Cobb

Joy To The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dissonance & Faith

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

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

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

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

You will be interpreted.

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

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

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

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

 

Spinoza

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

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

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

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

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

Thanksgiving Haps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

Idiocracy

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

 

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

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

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

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

Who Would Call It Genocide?

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

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

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

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

Whiteboys don't dance.

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

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

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

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

The Naked Lady

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Prayer Is Public

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death and Dishonor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitchens Outs Rauf

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Deep Contradiction

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

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

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

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

60/40? 80/20?

Some Basic Questions on Cultural Evolution

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

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

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

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

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

Five Things To Be

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

Just thought I'd share that.

Christian Soldiers

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

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

A Small Article of Faith

And I quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The No Self

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

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

Hedge or Die

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

Rude Questions About the Catholic Priesthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lotta questions in there. 

==

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

The Americanist

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

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

In the meanwhile, an interesting POV

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

theAmericanist 03.31.10 at 12:14 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My ACOG

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

-John 8:12

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

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

Another Good Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logical Optimism

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

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

Therefore it is reasonable to be optimistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snappy Answers to Atheist Questions

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

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

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

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

So I shout back:

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

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

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

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

Outside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paglia on Religion

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

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

Sufficient Divinity

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their answer will inevitably be war.

Pray Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Silas, AL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith vs Articles of Faith

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

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

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

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

The Peasant Principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

Down to the Fingernails

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

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

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

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

You must internalize the discipline, down to your fingernails.

--

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

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

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

--

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

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

Karajan & Perfection

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

Small perfections.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Godless Problem

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

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

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

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

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

Man's Inhumanity to Shrimp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except. 

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

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

Islam Demystified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paragraph 56

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

-- Benedict XVI

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

Owen Brown & My Piece of America

There is an outside chance, perhaps 30%, that I have already accomplished my greatest contribution on this planet. Perhaps there is something about being an American that makes us believe such things deep into our 40s, and thusly I am deluded. Whatever the figure, I recognize the inclination I have to elide a number of things I know when speaking. I know more that I say and I don't mind it so long as I say the most important things to say, which are often more humble and encouraging than anything else. There aren't many occasions when I wish to impress people, and my passions are my own.

It is in recognition of such things that I approach my 48th birthday with another sense of generosity - that of curating some aspect of my experience I think ought to be worth something. So I've been thinking that we all ought to know something extraordinarily well. Not that that something needs to be important, but just that we stay close to it for a long enough time to know it gets translated well into the next generation. I don't know how long ago it was when I first thought of this, but the fact that Tantalum is element 73 and the Iranians have been purchasing it for making capacitors with military applications reminded me. How many times do we know the periodic table without really knowing something extraordinary about one of the elements. What are there 210? 210 people could make that their life - to know all there is to know about their element. 67 is one of my favorite numbers, that would make me the curator of Holmium, I guess. Like the old woman from Airplane who pops up and says 'I speak jive', there might come a moment when we have something to say.

If I might take a detour to be the critic while I'm at the humble task, I would jab my neighbors in their intemollectual ambitions. There's something wrong about the shotgun morality of Considering All Things that has as its terminus the adopted program... I mean you have to be convinced that there is something essentially wrong with the world to become a moral crusader, but you have to be convinced that most things are wrong with the world to be generally supportive of moral crusaders. And that is the question begged by someone to takes an abstract approach to knowing moral things, which is the opposite of knowing a few or one thing very well and waiting for your turn to pop up and speak your perfectly inflected jive. Anyway enough of that.

The thing that hits me today is before I created it, there was no Wikipedia entry for Owen Brown, the third son of John Brown who died here in Southern California. It was 10 years ago last month when I visited his gravesite in Altadena on a spot called Little Rountop. At the time, I was fairly deep into my anti-racist activism and made the rather cornball decision to hang with whichever homies showed up for John Brown Day. It was one of those moments when I felt old, but not quite old enough. Which is to say a lot of things, none of them well. I'll explain it better later. The bottom line is that I feel drawn to preserve various arcana about Owen Brown due to that trip which meant quite a bit to me at the time, and now again in retrospect.

You see the big deal was that I had read Cloudsplitter and that book, like few others before, rocked my world. Reading about the life of John Brown from the perspective of author Russell Banks using the voice of Owen Brown forever altered my presentism on the issue of race. As you are probably well aware, there is a theory that people in today's America are better judges of matters of race than were those of our earlier history, and without the input of any number of non-whites, whites were inherently incapable of understanding the depth of their own racial depravity. It is this particular fiction that keeps any number of Americans in thrall to the sorts of declarations that roll off the chin of anyone a hair darker than George Hamilton. Because minorities have empathy. As if the very word originated in the original Ibo and didn't have an English equivalent until the importation of slaves to Virginia. 

At any rate beside the bohemian dingbat quality of Postfun's fetish of Race Treason, which at the time I thought profound, I did have an excellent and transcendent moment at Owen Brown's grave. How could I know Tim Wise would go so..tangential? And while I no longer live in Altadena nor subscribe to ideas for the improvement of either black or white races, I have a special fondness for the place feeling some responsibility as an archivist of that moment, and of the disposition of the memorial. So it comes as something of a surprise to me, now that I am one of the GPS class, that some various legal battles regarding access to Little Roundtop have scored one for the good guys.

As a consequence, I will make it my business to curate some fraction of Owen Brown's life and keep some Google Bots trolling the news for any mention of his name. Further, I will make available some collection of digital artifacts.

Download Owen Brown Package

Dunhill Blue

There are lots of things I used to do before I got married and had kids that I don't do any longer. But I do smoke about three packs a year.

I found myself lying awake at 5:30 this morning which is odd considering how out of it I was last night. The fitted sheet is coming off one corner of the bed and when that happens, the shock of raw mattress intrudes on my slumber. So I decided I may as well go to 8 o'clock services.

The two way fan that fits in the window sill would be a joke in Brooklyn, but here in Southern California it is just right for the oncoming summer. I installed it after some struggle with sliding the window up the other day. I brushed aside some cobwebs and turned it so that it blows cool air in and set it on high. By 6pm I was putting on long sleeves and had cured the oxygen deficit that had me feeling faint. This morning that fan and the other that sits on my dresser were both quiet and the early morning low clouds and fog along the coast had still not raised their dreary blankets from the neighborhood. It's May and I put on a mock turtleneck, my new style to go with my new hair.

This morning's service was about friendship. According to scripture, the New Commandment says that we are friends with Jesus and he no longer calls us his servants because servants do no know what their master is thinking. But Jesus is sharing the love of the Father with us and so we are all commanded to share love with our neighbors. Father Joseph reminded us two things. One, that we don't have to agree when we love our neighbor and Two, that it is not a suggestion that we love our neighbor, but a commandment. You *must* agree to disagree and live in love because God has decided to be your friend. And if God has condescended to love us miserable human beings, who are we to be intransigent?

I have had my post called 'A Christian Mob' in park for the past few days. I can't figure a way to complete it. In fact I can't find a way to complete much of anything these days. I am preternaturally lazy. My back still hurts and I'm feeling completely sympathetic with characters who are broken down and tired. Like Jean Paul Sarti in Grand Prix. Like Randy the Ram in The Wrestler. Like Paul Volker must feel. There are evolutionary dead ends all of us must face. Sometimes we come to grips with our irrelevance other times we come to grips with our apathy. They are both very hard to accept, especially if you've been a success. In the end, I gather you have to die trying. Some ambitions are like that. The alternative is that you start from scratch halfway through your life. I'll check out Shakespeare, I'm sure he had something to say about that, or perhaps he didn't. After all, he didn't make it much past 50.

The Christian Mob is about some great fraction of us coming to consciousness about Mark Steyn's predictions. It's going to be hard on a lot of people who don't agree to disagree. Muslims, I mean.

After services I went to my trunk to put away my jacket. On the little shelf opposite the GPS drive, I had stashed away a pack of cigarettes. Dunhill Blue. They were part of my few remaining deceptions. I bought them on the Friday afternoon that I snuck away to see Star Trek without the family. I stuck an unlit fag between my lips and trolled around View Park having stopped to closely observe some of the more fabulous houses on Angeles Vista. I was on my way to the richest black Starbucks in America, but I didn't have my lighter. I wondered if anyone does that - walks around with an unlit square in their mouth. Oral fixation. Indecision. Chalkline walking.

Sure enough there was a cream colored Silver Cloud convertible in the prime parking spot at Starbucks Ladera. I parked the Transporter 40 paces away and headed to the door giving a once over to the crowd of men outside. Grande mocha whip. Apple fritter warm. Six bucks. I sat alone, made one trip back to the car for my reading glasses, registered with the free AT&T wifi and caught up on my email while sitting alone amongst the groups of affluent middle aged black men. There were three conversations, and two of them were about basketball and one about real estate. I figure that the guy who dresses very much like T.D. Jakes, the commercial real-estate guy from Jersey, had a good chance of being the owner of the Rolls Royce. Or else it was the Caribbean gent who sat alone like me with a similar appearance of oblivion the the too-loud conversations about Jordan's retirement, Kobe's personality and Trump's craftiness. Meanwhile, I texted a friend to see if he were in California. No, still at the Cape. Rocket science.

On the way to church there were five motorcyclists in the fast lane. Three of the five were on red Ducatis, the other two were equally red, but I couldn't tell what kind of bike. I wish I were in a motorcycle gang. Five Ducatis are enough. Stand apart together. There were half a dozen black men at the alumni golf tournament last week, half of them were in our foursome, except there were only three of us. There were only four guys from our entire class of 78 in attendance and I was the only one not an officer of some sort with one of the many alumni associations. D is my connection to that holy land of my own history, all the black Catholics in LA with which I am connected in my exuberant youth. I have traveled too much in my life to have kept all of my roots close enough, and so on this cloudy morning I am thinking about the fleeting camaraderie of semi-private events. Two weeks ago it was the funeral of a gamer whose voice brought joy but whose face I never knew. Four years ago this Starbucks was a regular hangout.

I am a writer. Which is why I am writing this to you. I am overly perceptive. I am overly articulate. If it wasn't for the internet, I'd be in a library right now and these words would be going into a diary.

The apple fritter was much better than the Dunhill I never ignited. But that means I shouldn't eat again until 3pm. The Spousal Unit called and I headed home. And since we all go to different churches at different times, agreeing to disagree but one in love, I dropped my eldest daughter down at the contemporary Baptist's joint on Pacific Coast Highway. She noticed the pack of Dunhill Blue and asked what they were doing in my car. I told her that they were here for no good reason, but I didn't tell her that I hadn't smoked one.

She needs to know that I cleaned up my act to have a family. That there are a lot of things I used to do but no longer do. I'll figure out some way to communicate that, because like most teenage girls who are 'only' 3.2 GPA students, she figures somehow that she's not good enough. I'm trying to figure out how women negotiate as the weaker sex through a civilized form of quid pro quo that doesn't seem to exist in the swamp of our contemporary society where the Gospel is spread through Powerpoints. There are far too many lines instantly available through Google and nobody seems to have the patience to read between them. Every movie has a rating, every query has an answer, and almost nobody is trying to speak to the entire world. It's all rude niche marketing.

I'm an outsider. I possess alien observation mode. I know that none of it is prefab for my consumption, so I've got the critical thinking skills. None of the world makes sense to me, not in an easily expressible manner. Nor do I trust it much, which is why I process it all independently and spew it out here. I try not to be so flavorful or artistic as I once was on The Well or at Cafe Utne. It's good enough to have subscribers in the UK. I've got the English standards figured out. No need to try and be so awfully clever. The kind of writer I want to be is not niche. That would be for my motorcycle club, or my guys in Beef Alcohol & Tobacco, whenever they show up.

This is why I need my friends so much. Which is why I need the church. Which is why today's lesson is so important. It's a lonely world. I could not invent an invisible friend as complicated as Jesus, and even if I could, I could never expect that such a friend might haunt the dreams of so many millions asleep or abruptly awake at the crack of dawn on Sunday. We can all agree to disagree. That's easy for guys like me who may not say it, but am thinking, 'fuck you' to all those insipid personal questions. A person who can tell people to fuck off but is not a total asshole recognizes that we all belong together at a higher level. That's a bit complicated to explain but I'm not going to do it right now - I just know the type. Gregory House, for example.

So there's an emphasis on do instead of be. Yeah I did smoke Dunhills, that's what I did, not who I am. Now I don't - I just was remembering.

Lumen Gentium

“This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which our Savior, after his Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which he erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth.’ This Church, constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”

Catholic unity.

Catholic unity around the pillar and mainstay of the truth. That's pretty heavy. I like it.

As Vermont Goes...

I've found a new interesting blog called Mirror of Justice concerned with Catholic legal theory. The author Berg, underscores a point I've been making which is point three (emphasis mine).

The primary religious-liberty concern is not the one dealt with in the Vermont statute: that objecting clergy or houses of worship would have to perform or host same-sex marriages.  That prospect seems extremely unlikely anyway.  Attacks on the tax-exempt status of traditionalist churches are more likely, but still doubtful.  But recognition of gay marriage will definitely make it more likely that religious schools and social services, even those with religious content throughout their programs, will be punished if they refuse to hire openly gay people as teachers or counselors or to pay benefits to their partners.  It may do this in several ways:  (1) Most obviously, directly triggering the obligation to pay spousal benefits.  (2) Depriving religious organizations of the (sometimes successful) argument that they discriminate against all extramarital sex and not on the basis of sexual orientation.  See CLS v. Walker, 453 F.3d 853, 860 (7th Cir. 2006).  (3) Strengthening the gay-rights argument that there is a compelling governmental interest against sexual-orientation discrimination, overriding a constitutional religious freedom claim, in virtually every context -- not just marriage but also hiring and other associational decisions by private religious organizations.  See, e.g., Bob Jones Univ. v. U.S. (allowing stripping of tax exemption on ground that prohibition of race discrimination in numerous other contexts shows a "firm national policy" and a compelling, overriding interest).

It may be time for defenders of traditional opposite-sex marriage to shift some attention from trying to stop gay marriage to trying to secure religious liberty protections, at least in states where there is a significant prospect that the courts or the legislature will recognize gay marriage.  Once that decision of recognition has happened, the traditionalist religious organization is on much weaker strategic ground in seeking protection to continue to pursue its vision of marriage in its employment and other decisions.  As Doug Laycock suggests in the conclusion to the excellent book of essays Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty, there is opportunity at the front end to secure legislative compromises in which any recognition of same-sex marriage is accompanied by significant exemptions.  The exemptions should cover not just churches refusing to perform ceremonies -- symbolically important, in practice not a live issue -- but also religious schools and social services in their employment, leadership, and membership decisions.  But if traditionalists fight all the way to the mat on stopping gay marriage altogether, they may lose opportunities to secure such protection.

Boy can I be tedious.

Advent Rising

I'm working my way into my penultimate discipline, and I expect it to be the font of my best living. Before I hunker down into my last house and write books into the twilight of life, I will be getting down to my retirement weight, comprehending Western Civ, getting through Knuth and attending services. As to that last measure of devotion, there is a surprising contender: The Church of the Advent.

I should be on my way there by all rights for today is Sunday and the 8am service is the one I like. But my discipline is not complete and I have other priorities for the day. Still, 'the one I like' is a large part of this decision. I am drawn to God for reasons I can identify, reasons I can prioritize or change. I take the idea that doubt increases the value of faith when I'm into explaining, but I also take it on faith that I may not deserve God's grace. The two combine to make it an absolute necessity to find the proper way to deal with God, and that is why I seek Church.

I'm having a cheeky bit of row with someone named Olga over on Facebook, and it appears that way because we are limited to two tiny paragraphs in their interface. I hope to get her over here, as well as another surprise guest. But it is that little spark that reminds me of how weak secular humanism is in the face of Christianity. Secular humanism doesn't have a church. They have dorm room commons, they have seminars and soap boxes. They have sections of the blogosphere and newsletters. They have think tanks and university departments, they have essays and reading lists, and there might even be an edited multivolume compliation. But in the end they are awfully distributed and woefully disheveled as compared to Church. How can they stand it?

Albert Murray famously for me said that literature was his religion. OK, so where's the dogma, Al? Where's the aesthetic, where are the rules? Or is it all about what I like?

I am faced with the reality that the Christian faith is not, and can never be, left behind technologically. Obama is not a Muslim and today his hand is on the Button. He stands in the shoes of the Leader of the Free World and though I think him undisciplined as I am in matters of Christian faith, I know he wouldn't deny the Cross. But secular humanism has only its ability, sporadic and arbitrary, to push back the 'shadow' of religion. It is in fact always overshadowed and all it has most of the time is pluck and luck. As Olga says, most atheists are not vocal. Well of course not, they don't have a hymnal. We Christians have hundred year old Hymnals with 300 year old songs passed around in 500 year old churches in capital cities that are 700 years old that were never not Christian. One wise aphorism I always remember is to never doubt the intelligence of people in power. I could punch holes in CS Lewis and take potshots at the Pope. That doesn't make me Lewis, which I'll never be - and I should never even dream of taking the Pope's place. These men inherit something very, very large, something that keeps abreast of every development the world has, and has done so for 1000 years.

Science will inevitably understand the brain. It will inevitably yeild up its discoveries, first to academia, then to the marketplace and finally to the public at large.  But there is no Church of Science and it will never control its understanding of the brain. And in this world (obviously the only one scientists care about), humans will control all of the rewards of science, and the most powerful of them will be Christians. The scientific leadership will never defeat the Christian leadership and the Christian leadership will always have the larger set of weapons, the advantage of organization and the bigger army. In the realm of human achievement and knowledge, science will always be an integrated cult.

But for the moment, the universities own the libraries, and they charge exhorbitant fees for the use of their magical materials. Today as we witness the finale of March Madness and the Michigan State team challenges the North Carolina team, we have plenty evidence that there is loyalty in the secular arena. Millions of American families spend fortunes and decades preparing their offspring for the rites of SAT and it can certainly be argued that it is more difficult for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for anyone to get through the gates of Oxford. We're not doubting the intelligence of the powerful. Hell, Larry Summers somehow made 5.2 million bucks last year and nobody knows how. I don't mean to suggest that the secular institution is non-existent or has no ritual. But it still doesn't compare to Church.

As my great evidence of this, I offer a rather rascally piece of evidence which is Mark Steyn's book America Alone. I do so because it raises the, for me unanswerable if not imponderable question: whither Europe. How does the West lose faith in the West? Europe is the example. If America is the evolution, and I think it is, then America's solution to the European problem is the answer. There's no doubt that Obama has the right seductive charm for the symbolic task. I could elaborate on this, but that's for another moment.

Besides, for me the question is unanswerable. I have a lot of studying to do and I'll do it largely on my own - although having this blog helps a lot. It might help more if Olga would show up. But as for my other devotions, I know that getting my church on will replenish my spirit. There is no question of how Holy Communion does that for me, and I have found in the Church of the Advent over on Adams Boulevard, the oldest little brick building in the neighborhood I grew up in, something that works very deeply in my own personal soul. I have to do a good job of it, and I think that I can.

The Banality of Slavery

I probably don't give enough credit where credit is due to Dan Carlin whose history podcasts are not only interesting to me but to my kids as well. You should know that if you are still one of those folks who listens to the radio during your commute and at your lunch break, that's how you fall behind those of us who remain fascinated by the world. There is so much better stuff on podcasts.

In his most recent history program, he touched on the ubiquity of human trafficking and the particulars of chattel slavery. Full of the requisite apology, because after all Carlin is political as well, he outlined the world's second oldest profession. His angle on slavery and forced labor was very interesting. He asked the basic rhetorical question is slavery essentially evil? But I think he was getting at something more revealing since he talked about 'debt slavery' as well. As his program progressed, it began to be very clear from my interpretation that he was getting at something fairly deep, which is the extent to which we draw meaning from our relationships to each other and to technology.

As Carlin said, there are two ways to have leisure. You can either have a machine cook your breakfast or you can have people do it for you. For a long time, even being a technologist, I have always been more on the organic side. Why have some expensive machine smooth the sand in the long jump pit at the Olympics when you could have some kids with rakes? I considered this when I was in Sydney - about the mechanisms in society that would allow an engineer to be educated, for the farming out and funding of such a project, for the fabrication of the actual machine and training of the personnel who would move and operate it. Obviously the technological avenues are more fragile and expensive, but are they better? Why not save all the hassle and expense and just hire some local kids - why deal with machines instead of people?

Where the heart of the matter gets interesting are those implications of 'less than slavery' relationships of a human centric world. If we extend the continuum of the humanistic value of human labor down the skill or pay chain, eventually you end up at slavery.

There used to be a chap who visited Cobb with some disgust when we talked about immigration issues, and he would call me a 'cheap labor conservative' because I oppose the minimum wage. I've always seen the possibilities in allowing a class of businesses to operate without certain regulations that would solve the homelessness problem, and I've always had sympathy for America's ability to accommodate an internal Third World. After all, an economy that tolerates slavery, or near-slavery is a full employment economy. I think it is reasonable to assert as an axiom of human society, the more you seek to give meaning to people who, for whatever reason cannot compete, the more accommodating you are of slavery.

Now the way to read this is not with regard to the deprivation of human rights and dignity that is implicit in chattel slavery. A person who doesn't own his own labor is not a person in any social way, but a mere human being and way less than a citizen. But it is in that gray area that some inspection is useful. Still I am more interested in the matter with regard the economics we can afford. After all, as Carlin mentioned, Marx understood that the Industrial Revolution changed our ideas about human dignity and labor. It was this fundamental abstraction that he took to the extremes in a historicist way. Marx and his followers looked at somebody whose life and dignity were clearly understood in the pre-industrial world - Joe Chandler, for example. Joe made candles and lamps for the sailing ships, lived near the docks and got tallow from cow fat he bought at market. Joe bought his wagon from Wayne Wright who built it with materials from John Woods, etc. All of those were the relationships and social standing from pre-industrial society Until they were all disintermediated by Sears & Roebuck's lamp section of the catalog, and the ship company could buy lamps from the factory and put Joe, Wayne and John out of business. Instead they put Sam Widget on the assembly line in the lamp factory.

So where does Sam's value as a human being come from? He just looks at an assembly line all day. Where in fact does Cobb's value as a human being come from? I just type at a computer terminal all day. A new kind of society has to have new humanizing values for new kinds of work. This is what Marx understood. In a moral way, he enables us to get away from slavery which is a more natural relationship in a pre-industrial world. But Marx' great mistake was that he figured that all humanizing values must come from work and thus put labor at that center of his universe and the locus of power, he placed around the state's (and revolution's) control of those definitions. This usurped the value of other vital humanizing factors like spirituality. But Marx must have understood how building a framework for humanizing the industrial revolution took us towards a new, modern world.

Sex is the Opiate of the Masses

Not religion.

Today I am reflecting on a few Black Eyed Peas songs that I have not bothered to skip through on my iTunes this morning, and that phrase got stuck in my head. I will add one more old quote of mine from Aldous Huxley. "An intellectual is someone who has found something more fascinating thatn sex."

Thoughts?

Belonging

I've been reading about Atomic John, the man who reverse-engineered Little Boy with fascination. One of the interesting quirks about his journey is that through it he discovered the conceit of secrecy in the tight-lipped attitudes of most of the men he queried about the Bomb.

This morning I found over on Facebook the continuance of the Me Meme and discovered an interesting tale of discovery as people I knew and sorta knew tell things about themselves that we don't generally know. Being Americans, it's meritocratic. We have developed a social market and we are finding, through this type of revelation and confession, a new way to be appreciated.

It is a phenomenon I now observe in the breach. Who would we be if we could not express such things? What indeed impels us to express them at all? I am one of those people who is particularly hard-pressed to determine what my value is. I hate talking about what it means, it's very difficult and consequently very important for me to negotiate some deal on my worth. It is why I am attracted to the sciences and to economics and to theology. I need frameworks, dogma, metrics, laws. I am singularly convinced that I cannot sell myself, so I am doing it all the time and not at all. It makes me responsive in an insecure sort of way.

And so what I admire in people is their steadfastness and their faith in being a vessel of spirit for a cause or idea greater than themselves. I like it when musicians interpret the very same song. I like religious rites that find the same God the same way. Without that, it seems to me that people are grasping, grasping in desperation.

We Americans, especially those of us with some gall and/or ability are always keen to note the fete manque, the lost opportunity, the narrative that might have been if we had only. But what if we belonged? What if we only had 15% of ourselves as personality? It was the first thing I noticed upon arriving in New York from Los Angeles. Here in LA we are allowed to invent personnas and have the nerve to believe our story could be made into a movie. In New York, you're a New Yorker, meaning very specific things - you don't have the luxury of determining what your apartment means if it is on the Upper East Side. It's an Upper East Side apartment, period. You wear shoes appropriate to your occupation - whether or not you do, everybody judges you by your shoes. If you need to get from point A to point B, in your relationship, in the city, in your personal development - so what? So do 200,000 other people, right here, right now, exactly like you. A successful New Yorker knows these things and doesn't try to make believe that in another life it might be some other way. There is not an alternative marketplace - in NY even the alternative is institutionalized.

So it is, I think, with the world, and the history of the world as it relates to people. Either you are attached and belong - you recognize and conform, or you are constantly contingent and on the market selling yourself.

The question is, which is more fulfilling? The answer is that the grass is greener on the other side.

Loury & Franklin on Symbols

A thoughtful reader passed on this discussion of note about the role of Rick Warren in the Obama oevre and other matters of some political and religious significance. This is the kind of debate I hope to be hearing less of as time goes by. My pendulum, while quite interested in the way in which the Catholic Church deals with the natural world, has swung towards the natural world itself. I am finding myself less and less drawn to matters of interpretation, especially of symbols, and most especially of symbols coming from politicians. 

Firstly, I find much of the controversy over the selection of Rick Warren to be a great deal of smoke and mirrors, and I think that it is overplayed precisely because of the recent passage of Proposition Eight. At the outset, Loury went in a significantly excellent direction which was to get some response about what to do with dissent from the progressive agenda, and I think once that question was left out there unanswered, it gave both parties license to sidle up to the particular issues that bother them most. The particular thing that worried Franklin the most was that of the Vatican closing debate. 

As the sort of conservative I am, I find something extraordinarily wise about the decision to close debate, and I wonder how it is that any religious leader finds otherwise. I think perhaps it is, now that I reflect on Franklin, because he is part and parcel of the Ecumenical Movement which energizes this desire. I see it as perfectly logical for the sort of Christian who finds some threat in the obiter dicta of Sarah Palin to have the propensity to keep debate open indefinitely. Because sooner or later there will be some value in this eternal debate for the inclusion and sanctity of his every constituent. At that point, debate can close, right? He will keep arguing for the ordination of women until such time as it becomes 'common sense' that women should be ordained, and from that point forth debate shall close, as it is surely presumed today.

So it comes as no surprise that the vector of this Ecumenical Movement, dedicated as it seems to a program of enforced diversity must seek to find some very special meaning and moment in the inauguration of this man, Barack Obama, as the first black president of the US. Loury was correct to note how thin this skin must be and how foolish it might be to notice the skin color of the pilot on the bridge of the first ship behind which is the entire fleet of American power. The steering wheel was not built for black hands, but for human hands - there are only so many degrees of freedom that fleet can be steered - but then again we are only talking symbolically. It allows them to make the non-point but Loury's use of the word 'patina' was altogether correct. 

It seems to me that the two gentlemen are, perhaps unwittingly, contributing to the raising of political expectation in all areas of life and are thus making enemies of religious dogma of the sort which they also unwittingly lament. For it is conformity that they resent and resist. And it seems to me that it is only confession and creed that can establish the kind of unity of purpose they both desire. Unless they are willing to pay that price for establishing harmony, they are going to keep debating in circles, fruitlessly ad infinitum.  

Being of This World

I find various interpretations of the meaning of Jesus to be disturbing. What I find most disturbing is the idea of a 'personal savior'. And so in the Trinity I find most comfort in the Father. I guess that I think that people need the example of Jesus - Jesus spells everything out, makes it plain. But Jesus the comforter in times of trouble... eww. It seems to be a substitute for a disciplined virtue, or for courage. When I say that I just want to do God's will, that's the thing that makes my faith strong. For me to know God's will, and to do the right thing in times of trouble seems so much more of what I think is actually Christlike, than to fail in the world and seek the solace of Jesus. I feel that so many Christians are only Christlike in the one aspect of being forever at Gethsemane and that this is how ministers are telling people to approach God, from the point of view of someone whom life has defeated. It gives people just enough Jesus to make it through the day. And in that, their faith becomes like a payday loan, an advance from heaven they get and pay back (almost) via weekly journeys to church. I haven't read Augustine, but I feel destined to and others like him as well which is why I ask for your recommendations. It was Neuhaus who began thusly in giving me great inspiration:

That religion and particularly Christianity presents itself on the basis of reasonable truth claims that are to be engaged and to be presented as persuasively as possible in a reasonable manner. His lecture at the Regensberg University was directed chiefly against ideological secularists on the one hand who want to radically divide faith and reason and directed against Christian thinkers who want to assert a kind of pure Biblical Christianity against the great achievement which is the synthesis of Greek philosophy and revealed truth.

This great achievement is what I'm on about. The intimacy, the very co-dependence of faith and reason is the very proposition that I have always believed was that which bound the Jesuits to education, worldly works and intellectual distinction. It is something missing in almost all of my past. I have been mystified by the lack of Christian virtue in most of the intelligent people I have known and confounded by the lack of refined intellect is most of the spiritual people I have known. It's as if nobody knows that anyone like Augustine ever existed - I've never heard his name in any sermon. And so we are parceled out like indentured servants to a world of usefulness completely disjoint to that of the human spirit because so few recognize the unity of heart and mind in the active synthesis the Church has provided. And so many walk around proud to be 'not of this world' as if God created the entire thing as a joke and our lives as an exercise in denial of our sensory gifts. And so my displeasure at the testimony of the world-weary sufferer who brings his burdens to the feet of Jesus - who can assert (falsely) that in Jesus forgiveness he can dismiss the concerns of a world that is all bad. It was greatly said that the corrupt regime knows no innocents. And those who are faithless in reason always misinterpret Original Sin as the corrupter of all Earthly institutions and thus feel no sin in rejecting their righteous authority. This is the great sin which is at the core of the abuse of the name of God in the affairs of men. We say that 'for God so loved the world', so who are we to hate the world? Who are we to assume its corruption? Who are we to deny our responsibility to it? Some would say that we are vessels of spirit only... ah but the Holy Spirit directs our minds as well.

I think too many people take the grace of God for granted. They fail to realize their duty to reason, they fail to recognize that good works are necessary, that implicit in the command of loving your neighbor is the maintenance of society. They try to make their faith all about their own soul and believe that if they can send a telegram to Jesus that his reply will be specific to their salvation, like a phonecall from Morpheus or The Operator to get them out of one jam or another in the phony Matrix.
We are of this world, it is our world, and there is no escape.

Vatican Three?

This is what I was looking to find when I asked this question.

For decades, the Catholic left has called for a Vatican Council III to “complete” the work of Vatican II. Others on the left, such as Garry Wills, dissent from that call, claiming that Vatican II put the teaching Magisterium out of business once and for all, “diffusing” ecclesial authority throughout the Spirit-guided private opinions of the People of God. This move is implausibly presented as what is meant by the sensus fidelium. The burden of Steinfels’ argument is that liberal Catholicism made a great mistake since the Council in not distinguishing itself and, when necessary, separating itself, from its “dubious allies” of the Catholic left. Turning from its intellectual and theological tasks, liberalism got bogged down in the canonical litany of leftist complaints about contraception, homosexuality, women’s ordination, and clerical celibacy, along with endless agitations aimed at “power sharing” in church government—and all of these linked to the larger question of papal teaching authority. Moreover, sectors of the Catholic left became increasingly part of a political and cultural left that is increasingly secularist and post-Christian, and even explicitly anti-Christian. Liberal Catholics, says Steinfels, should have made it clear that, in very important respects, these dubious allies of the Catholic left were not allies at all.

The association with the Catholic left created, he wrote, a crisis of irony, a crisis of intellect, and a crisis of inclusiveness. The absence of irony and historical perspective led to fanaticism and a sectarian spirit. The refusal to make serious arguments nurtured anti-intellectualism and an emphasis on an ever-expanding inclusiveness which emphatically excluded those not of like mind and resulted in a loss of Catholic identity. The Catholic left, he says, has no patience with liberalism’s devotion to “compromise, incrementalism, or extended analysis and debate.” “The Catholic left,” he writes, “is an offspring of liberal Catholicism, but is rooted in the dramatic appeals and confrontations of the 1960s” rather than the liberal, and mainly European, tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But so smugly triumphalistic were liberals following the Council, while at the same time—and somewhat contradictorily—so fearful of their powerful enemies on the right, that few were, and few are, prepared to challenge the dubious alliance with the Catholic left. The old maxim applied: the enemy of my enemies . . .

Now we're getting somewhere.

My First Gay Dream

Back in 91, sometime after the summer but before I broke up with my girl, she wanted to test me. The fact of the matter included some evidence that she was attracted to the girl next door, so she wanted to know if I might be attracted to the dude next door, or dudes in general. She gave what I consider to be as good an argument as any that we are all parts omnisexual and that it is society that shapes whether or not we can be comfortable with out particular predilections. Intellectually it makes perfect sense, but I think she was trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

Since then it has occurred to me in regarding the phrase 'latent homosexuality' that a certain type A personality at some age might consider taking the omnisexual argument to heart. That a certain hardening of self-regard would give one license to take pleasure in whatever flavor desired, critics be damned. Since I myself am something of that sort, I always consider that possibility given various attempts by male friends over the years to test me in other ways. What can I say, I've got the hotness, boys and girls can see it. Except that I'm indifferent to 99% of the boys and girls, I'm married, and I do dig my current position in society. Besides. I'm one of those guys who digs a pastrami sandwich, no matter what other kinds of french dips are on the menu. I know what I like and I'm happy when I get it. No need for experimentation or making any proofs.

It was that kind of attitude made forwardly that has made me the sort of cat who doesn't really have any 'provincial' fetters about talking about whether or not a dude looks good or those 'if I was gay' jocular conversations. In fact, I think that the way I think about men's looks is directly parallel to the way women think about women's looks. Basically I get mad and jealous when I see somebody who looks as good as I think I should look. For what it's worth, at this moment in time that person is Ron Pitts, the TV host of Destroyed in Seconds. Funny, I think he played football with a dude I grew up with.

Anyway, I did have a gay dream last night, but interestingly enough I drew the line in my dream.

As Cobb readers know, I am blessed with the good fortune of waking up every day with a song in my head. This morning it was Spiral by John Coltrane. I didn't know the title until this very moment, never really thought about it. Anyway I also have extraordinarily vivid dreams that put me in bizarre situations. I remember 75 percent of them by morning, but I almost never reflect on them. I take my dreams for granted and I enjoy the hell out of them while I'm in them but pretty much ignore them during the day. For a while when I was deep into Borges, back in 87 or so, I did a bit more with the dream work, but now the boundaries are set.

My favorite kind of dream is the kind in which I compose and perform music. If a machine is ever invented to capture dreams then I will be an even better composer than I am writer. The music in my dreams is really fabulous - you'll just have to take my word for it. I've made some pretty good raps too. My second favorite dream is athletic. Yesterday I had a surpassingly fine dream in which I was playing a kind of sport which was a combination of soccer and basketball in which the players on a grass court about 1.5 times the size of a regular basketball court competed in garb that resembled field hockey. The ball was in this case something about the size of those aerobic two pound dumbbells - it looked like a giant tootsie roll, you kicked it on the ground but you had to slam dunk it to score, but you had to juggle it into the air with your feet under the hoop before you could put your hands on it. My third favorite kind of dream is the sort I usually can only have if I'm not facing down, if you catch my drift.

The gay dream had an odd context. I was part of a military training exercise of some sort, but it had immediately dovetailed onto the end of a daring escape I had made. In other words the guys who were sent to rescue me immediately drafted me into a six man team in which we went through various gauntlets the ultimate one of which was a scuba swim of about 200 yards.  Just before we all stripped down to get into the pipe that led underwater, I noticed that two guys in our party were making out over in a corner. They came back rather apologetically and then the jokes started. Apparently everybody knew that they had a thing for each other and that they were cool with it and wouldn't mind being part of the fun. So I pretended like I was too, but then went overboard into the entire deal. So the two broke out with some penis shaped regulators for the scuba gear. I was just about to go ahead with it and then decided not to.

Now this is not exactly how the dream went, but I can't remember many more details. Aside from the fact that we made a hell of a lot of ass jokes and went seriously into evaluations of each other's asses which in my dream were all shaped exactly like lunchboxes. So I said so and everybody laughed at the joke - except, as such things happen in dreams, I was actually seeing aluminum lunchboxes. As well, the whole regulator thing has been edited somehow - because I can't actually remember the context of how it was suggested that we all walk around with dildoes in our mouths. I simply remember that I was game and then I changed my mind at the last minute.

I woke up from the dream because I had held my breath too long. I actually do have apnea and somehow I managed to only have a snorkel whereas the other guys had the full apparatus. Rebreathers I think because there was enemy shooting above the water and we were supposed to be undetected. No bubbles allowed. That's why I held my breath for all that time. I woke up from the dream suddenly and dozed back into sleep until Coltrane woke me up for good.

As it happens, I wasn't turned on by the gay thing. Or maybe I was and that's why I decided to remember and write this. But I did remark through my dream signal apparatus to my higher consciousness that the acceptance of the dildo was a first. It was in the end a kind of gay liberal gesture - something I could do to prove that I could do it.

I'm particularly aware this week of indulgences. As my correspondence with Fr. Rude continues and I get my Bible assignments, I'm trying to narrow in on the sorts of sacrifices that do and do not count. In a way it is a followup to Magnificent Obsession - how mere manners do and do not contribute to the Christlike behavior we should strive to achieve, how grand gestures of magnanimity do or do not make any difference in the eyes of God. The soundbite angle on it is whether or not Bernie Madoff was doing good. We all know the charities that are suffering because he pulled the rug out from under would-be philanthropists, but for many years it was all going smoothly. Now what. Don't the lives he saved outweigh the fortunes he ruined?

We all make gestures to show we understand, we want to belong, we want to be inclusive. It's very difficult sometimes to know which are self-serving and which are genuine.

The Love of Zero Tolerance

I am in regular communication with the Catholics of my youth, one of whom is Father James Rude, a loving affable character who was the bearded priest at my Jesuit prep school during the late 70s. Fr. Rude ran the soup kitchen in downtown LA and taught social justice as one of his courses. By the time I was a senior, his social justice course ran afoul of what I expected it to be - I was horrendously upset and performed an intellectual boycott, refusing to do the work. The details escape me, but I do remember my great disappointment now that I think of him, something I haven't done in over 30 years.

At any rate, we may or may not have begun a correspondence about social justice of the sort I would have liked to have had here in the context of that as a plank for Mr. Obama. He has assigned me to read Matthew 25 which I am about to. I posed the following question:

Given that we understand great differences in the circumstances of people, how does loving one as yourself not become gratuitous charity when one has very exacting standards it is not reasonable for the object of one's love to achieve. If I never smoked a day in my life, wouldn't the love of zero tolerance be onerous to a smoker?

At the back of my mind is the question about whether or not a society of laws serves social justice and where charity and philanthropy meet morals, laws and religious dogma. It goes to the core of an exceptionalism and an expansive foreign policy - on what basis can one society judge another and on what basis in law are the 'conquered' bound to obey given that most of us can't read the law.

Estemard's Distance

Anathem is a great intellectual entertainment, and as I read it, I am reminded that some time ago, many of my distant peers in the computer science field had presumed that Douglas R. Hofstadter was going to write this book.

In 'The Minds I' DRH introduced us to Prelude Ant Fugue a simplified retelling of a theory of Fermat. It was a delightful kind of Alice in Wonderland dialog. Fans of DRH awaited his vague promise to reintroduce us to his characters in a longer form. It never happened.

Although Anathem has taken a different sort of turn since I began writing out this fragment, I still think of it as something of a Rowlingesque primer on metaphysics. That doesn't change the fact that there are exquisite gems scattered throughout. There is a character Estemard whose spiritual dilemma resembles my own.

--

"You feel the truth but don't know it," Cord repeated. "Your service the other day, in Samble - we could hear your singing. It was very emotional."

Gnel nodded, "That's why Estemard attends -- though he doesn't believe."

"He's not intellectually convinced of your arguments," Cord translated, "but he feels some of what you feel."

Estemard was a monk who had left his cloister and found himself among pagans. He attends their services which are rollicking, and yet he does not convert. Estemard's distance is not born of skepticism of the ultimate truth but of his awareness of a more disciplined understanding. He is presented the essence of the Great Spirit arising out of a poverty of logic. He cannot accept these sacraments on their own terms.

My sympathy for Estemard is complete.