through a glass, darkly

Sexuality and the law

2010-12-19T00:23:00.006-05:00

I, like most people, was shocked to discover that a high-profile and (as far as I can tell) well-liked professor at Columbia was indicted for sleeping with his daughter for five years. Perhaps most surprising for me though, was that the professor was charged with a crime.

I mention this not to advocate removing laws banning incest, only to express my surprise that our society still regulates consensual sexual relationships between two adults at all anymore. It also got me to thinking about Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that struck down laws banning sodomy as unconstitutional, and, due to subsequent conversations with friends who have no or few moral qualms about homosexual behavior expressing abject horror at the Columbia professor incest case, wondering what it is about our society's organization that led to the decriminalizing of one and not of the other. I think, oddly enough, the disease model of homosexuality that arose in the 19th century is probably the reason.

If you consider the way sodomy is understood in our culture compared to how it once was, you will find that today we consider the act of sodomy not as an aberrant form of sexual behavior, but as the consummation of a natural inclination arising within a particular class of individuals. As far as incest is concerned, we have no "incesexuals" or the like. There is no class of individuals that is socially designated as "those whose identity is defined by their having sex with their relatives." The interesting thing about this designation is that it typically arises with the intent to marginalize and stigmatize a group of individuals by making a reviled behavior into the ultimate source of their identity. Ironically, what ultimately appears to occur instead is the decriminalization of that behavior, and eventually (if gay marriage advocates are successful) the social endorsement of its moral legitimacy.

Permit me to armchair psychologize for a moment. Maybe this happens because so classifying these behaviors as the result of a particular identity makes society at large feel safer. These behaviors confused and horrified our ancestors. "Why," the Victorian moralist asks, "would anyone ever choose to engage in such a behavior?" In response to this fear,* society can either prohibit it morally (and sometimes legally), or it can attempt to explain it "scientifically" in order to wipe it out that way. In the case of homosexual sex, this was accomplished with the new "science" founded by Sigmund Freud.

In order to make society feel safe, this science would need to identify those behaviors and traits that are co-morbid with the dreaded sexual act, so that society can push those that display them to the outskirts of the community, and label them as "homosexuals." Then when society develops a well-established conception of what "homosexuality" is, they can neatly categorize the population into two groups; one normal and the other aberrant and to be "cured."

Later, once the marginalized group is deemed sufficiently harmless (i.e. all of the "homosexuals" are out in the open and no one will suddenly wake up tomorrow and leave his wife for another man; that is, it becomes a temptation for a class of people rather than for all people), then the individuals can safely be reintegrated into society. Sodomy is no longer dangerous, because it's something that is confined to a particular group of people, and no longer something that society at large is responsible for. Same-sex sexual behavior becomes domesticated. (This could also explain why those who have a large number of gay friends and are very friendly to the idea of gay marriage still experience a great deal of fear and disgust when confronted with a son or daughter who comes out as gay: it's an example of the marginalized outgroup suddenly bringing its behavior home, which goes against the "rules" of the divided society.)

But why did this normalization take so long to get started and why did it eventually happen so quickly? My guess is that the internal moral logic of liberalism that came of age in the civil rights movement has a great deal to do with it. If sexuality is who you are and not what you do, suddenly, maintaining the marginalizing force of the disease model of homosexuality faces increasing moral approbation. Make no mistake though: our contemporary understanding of what "homosexuality" is is still entirely dependent upon that original disease model. Only those smaller voices at the outskirts of the Left and the Right that are beginning to insist on a less rigid understanding of sexuality are moving to put it aside. Certainly the advocates of same-sex marriage are, ironically, the disease model's strongest defenders.

To return to the original idea: once upon a time, learning that someone had intercourse with a member of the same sex had a similar emotive and moral impact on the hearer that learning of this Columbia professor's acts of incest do today. This is no longer the case. Does no one else find this odd or in need of an explanation? I've tried my best to outline one here.

*I'm not arguing here that this fear is necessarily a bad thing; there are certain behaviors which are so damaging to the social fabric that they ought to cause fear. It is the community's collective responsibility to determine which feelings are rational and which are not.

Rights and Hermenutics of Suspicion

2010-09-07T18:26:00.003-04:00

My previous post on the totalitarian nature of "rights" has prompted me to flesh out my arguments with respect to this issue further.

My major beef with a discourse of rights is that it is a discourse which abjures claims to totality while itself engaging in totalizing rhetorical violence supported by platitudes like "freedom," "openness," and "inclusiveness." It is a moralistic flight from morality, an apolitical grasp at political power, an authoritarian play at anarchy.

As the moral constraints of our society have receded, we have put more and more under the umbrella of "rights." Instead of "rights" being the other side of a coin of moral law (e.g. "property rights" as a rationalistic justification of "thou shalt not steal"), they now function in discourse as fencing off territory over which morality may have no political claim. That is, they invade moral territory in order to "liberate" it, and thus fend off any further moral incursion into said territory (deceptively granting victory to one of the claimants of moral authority and providing it with a governorship of that territory). They succeed in doing so by claiming that their colonization causes no "harm" to those whom they have invaded, and thus stake first claim to ultimate authority over the demarcation of society into that which can be governed by moral law and that which must not be so governed.

This is to say that the use of "rights" as a tool to navigate the moral and political realm, is analogous to the use of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" among postmoderns in the realm of truth. To further explicate this line of reasoning, I turn to David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite:

"...the pious practice of hermeneutical suspicion, though it appears to have disengaged itself from all foundations, is no less deserving of the scrutiny of Nietzschean suspicion: Might not the renunciation of power over the real also dissimulate a subtler kind of power, a final violence (or the violence of finality), the tyranny of twilight? After all, the deconstruction of Western metaphysics, and the attendant critical privilege of deconstructing every metanarrative, must be undertaken in such a state of structuralist abstraction that it is, by extension, a forcible interruption of every narrative precisely where it would take flight. A postmetaphysical hermenutics of suspicion must stand...always further along downstream, aware of the inevitable conclusion of all stories; and this is why it must be allied also to a very particular regime: insofar as it presumes to exercise no control over difference, it must have the form of a critical Gelassenheit of all voices; but insofar as it resists the "totalizing" motion in every narrative, it also must mediate among all voices as the metanarrative condition of undecidability that is presumed before any discourse can articulate itself in the open. In order for there to be this letting be of different voices, a certain neutral space must first be secured: so much difference must be converted into indifference, so many voices must be suppressed; the consensus of the forum always excludes the overly garrulous fabulist, the storyteller who knows too much. It is not to be doubted, certainly, that this is the very form of ethical restraint; but it operates effectively only to the degree that it makes difference unthreatening--not by imposing total silence, but by setting the limits of intelligibility, the demarcation past which no narrative may pass without becoming an illicit discourse of impossible knowledge. Obviously a radical hermeneutics intends to suppress nothing by force; it seeks, probably in earnest, to be just a patient and humble craft of salutary suspicion, the most unambitious pursuit of liberation. But whom, or what, does it liberate?

The question must be asked, principally, precisely because a more or less "unfounded" discourse of suspicion always commences from a place prior to, and so also somewhat inattentive to, the difference of one story of truth from another.

[...]

It is tempting to hope that a radical hermeneutics might act as a moderating force that could impose "peace" upon the space of difference, if not in the interests of justice, at least of prudence; but for Christians this pacification of difference's "site," prior to the advent of what genuinely differes, should be fled, as a violence that seeks to subdue the evangel, to reduce its audacious renarration of the world to just so much more exotic chatter at the world's margins, outside the boundaries of the forum.

What is at issue, of course, is power. According to John Caputo, the real aim of his postmetaphysical hermeneutics is an attack upon the established power, its totalizing discourses, its supremacy over the narratives that might resist or seek to escape its embrace; it strives to make room for all voices, in order to make sure that debate is fair. This, obviously, makes it sound as if he is advocating a strategy of simple liberalism, a social hygiene for preserving the opennes of a marketplace of ideas from the imperial ambitions of unconstrained (and politically enfranchised) metanarratives. Nor does Caputo pretend that his project occupies a position beyond every mythos as such: his interest, he declares, is in afvancing a certain very particular myth, the myth of justice, and in inventing many small emancipatory myths that might disrupt the dominance of great stories of being, while exercising vigilance over these small myths as well. But then again, there is surely something here of the familiar gesture of doubling back upon one's own discourse, to protect it preveniently from critique: having acknowledged that one's myths are myths, one is then free (with a clear conscience) to deploy them among the world's narratives, as limits imposed upon their "excesses." This is, in some sense, a gesture of occultation, concealing radical hermeneutics' capacity for rhetorical violence behind a veil of critical detachment. When, similarly, Derrida declares that "Justice...is not deconstructible" and that "Deconstruction is justice," it is supposedly because it is in the nature of justice that it make its claim on behalf of the other, prior to every narrative of the Same--this is its definition--and deconstruction (if it can be practiced) serves the ends of justice, in fact is the course of critical suspicion that justice must follow when the great narratives threaten to overwhelm "alterity"; but it can also mean that a very particular practice of deconstruction has been placed beyond all deconstruction. And while a radical hermeneutics may seek only the path of peaceful pluralism, where no voice is suppressed, it still perhaps hides within itself an impulse to subdue the very difference it attempts to emancipate; it invites, or at any rate foreshadows, a rule of law or (at the very least) a rule of legitimate discourse that would seek to contain all voices within a neutral paradigm of rational restraint. Yet this very paradigm may constitute a complete contradiction of the narratives for which it seems to make room; this particular species of toleration may, as likely as not, enact a subtle but quite devastating violence upon narratives that make claims in excess of the proportions of polite restraint. However admirable the ethical intentions of a radical hermeneutics, it should itself probably be disrupted by the particularity of all those narratives that should not consent to the constraints placed upon them by the "myth of justice," if it is a myth that merely governs the strife of persuasions according to a dogmatic metanarrative of truthlessness. At any rate, insofar as it tends to subsume so many narratives under a single history of metaphysics, and insofar as it attempts to preface every story with a story of undecidability, radical hermeneutics remains a metanarrative, a discourse of power, however much it dissembles itself as a kind of principled powerlessness.

Again, "rights" function as this "hermeneutics of suspicion" in the political/moral realm. By declaring a "right" to do something, own something, or be something, one is declaring that any debate about the goodness of the claim is off limits. It is to declare from the start that no consensus can be reached and that, therefore, those with power must impose an ethic of indeterminacy. To do so it must silence and marginalize those whose beliefs would cause them to register an opinion about a particular action, lifestyle, or commodity. And in declaring ultimately that which cannot be known and is therefore off limits to discussion, it must pretend that it is not itself grasping at power, but is renouncing power.

This is the lie on which the foundation of "rights" squarely rests, and it is the primary reason why I find them so frustrating.

Blind-sided by "rights"

2010-08-11T22:36:00.002-04:00

There's been much talk in the blogosphere about the decision handed down by Judge Vaughn Walker striking Proposition 8 in California. In the context of that decision, I want to say a bit about "rights," because I think this issue does a good job illustrating why I find them so frustrating.

I'll just come right out and say it: this may come as a shock to the average 21st century American, but I don't believe that "rights" exist. I think they are a fiction invented by a well-meaning, but ultimately self-serving aristocracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that ever since then they've had an undue hold on the Western imagination. Why do I believe "rights" arose in the first place? Because notions of virtue (from which laws were originally derived) and a shared teleological understanding of the human being (bound up with notions of virtue) were cast aside in a new era of "science" and "reason," which are only capable of assessing the material or efficient causes of things. Since virtue was set aside, some sort of moral ordering needed to be given to society lest it descend into chaos, and thence came the notion of "rights." They are defended in such collective myths as the "social contract" that imagined every individual as a free-willing agent terrified of the "state of war" and eager to determine mutually agreed upon "rights" with his fellows in order to live in peace and harmony (each having, of course, the "right" to assent to such collections of "rights"). In the past fifty years, the notion of "rights" has become so distorted that it has threatened to tear apart American society in what was long ago dubbed the "culture wars."

Why do I think "rights" have lost their ordering power and ought to be discarded? Because I think they do more harm than good these days, and the society they leave us with through their logical application is thoroughly atomized and inhuman. To illustrate, let's return to Walker's decision and focus on the issue of gay marriage for a moment. "Rights" first became tied up with the issue of marriage in Loving v. Virginia back in 1967 when the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, claiming that they violated the "right to marry"--another check-box on a growing laundry-list of items that a law may not violate lest it meet the wrath of the Supreme Gavel.

So this "right" to marriage has now once again surfaced in the debate over same-sex marriage. On the one side, you have a group of people claiming that same-sex couples have a "right" to marriage, and on the other hand, you have a group of people claiming that they have no such "right." Neither side satisfies the other with argument, they simply provide assertion. So they vote, then they threaten, then they sue, then they vote again, then they sue again, and so forth. Neither side is able to make its case to the other in a way that would actually bring about some sort of social peace on the matter, therefore the matter will never be settled except by a raw expression of power.

If the issue of same-sex marriage (or any issue for that matter) is not about "rights" then, what is it about? If we want to maintain an ordered society without the use of "rights," then we will need to return to their forerunners: to virtue, to beauty, and to teleology.

And teleology is precisely what the fight over same-sex marriage is about: not whether or not recognizing gay couples as "marriages" causes "harm" to society, nor whether gay couples have a "right" to be called "marriages," nor even what the definition of marriage is, but what marriage is for. What is its end? What is its telos?

I don't believe these two sides are arguing about a static "definition" of the word "marriage," but over the ideal toward which that word should cause one to move, the trajectory it sets one upon. They each have in mind an embodied teleology of sexuality that makes their position on the marital status of same-sex couples intuitively obvious, but it also leaves it impossible to articulate rationally. It is not a clash of rights, it's a clash of narratives, and in order to find a social narrative of sexuality and marriage that satisfies both sides, the national discussion will need to continue to play out openly and without a threat of preemptive rhetorical strike by one party that demands the other submit. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely because the debate has already been blind-sided by "rights."

One could claim that my summary of the argument without resorting to rights seems rhetorical and aesthetic rather than rational. I would reply that judgment is correct, but I would also say that it is a truer expression of the country's division on the issue and that an argument along these lines would be preferable to the raw assertions of power that are typical of today's debates.

The Use of God

2010-06-05T18:53:00.001-04:00

I've written before about my feelings toward therapeutic religion. To give a sense of what I've said previously, here is a quote from the late Philip Rieff on the subject:

It's characterised by a certain vacuity and diffidence. The institutions which were defenders of the second world, or second culture - I think cultures are world creations - have not offered the kind of defence or support that would have been more powerful than therapeutic forces. So Christianity becomes, therapeutically, 'Jesus is good for you.' I find this simply pathetic.

As I noted before, both Christianity's enemies and defenders often take a therapeutic view of religion, and use it as a way to argue either for or against Christianity. I understand this only insofar as I live within the culture that behaves this way. Beyond that, this makes absolutely no sense to me.

I was having a short and friendly debate with an atheist friend of mine recently. This friend objected to the "inefficiency" of God, and claimed that the reason he did not believe in God was that Christianity was "not worth his time." Essentially, this argument is assuming that in order to be a Christian, one must derive some benefit from so being. One asks, is it worth it to be a Christian? The answer to this question is thought to be either yes or no. That is the end of the matter.

Unfortunately, many modern (especially American) Christians accept this premise and argue accordingly. They list the myriad ways that being Christian can be beneficial. Some claim that believing in God will make you rich. Others claim that it will improve your sex life.

Now, it may be the case that Christianity or "religion" (using the nebulous category of academics) offers a number of important benefits to individuals and to society at large, but note that this utilitarian argument leaves out the obvious question about whether or not Christianity is true. I note this, because it leads me to two difficulties with the discussion that I had with my friend. The first is how we will always talk past one another on this issue, and the second, one which I addressed while in the midst of debate, is that the utilitarian question necessarily addresses the truth question while simultaneously pretending that it does not.

Allow me to explain. If someone is stating that she does not believe that Christianity is "worth her time," then she is implicitly declaring that she believes that Christianity is false. As noted by C.S. Lewis, Christianity can either be extremely important or not at all important, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important. If God became man, and declared unto us the truth of eternal life, then nothing can be more important that being a Christian. If Christianity is untrue, then certainly it can be seen as an impediment to a number of things (sexual promiscuity, various drugs, pornography, obscene consumption, selfishness) to which an individual may prefer to have access. Thus, in making the statement that Christianity is not worth one's time, one is implicitly declaring that one believes that Christianity is not true.

Why do they believe Christianity is not true? Well, because it is not worth their time to believe otherwise, you see.

Unfortunately, I can sit here and play my little philosopher's games on my blog, but I still am unable to convince these individuals that they ought to revisit their implicit assumptions revealed by their logical errors, as I was unable to convince my friend. As long as the narrative of postmodern life continues to treat "why are you a Christian?" and "what benefit do you derive from being a Christian?" as two ways of asking the same question, then we will have a problem. The first obvious step to change the culture, though, is to stop playing this game. We need to stop pretending that fact and value can be separated, that making value judgments on ways of life or art are attempts to make true statements about the world.

I am heartened by the recent upsurge of interest in the relationship between truth, beauty, and goodness. The other day I walked in on a discussion between two graduate students trying to figure out whether or not beauty and truth were the same thing. I threw in goodness (or law, if you prefer) to make the traditional three. If we can make people care about what is good, true, and beautiful, then we might still have a chance. We have our work cut out for us, but there may yet be hope.

Atheism and Neutrality

2010-05-05T01:33:00.001-04:00

If you can get past its somewhat disrespectful tone, this piece in the LA Times by Marc Cooper opens the door to something I've been pondering for some time, and is certainly something that Cooper would never have intended.

Postmoderns tend to agree with Christians and other religious people when it comes to the pretensions of Enlightenment reason--the notion that somewhere out there, if we just think hard enough, there lies a completely objective and neutral position from which we can reason about all things. Modernity rested upon this article of faith, and it has been largely discredited (though admittedly not always for the right reasons).

At any rate, back to the Cooper piece. Having spent my undergraduate years swooning over the possibility of someday becoming a Supreme Court justice, I spent hours poring over establishment and free exercise clause jurisprudence both in class and out, and came to notice a pattern. Wherever religion was said to be getting too close to the state, the Court's solution was to remove religion. Prayer in public schools is an obvious example, though things are getting more complex as we ponder less obvious things like crosses on government property. O'Connor was probably one of the most influential justices in history when it came to establishment clause jurisprudence, having essentially invented a multi-pronged test of what constitutes government "endorsement" of religion (often involving some sort of advanced examination of the psychological motives of the legislative branch). What is striking about decisions flowing from this jurisprudence is that the seeming "neutrality" imposed by the government is a de facto establishment of atheism.

I don't mean that last sentence to sound as combative as it probably does, and I know I'm not the first person to notice this trajectory, but it's becoming pretty clear that what atheists want and what the logic of Supreme Court jurisprudence demands is essentially the same thing. Lately, the Court, perhaps recognizing this, has started tying itself into knots to avoid the possibility of seeming "hostile" to religion, which they don't intend (see an overview of a case of this knot-tying here). But let's not kid ourselves here: "neutrality" according to any interpretation of current establishment clause jurisprudence is the fusion of government with atheism (I suppose it would also be compatible with a henotheist or polytheist view of religion, provided the state were to identify itself as a god, but I doubt that anyone in the 21st century United States actually wants this).

What I want to suggest is that the Supreme Court, in the earnest search for rational neutrality with respect to religion, is beginning to discover what the postmoderns and many religious thinkers have already discovered: there is no such thing as rational neutrality. There is no such thing as a way for the government to be "neutral" toward religion. It must either appear to endorse a religion or religions, or appear to endorse nothing (i.e. atheism). Cooper clearly thinks that having an atheist on the Court would make it more in line with "reason" (i.e. more in line with the way Cooper thinks), and perhaps he's right, but I want to point to something deeper revealed in his piece.

If we are to assume that others and I are correct and that there are no reasons without some sort of commitment (i.e. no "primordial" neutrality), then atheism can no longer posture itself as the "neutral" alternative. Belief in atheism is, like other "-isms," faith that a collection of notions about the universe (whether explicit or implicit) is true. This is also the case for agnosticism, skepticism, etc. Whenever you choose to ponder a question about the meaning of things and come to one conclusion or another, come to no conclusion, or decide not to ponder, you are making a series of tacit judgments about the nature of reality, and behaving in accordance with those judgments by way of faith.

What I want to suggest, then, and what I've been pondering over the past few months, is that we should stop viewing atheism as some sort of neutral starting point. We should stop looking to it as the bare bones of humanity upon which we build religious belief. Instead, we should view all people, religious and otherwise, as having a number of beliefs, and then explore, equally, the reasons for all those beliefs. We have an investigation of the psychology of religion underway (of which I am a part), why is there no investigation of the psychology of atheism? The obvious answer is that most psychologists believe the Enlightenment myth that there is such a thing as reasoning prior to belief, and so we need some sort of rationalist "starting point" which may look like atheism in all respects, but really isn't atheism.

I don't buy it. I have a feeling more will soon begin to share my sentiments. I worry for the Supreme Court, of course, for having carried this boulder all the way up the mountain; they're likely going to see it roll back down the hill. For science, though, this offers an exciting new frontier. The psychologist in me is excited at the notion of trying to understand atheism as something that is really a kind of motivated belief, and the Christian in me is excited at the ways that this discovery could forge more interdisciplinary connections between fields, especially theology and the rest of the humanities with the social sciences.

As usual, the future holds many potential disappointments, but many hopeful possibilities as well.

The Third Economic Way?

2010-03-09T11:18:00.001-05:00

Paving the way between the current discourse on the contemporary Left and Right?

I have to say I like almost all of the policy proposals. The only thing I'm not enthusiastic about is that it only seems to focus on rural life and agrarianism, ignoring the New Urbanism movement that takes many of these ideas and applies them on an urban scale. Supplement it with that, though, and it puts forth a lot of ideas I can support. Too bad they never even get mentioned by either political party.

Moderns and Postmoderns

2010-03-09T11:17:00.001-05:00

This article was featured on the First Things website in honor of the magazine's 20th anniversary.

I think this business about modernism/postmodernism gets to the heart of a lot of our political difficulties. The Millennials are the first truly postmodern generation, and the reason for that is we have no memory of Soviet Communism. The Cold War was the last truly modern conflict, and following the USSR's collapse, we rhapsodically descended into the era of Nietzsche's Last Man.

9/11 was remarkable in that it created a truly modern moment within the new postmodern era. Indeed, there was a brief period when we nearly reclaimed a modern understanding of the world. However, perhaps the 9/11 moment is most remarkable in that it failed. We have reasserted our 90s discovery of postmodernism and nailed the modernist coffin shut for good. Terrorist events may rudely awaken us to the old ways, but the slumber of the nation-state in the public mind is now deep and may not ever end.

What I was saying about politics and Millennials earlier this week still holds true, but with the caveat that devotion to the Democratic party is extremely tenuous. The reason so many of my generation (myself included) find the contemporary Left-Right divide so tiresome is that each party seems equally committed to perpetuating modernism, when modernism is dead. The reason Barack Obama's campaign resonated so strongly with my generation was the way it promised to end modernism and take politics to a new era. In that effort it has manifestly failed--Obama's administration is merely a re-imagined incarnation of the modernist New Left, a desperate grasp at the programs and ideas of the last century unrequited.

I don't think this marriage to Millennials can last as long as it remains such. Obama's rhetoric may belong to a new era, but his policies are more modernist than the Republicans'. I don't see why a re-imagined Right Wing couldn't have wide appeal with my generation, provided they drop the thirty year old rhetoric (narrative?) of the late twentieth century. I think the Left has less distance to travel rhetorically, but in terms of policy, they have farther to go.

I'm not saying this change is good; I'm saying that it is real, and it can't be undone.

Politics has entered a new era. Late behind art, the academy, theology, and culture. Now we wait for the politicians to realize it.

Two Conceptions of Self-Government

2010-01-17T20:21:00.002-05:00

James Poulos has an interesting reflection up regarding the "tea partiers" in response to a post by Conor Friedersdorf. I like it, in part, because it explains my frustration with those who refer to themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" (read: American undergraduate college students), a position which is theoretically possible, but, in practice, never seems to materialize. Here is an excerpt:

...liberals of any party seeking primarily to foster or facilitate cultural change typically have little desire to focus their attention, much less their careers, on preventing the government from aggrandizing itself. A government that routinely manages economic behavior through its economic policy is well able to routinely manage social and personal behavior that way. In theory, there’s no reason why lots of Republicans can’t be ‘socially liberal but fiscally conservative.’ In practice, social liberals, of any party, have a vested interest in a government that rules not only by law but by economics.

In fact, tea partiers help everyone understand that ‘fiscal conservatism’ is a misleading phrase. A ‘fiscal conservative’ is for balanced budgets and well-calibrated taxes and against wasteful spending. A tyrannical government, if it has any brains, is for solvency and efficiency too. ‘Fiscal conservatism’ can license the aggrandizement and abuse of government power. It might be necessary to economic conservatism, but it isn’t sufficient. Alone, it isn’t conservatism at all, and under the right conditions, ‘fiscal conservatism’ can actually destroy its namesake. [emphasis mine]

The whole post is worth reading as a reflection on where things stand.

My own thought about what divides us is that people look on self-government as a "right," rather than as a double-edged sword of privilege and responsibility. They assume "self-government" means "getting government to do what I want it to," when in fact it means "taking responsibility for what the government does." Those are two very different things. I think the first way of thinking fosters support for a centralized omnipotent government which imposes a sort of amoral individualism upon the populace while simultaneously supplying security and comfort to its citizens. The second way, in contrast, leads to the view that government should be small, local, and impose the moral norms of the community upon its citizens. I think there are both Democrats and Republicans which take either view. Perhaps they are expressions of the ideological visions identified by Thomas Sowell.

Either way, in spite of how badly the modern man would like to separate morality from government, there is a reason that Aristotle made his discussion of ethics a subset of his reflections on politics.

Twitter's Non-Revolution

2010-01-05T22:16:00.002-05:00

Evgeny Morozov writes about how he thinks the techno-philes are far too sanguine in their characterization of Twitter as a weapon against totalitarianism:

Techno-utopianism is usually rooted in rigid and obsolete views about the relationship between authoritarianism and information. Most techno-utopians interpret the fact that authoritarian governments resort to censorship as a sign of their weakness. Hence, whenever authoritarian governments cede control over information, they are believed to become weaker. Thus, every time Chinese bloggers use proxy servers to access banned content, they are slowly eroding the Great Firewall of China. And where the firewalls fall, dictators soon follow.

This view is fatally flawed, as it understates the sophistication and flexibility of modern authoritarian states and overstates the democratic aspirations of their citizens. Western leaders have an unhealthy tendency to imagine politics in authoritarian states as being more hyperactive and participatory than the politics in their own countries. They implicitly view all Chinese, Russians and Iranians as hard-core news junkies and seasoned political dissidents. Authoritarian states are thus seen to be one step away from full-blown revolution – and waiting for the West to nudge them, whether via the Voice of America, BBC World, or judicious retweets.

The eruption of enthusiasm for social networking sites during the riots in Tehran sounds like a libertarian version of Bush-Blair neoconservatism--that people all around the world living under authoritarian regimes are just waiting for their chance to breathe free. That everyone in the world, deep down, just wants to be...exactly like us. Besides throwing cold water on the Tweeter Twits' motherboard, Morozov goes on to make an insightful point:

...this [techno-phile view] is an anachronistic view of the world. Modern authoritarian states have eagerly (but selectively) embraced globalisation to provide their citizens with at least a modicum of self-actualisation without ever abandoning their authoritarianism. Their young people travel the world, learn English, use Skype and poke each other on Facebook - all while competing for comfortable jobs with state-owned companies. We are entering the age of "accommodating authoritarianism" - and the internet has played a crucial (though hardly the only) role in providing many of the accommodations.

The reason why the Chinese can download Weeds or Mad Men from peer-to-peer networks is not because the Chinese government can no longer police the web. It's because watching Weeds and Mad Men is what young people living under contemporary authoritarians are supposed to do. These societies no longer operate in the world of cultural scarcity; it's hard to nudge them towards dissent with the promise of blue jeans or prohibited vinyl records. For every Chinese blogger that the techno-utopians expect to fight their government via Twitter, there are a hundred others who feel content with the status quo.

In one respect, then, authoritarian states and modern democracies are very much alike: both have embraced hedonism as their main and only political ideology. The recent outburst of techno-utopianism in the West may thus be just another futile attempt to imagine a world where the purest ideal of Athenian democracy, uncorrupted by special interests and popular culture, is not only possible but could actually be facilitated by its more corrupt, frivolous, and somewhat culpable western sibling. This, of course, is an illusion. Citizens of modern authoritarian states face a choice between hedonism with stable prosperity (their status quo) and hedonism with unstable prosperity - the hedonism that may follow a tumultuous transition to democracy. Stability wins, with or without Twitter.

The deeper point here is that Westerners have become confused about what it means to be an "authoritarian" state and a "free" state. We assume that being "free" means being able to watch whatever TV shows we want, being able to eat whatever food we want, being able to have sex with whomever we want, etc. This flows from our conception of human beings as ultimately mobile bundles of desire, and thus, the actualization of our humanity (perfect "freedom") lies in the satisfaction of our appetites. An "authoritarian" state is assumed to be a state that restricts our access to those satisfactions, and a "free" one is one that works to satisfy as many varieties of desire as possible. Therefore, any break in these restrictions is assumed to be a movement towards "freedom" and any bolstering of them is assumed to be a movement away from "freedom." Social networking sites and the internet allow for a greater variety of appetite satisfactions, therefore social networking sites and the internet will spread freedom and undo authoritarianism.

The problem with this view is that it rests on a false premise. That premise is the conflation of political freedom with the freedom from obstruction of the satisfaction of appetite. In no way does the availability of the internet, television, McDonald's, porn and prostitutes preclude a police state. In fact, they make the hold of a police state more difficult to find and much more difficult to break. Against the machine of Communism, the West could promise a car in every driveway and a chicken in every pot. But what if citizens under Communism had access to cars and chickens, and those in power guaranteed that access? With an unlimited supply of bread and circuses, it is difficult to rouse the people to slough off tyrants.

You may think I'm overreaching with this thought experiment. You may say that it is impossible for a regime that is authoritarian to provide prosperity to its citizens. Yet we observe that the authoritarian countries of Asia are becoming far more prosperous, and under the Obama and Bush administrations, our prosperous country has become far more authoritarian. Nor am I the first to posit such a thing. Poulos and Deneen have done essentially the same thing here and here, respectively. Essentially, governments consolidate power not with force, but with prosperity and pleasure. Brave New World has supplanted Nineteen Eighty-Four as the future of civilization.

I don't pretend to know exactly where the West is headed, but if liberalism's future rests on the revolutionary potential of Facebook and Twitter, my bet is with the authoritarians.

New Directions

2009-12-22T18:03:00.001-05:00

I've been woefully poor at blogging lately, mostly because of the start of graduate school, but also because I've been doing most of my thinking in dialectical form and haven't made room for reflection in solitude.

With this in mind, I'm going to make an early 2010 New Year's resolution: I will blog more. Not only do I like to hash out an idea every now and then, I would also like a space to act as an early sounding board for some research projects in the future. I'm also toying with the idea of wiping some of the more raw political material from the earlier parts of this blog and making it more public.

So goodbye, aughts! We shall see what the future brings.

Douthat on Benedict's Option

2009-11-03T00:34:00.001-05:00

In the NYT, Ross Douthat takes a look at the option Benedict is extending to Anglicans wishing to become Roman Catholic.

I personally think Benedict might be preparing for another dark age in Europe (and perhaps America too, but "the West" in general). He obviously recognizes that the logical end of this Enlightenment project on which we've embarked is the creation of a secularist atmosphere in which Christianity is not permitted to be Christianity because it comes into direct conflict with Enlightenment or postmodernist values.

It's an interesting dynamic to watch, since both the Enlightenment and postmodern narratives borrow extensively from the Christian one (in both form and substance), but each in its logical end has no use for the doctrines of the church insomuch as they conflict with its own sacralized values (e.g. Enlightenment rationalism, postmodern inclusionism). What I'm trying to figure out is how we've managed to keep fooling ourselves for the past two hundred fifty years that this ultimate conflict does not exist. Is it because the American mythology surrounding the pilgrims and Puritans has an overtly religious character? Is it because we've until now managed to dichotomize personal religious faith from political orientations since we've shared unspoken moral values? Or is it because we've adopted an un-Christian Christianity which is more capitalist/socialist/Enlightenment/postmodern than it is Christian?

I think the second option comes closest to the truth through history, and the third is true today, but I really have no idea what the answers to those questions are. Maybe historians will figure it out, but I can't help but think that Christian scholars at least will look back on these years as the closing of an age. I think liberals (meaning all who believe in 'liberalism,' not just those on the left wing politically) will continue pushing for an apocryphal 'perfect' future in line with their views of the sacred (think some sort of quasi-statist-libertarian mutant horror like James Poulos's Pink Police State), and conservatives (meaning those who believe in some liberal values but not others) will continue pining for a particular slice of Western history which can never come again let alone attain any sort of permanency, and, to be perfectly honest, probably wasn't so great in reality anyway. And thus we'll continue our gradual slide down into obscurity, as, in the words of Alisdair MacIntyre, the day's political debates are waged between radical liberals, liberal liberals, and conservative liberals.

In the long run, it's probably for the best. It won't be pleasant for those living through it, though. It's tough when the naked emperor has been increasing your personal prosperity and capacity for pleasure for centuries, and now he's willing to continue, but wants to strip you naked too. But remember that no matter what good he's done for you, he still has no clothes.

Anyway, that's my two cents, for what it's worth (while two cents is still worth anything). In the meantime, enjoy the ride.

Williams, Anglicans, and the Ecumenical Future

2009-08-03T23:50:00.001-04:00

There seems to be one major idea which is driving forward the liberal leadership of The Episcopal Church in the midst of the Anglican crisis: that Anglicans have long eschewed doctrine, so we should strip our moral codes of the disapproval of homosexuality. The idea is a somewhat bastardized version of a certain epistemological humility that has a long historical basis within Anglicanism. It is true that Richard Hooker, the biggest brain behind the via media, argued against the dogmatisation of the answers to certain theological questions (e.g. the nature of the Marian conception). They recognized that there certainly are areas where human beings simply cannot know the truth, either because we don't currently have the instruments to discern it or it has not been revealed to us by the Divine through Scripture. On these issues, it was the wish of the catholic-minded Anglican reformers that the Church should remain silent. Indeed, a point of contention between Anglican and Roman theologians still exists in a number of areas due to their differing faith in the epistemic powers of human institutions, with Romans opting for precision where Anglicans opted for agnosticism, at least institutionally.

They also opposed the radical notions of the Puritans which pulled in the other direction, who generally opposed any church practice which did not have a specific endorsement in Scripture. Instead, Hooker argued for the theological basis of the liturgy found in the Book of Common Prayer and for other instruments for worship such as music, vestments, and icons. Again, though, in arguing against their prohibition, Hooker and those like him did not argue for their universality, once again opting for a certain epistemological humility, allowing individual believers and clergy to settle these questions according to their own consciences.

However, this cannot be said to completely define Anglicanism, and here is where the questions of the Communion today come into play. While Hooker et al. argued for epistemological humility in a number of unknown areas, he still supported the concept of dogma. On questions such as the Incarnation, the Trinity, the holiness of Scripture, the threefold nature of the ordained ministry, and the sacraments, for example, he opted for a universal theology. That is, one could not call himself a Christian unless he accepted the correct position on these issues, but was offered a certain degree of leeway on a number of others.

This is where we are left today, with one group asserting its Christianity as valid, saying that the issues on which it has deviated from orthodox Christendom are not "essential" and another group claiming that the first group has effectively left the religion that is called Christianity. There is an authority vacuum here. Where is the via media? What are the solutions to this dilemma?

There are two extant solutions to this problem: the confessional solution and the hierarchical solution. The former resolves questions of doctrine by putting forth a "confession" which lists all the correct views on a number of issues and determines that those who follows said articles of faith and believe are "in" and those who do not are "out." The hierarchical solution continually outsources the question to a higher authority until a final judgment is reached on the question. There are, as with most things, problems with and benefits to either solution.

The confessional model is that which is used by most Protestant groups (think of the Westminster Confession for Presbyterians). The benefits of this model are doctrinal purity, unity, and (temporarily) clarity. There is no question what the group believes, and the group, with its clarity on these issues, is able to act with a unity that most other groups envy. Unfortunately, this model has its problems as well, best illustrated by the ridiculous number of Protestant sects which litter the landscape. No matter how clear the doctrine is laid out at the beginning, history is not static, and the world will always present new questions over which there are bound to be disputes. Thus requiring new confessions and new denominations ad infinitum, multiplying the scandal of a divided Christendom.

The hierarchical model offers more institutional unity, and it has a way of dealing with new historical circumstances that the confessional model does not. It recognizes that all judgments, in the end, need to be human judgments. A document cannot judge the rightness or wrongness of something or whether or not something fits a particular definition. At some point someone somewhere is responsible for saying "yes" or "no." By placing a human being in charge of decisions regarding faith and morals, hierarchical churches (like the Roman church) offer an institutional continuity unseen in the rest of Christendom. However, it too has its problems. Often one finds that the unity is merely institutional. With such a large organization, one finds that the people in the pews rarely espouse the same views as the man on top, thus is lacks the internal unity that the confessional model gains. Additionally, it ignores the reality of the lack of human knowledge to be able to answer all questions definitively, and in many ways replaces a more Biblical institutional structure with another for the sake of ease of governance. It also must, by its very nature, assume its authority greater than all others, and so cannot exist on a level equal to another model of authority, thus making ecumenical relations difficult.

So what of the via media? I think this is where Rowan Williams was going with his recent statement "Communion, Covenant, and our Anglican Future." What has actually broken down over the past few decades between The Episcopal Church on one hand, and the other churches in the Anglican Communion on the other, is mutual recognition. It is not that the American bishops violated some legalistic doctrine, it is that they began behaving in a way which the other members of the Communion no longer recognized as Christian behavior. From this arises the third model of authority, and, in my view, and important one. Rather than explicitly codifying Christian doctrine, or establishing a top-down hierarchy to impose doctrine upon the entire church, Williams and others seem to be opting for a more communal structure in which those who belong are "recognized" as Christian. This is of course, accomplished in consultation with others so that a decision can be agreed upon as a communion (those who recognize one another as belonging to the same church). The covenant, therefore, would not lay out specific doctrines to which all must assent. Instead, it would lay out how this vision of Anglicanism would play out institutionally.

This, I hope, represents a way forward for believing Anglicans in the global Communion. A church that is based upon mutual recognition and mutual submission. This seems to incorporate some doctrinal and institutional fuzziness which seems inevitable in a changing world, but also establishes that there really is something to being a Christian. More importantly, it seems to short circuit the questions of geographic "border" crossings and specific hierarchical models, and thus could present itself as a way forward for ecumenical relations. The Roman hierarchical model poses a challenge to reform-minded Christians of an ecumenical bent simply because it posits that "all roads lead to Rome." Meaning that in the end, all of Christendom would take the form of the present-day Roman Catholic church. Obviously there are geographical considerations to be considered (two bishops of different denominations coexisting in the same diocese for example), and issues of integration into a hierarchical structure. I highly doubt that most Protestants would be comfortable moving under the authority of a Roman bishop or becoming subject to Papal Infallibility. However, if the goal were instead the mutual recognition of the validity of the sacraments within each church (where a Roman Catholic could presumably take communion at an Anglican church should she choose and vice versa) arising from a mutual recognition of the Christian faith in both forms, then some sort of Christian unity could be possible. In that way, the project of the covenant, if institutionally enacted, could open the door to a new ecumenism.

The Anglican storm is a tragedy which will probably result in a diminishing of the Anglican presence in North America, and the loss of a good deal of property that was bought and dedicated for the glory of God by previous generations. However, it may be that this death of Communion will be Resurrected into a new life of ecumenism and a deeper worldwide faith for all Anglicans.

This is why I believe the Anglican project matters, and why, by God, I hope it works.

Musings on the Fall Part II

2009-07-21T22:32:00.003-04:00

I left off this discussion before reading The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff, which I think can give some insight into, again, what the doctrines of the Fall do not mean, and in so doing allow us to better uncover that which they do.

During his tour of three major therapeutic thinkers of the twentieth century (Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence, inheriting a technique from Sigmund Freud), there is a recurring theme that continues to surface across these various authors. This theme, Rieff refers to as "anti-intellectualism," and it is this idea that I think can show us a way in which the doctrines of Christianity do not intend us to respond to the reality of the Fall.

To begin, it is worth noting that none of these authors denies the fallen condition of mankind, albeit in a self-serving way. All three recognize that there is a distinct disconnect between man's account of himself and the appetites and drives which he feels pushing and pulling him in various directions every day. This disconnect, when not mitigated by self-defense mechanisms such as repression or sublimation, according to Freud, results in neurosis and "dis-ease." Freud understood past mechanisms inherent in religious communities as providing the motivation and force behind these mechanisms so that they function properly to avoid the neurotic condition. He noted that in today's age which is getting increasingly scientific and individualistic, these religious imperatives no longer function effectively, and so analysis becomes necessary. Analysis, according to Freud, provides a rationalization of both drives and cultural inhibitions on those drives in order to empower the patient to be able to control the former or latter more effectively, and therefore rise above his or her neurosis.

Leaving aside the empirical veracity of this diagnosis, it is easy to see how the analysis of drives and cultural constraints effectively makes the individual person the end towards which these inner and outer forces can only be harnessed and secondary. Thus, the individual becomes the end of being human, and all other societal or biological forces exist for the fulfillment of the individual person. Sex, religion, marriage, technology, money; they all exist for the improvement of the individual.

Freud, for all his empirical faults, was at least reserved enough to avoid declaring what those ends ought to be, but nature abhors a vacuum, and when his therapeutic heirs (listed earlier in this post) took up his techniques, they argued that those ends were knowable and achievable. That is, Freud never intended for his therapy to be a "cure" in the old religious sense for human dis-ease, instead he simply wanted to mitigate the discomfort he saw around him for the time being. His heirs, however, each believed that they, in shrugging off the cultural constraints previously imposed by Judeo-Christian culture, had discovered new therapeutic ends towards which they could orient their patients in order that they may achieve human fulfillment and a cure for their neuroses.

Without going into too much detail regarding their individual doctrines, I want to return to the "anti-intellectualism" that Rieff sees running through each of them. This is where the questions of modern culture find their way back to the questions about the Fall; an excerpt from Rieff's exploration of Reich:

There is a sinister anti-intellectualism about Reich's theory of the origin of repression. Repression began the moment man made the mistake of thinking about himself, ceasing thus to trust his "instinctual judgment." Reich believed that our sickness began at the moment man began to think--too much and specially about himself. This reverses the naive intellectualism of the liberal tradition, in which ignorance is blamed for the human condition but may be cured by self-knowledge only. But, to Reich, the human being suffered his first and most fundamental neurosis through and "overstrained perception of self-perception." Mind turned against body. Body could not help but turn against mind. Love abstracted itself from sex. Sex could not help being restive in the trap of love.

This tendency is found in all therapeutic inheritors of Freud's legacy. Jung encourages seekers to shun traditional religious doctrine in favor of an individuated realization of cultural gods whose empirical validity is demonstrated by their positive therapeutic effects. Reich, as mentioned, shuns all moral reflection as inhibitory on man's growth into his healthy self (the ideal hedonist). Lawrence attacks rationality as a roadblock to communal feeling which is found primarily in the erotic. In all these doctrines, man's reflections upon his own self scientifically, psychologically, and, most importantly, teleologically is implicated as the cause of all man's woes.

It is worth remembering, then, that in the story of the Garden, Adam and Eve were first discovered to have eaten the forbidden fruit through their recognition that they were naked. Genesis 3:7 reads, "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons." What we can gather from this fact is that the original sin of Adam resulted in he and his wife attaining self-awareness and an attendant moral faculty that resulted in their shame at their nakedness. No longer was the innocent world "natural," but needed to be guided by reasoned moral judgment and action.

What the therapeutics, though not from reflection upon these verses, suggest is that mankind in order to put an end to modern sickness, ought to make attempts through psychoanalysis to reattain the state of innocence mythologically and theologically attributed to Adam and Eve prior to their eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The moral self-reflection, and the associated beliefs with how a human being ought to behave, are indicted as the source of all modern human misery. "Release" or "liberation" are seen as the means of salvation. The religious character of the therapeutic inheritors of Freud, in contrast to Freud himself, is particularly evident in this belief.

The naivete of the therapeutic is similarly evident. They made it to the Fall, watched the expulsion from the garden, but refused to see the character which oversaw the narrative. Once the proverbial genie has been released from his bottle, he cannot be put back in. Once humanity achieved the development of self-consciousness, and all of its attendant misery, he cannot simply un-achieve it. Nor do any of the therapeutic authors consider the possibility that our moral and communal faculties also evolved in tandem with our instinctual drives, and, thus, the ability for self-reflection did not force a change in the behavior of man, but only gave him partial authorship over that behavior as far as Nature would allow him. In an attempt to gain "freedom," the therapeutics actually actively spurn that consciousness which enables what freedom of action human beings are in fact capable of. Nor can they seem to agree on the solution to the problem of human neurosis, aside from declaring without evidence that it must lie in the repudiation of Judeo-Christian communal morality, which, it should be noted, sets reason in a particularly high place. Furthermore, they seem to be incapable of recognizing the fact that in that repudiation, far from establishing a negative anti-creedal mode which Freud endorsed, they are actually establishing their own moral accounts of what it means to be human complete with ends, means, and prophets to deliver them both to the masses from on high (themselves). Perhaps this incoherence explains why no one has managed to overcome this vexatious duality by assuming the analytic mode.

Having rejected the therapeutic position as incoherent and unsustainable. What does Christianity propose in its place, and why is this a better account of the story of the Fall? These are notes for further reflection.

Unanswered Questions

2009-05-28T11:35:00.002-04:00

Nicholas Kristof has jumped on the moral psychology bandwagon and thrown his twenty-two cents into the ring (accounting for inflation).

I still have some issues with Haidt's analysis, although if you've read any of my earlier posts, you know I think he's onto something big. Part of my problem is with Kristof's piece has much to do with journalistic oversimplification I'm sure, but take this statement for instance:

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

Aside from the odd idea of someone not having "revulsion at disgust" (isn't someone who is disgusted by definition also subject to revulsion?), I take issue with the notion that liberals are not also subject to moral disgust, or at least behave as though they are. I have had a number of exceedingly liberal friends who have behaved as though I have leprosy when I express skepticism at the ultimate goodness of same-sex marriage, for example.

A quick tour of any of the far-Left websites or an op/ed column by Frank Rich will show you something similar. Or take the video of a handful of McCain supporters walking through the Upper West Side of Manhattan last fall. If this isn't the product of disgust, I'm not sure I understand what the operative definition of "disgust" is.

The other questions that arise come from statements like this:

The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process.

Really? All of our judgments are formed in the moment and undergo no cognitive development whatsoever? I know that Haidt doesn't believe this, but his journalistic summarizers do. So there appear to be underlying correlatives of particular moral and political beliefs? Well, which way does the causation run, or is there a third factor of causation that isn't being considered? What about beliefs that change over time? How does that happen? Virtue ethics may be the key here--a subject that I know Haidt finds intriguing--but it receives no mention from Kristof.

Also this:

A study by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people saw tight television shots of blowhards with whom they disagreed, they felt that the other side was even less legitimate than before.

Well, of course! If you expose someone to a belief system being presented by someone in whom he or she has placed little or no epistemic trust, why would such a person be expected to moderate his or her beliefs?

Like I said, Haidt is definitely onto something, but it needs more empirical study, and less armchair boiled-down oversimplification. Luckily, given the rise in interest among academics (and journalists) in the subject matter, it's likely to get it.

Everyone Is Doing It

2009-05-21T15:47:00.000-04:00

My co-worker recently came into work saying how distressed she was that AshleyMadison.com was advertising on the radio during the day. For those who are in the dark about this website, it is a "dating site" catering towards those with spouses. That is, it's a forum for adulterous affairs.

One may be curious how the creators of this site manage to sleep at night knowing they are the facilitators of what virtually everyone believes is a moral evil. Putting aside the obvious motivation that is the root of all evil, when questioned, the creator responded to the effect that he is not actually encouraging adultery because all of his clients already wanted to have affairs beforehand. In fact, he is providing a service to the dating community by giving these individuals a place where they can honestly present themselves as being married rather than lying about their marital status in order to get dates.

So the moral hedging proceeds. Similar arguments are made for condom distribution in schools and for provision of clean needles to heroine addicts off the street. "Well, everyone is doing it anyway, might as well keep them safe!" Take that mentality a bit further, and you have AshleyMadison.com. "Well, everyone is doing it anyway, might as well profit from it!" Curiously, this argument has been leveled recently by libertarians for government profit, but that is another discussion for another day.

What I want to focus on is this creation of a combined feeling that (1) everyone is doing this and (2) people are going to do this no matter what. The perception of the universality and inevitability of sin is the biggest obstacle to both the moral teaching of institutions such as the Church, and to the moral life of individuals. By assuming that affairs will take place and by creating the perception that affairs do take place on a regular basis, one most definitely does increase the prevalence of adultery by making it seem more natural. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It has long been argued that the world that the individual perceives as 'reality' is socially constructed. That is, we take cues from our environment and from the behavior of others to determine how things really are. If smoke enters through a ceiling vent and no one in the room seems to notice or react, people conclude that there is nothing alarming about the situation. If a group of people is presented with two lines and asked to determine which one is longer, people will be more likely to answer what the group is answering even if what the group is answering is obviously incorrect. This is not due to weak wills or small brains, it's due to the fact that human nature necessitates social verification for the establishment of reality. These people didn't believe with one part of their brains that the building was on fire or that the other line was longer and then just react with the group because they were intimidated, these people actually believed there was nothing wrong in the first case and that the group was correct in the second case even though they were mistaken.

Social construction is a powerful thing. Now let us talk about morals.

People (I believe) are natural Aristotelians. That is, they believe deep-down in Natural Law theory: that we can derive what ought to be from what is; they can see how they ought to behave based upon the way their environment is and how other people are behaving (particularly people in whom they place a great deal of epistemic trust). If a man is walking down the street unwrapping a candy bar, he will be more likely to litter with the wrapper if there is already litter on the ground. He will be even more likely to litter if he sees someone else litter first. That is, he internalizes the fact that "this is a place where people litter," and from that fact, he concludes, "I ought to litter." Maybe he even generally believes that littering is bad, but in this case, since everyone else is doing it, it's ok. He's not going to be the sucker that sticks the wrapper back in his pocket if no one else is.

So when we give out condoms to children or when we advertise adultery-facilitating websites on the radio, we are saying, "This is how people behave. Children have sex. People cheat on their spouses. Everyone is doing it. This is the way things really are." Suddenly, when a person is faced with a challenge to a moral standard which she has been taught by her parents, church, and friends, she is reminded of that website and those free condoms, "Maybe I'm the only one not doing this? Maybe there's something wrong with me."

"Maybe that line only looks longer than the other, but I'm actually mistaken. Maybe that smoke doesn't mean there's a fire. Maybe it is ok to litter here."

No man is an island. Everything we do, the world we create, the norms we profess as inevitable and universal, all affect the behaviors of others. We depend on one another to know what is real and to know what is good, and to pretend otherwise to push responsibility off of ourselves is, well, denying reality and goodness.

Be careful what you say. Be careful what you do. Someone else's soul may depend upon it.

What Am I?

2009-05-12T14:14:00.001-04:00

As I posted previously, I recently read Receiving the Gift of Friendship by Hans Reinders, and one of the points of that work came to mind as I was reading this David Brooks Op/Ed in the New York Times today. The Reinders book focuses primarily on severe intellectual disability and personhood, while the Brooks piece is a longitudinal overview of the lives of some people deemed "successful," but they come together in this paragraph:

Shenk’s treatment is superb because he weaves in the life of George Vaillant, the man who for 42 years has overseen this work. Vaillant’s overall conclusion is familiar and profound. Relationships are the key to happiness. “Happiness is love. Full Stop,” he says in a video.

I'll write it again: "Relationships are the key to happiness."

In his book, Reinders wishes to attack the Aristotelian notion that our fullness of being is achieved through the satisfaction and development of our rational faculties. Classical philosophy (and scholastic philosophy following it) has traditionally asserted that what makes an animal "human" is our capacity for reason and, thus, self-expression (or its potential), and thus, the purpose of being human is to live our rational faculties to the fullest. Even the disability-rights groups accept this underlying notion when they argue for the full inclusion of disabled persons into our citizenry, asserting that it is through their capacity for individual self-expression against the negative social order imposed upon them (following most "liberation" narratives) that they 'prove' their full humanity and demand acceptance.

What of the severely intellectually disabled, then? A group of individuals who may never even have the potential capacity for reason. Here is Reinder's project: how can we intelligibly include those with severe intellectual abilities in our modern liberal societies when they don't have the agency to achieve what our culture has deemed the ultimate source of humanity: self-expression? Are their lives worth less because they do not have use of their intellectual faculties? Reinders argues that they are not, but only if we view our humanity as being revealed in our relationships with others, rather than through our individual self-expression.

In my areas of work in psychology, one constant theme continues to impress itself upon my mind: all things about us, our agency and identity, our knowledge about the world and our decisions about how to live, come to us mediated through our relationships. The reason for this is not that we are not free or that we live in a relationally deterministic universe where all of our decisions are foreordained, but because nothing we choose has any meaning apart from others, most importantly those others with whom we are close. We live in a world of ambiguous data points, and only through relationships with other people can we settle on the thing called "truth" and really begin to live something like a human life. For example, even my name, that thing which I cleave to most dearly and expresses my deepest sense of self, is completely meaningless apart from other people. It wasn't something I created, it was something I received.

And what of God? Most religions, whether they be polytheistic or monotheistic or atheistic, see this thing which we call God (or a god) as a person, thing, or cosmic force. Something single and unified. Christianity, to my knowledge, is the only religion that sees God as a relationship rather than a person. Certainly, given the shortcomings of our language, we refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as divine "persons," but remember that Christian doctrine also asserts that no divine person is distinct from any other in substance or being, and that they are together one God.

How can we make sense of this, then? Only if we assert the doctrine that the persons of the Trinity are hypostases or "substantial relations." Normally, given our language, we think of relations existing between two substances. But what we say about God is that in His persons the relations are the substance. That is, the identities of the persons in God are themselves relations.

According to Christian doctrine, one of these relations took on a human nature. If we believe that Christianity is true, and that, if true, it must conform to reason, we must see nothing inherently contradictory between human nature and divine nature since they both existed simultaneously and fully in the person of Jesus.

If that is the case, then maybe we would do well to think of ourselves more as 'relations' than 'substances.'

Returning to Brooks, if relationships are indeed the key to happiness, then "happiness" itself receives a profound definition. Happiness is a life lived in the manner of the divine being, that is, being in its highest form. If fullness of being is to be a relation, and Jesus Christ allows us access to that fullness, then it is in the act of self-giving love, and the receipt of that love that we are being most fully ourselves.

Happiness is being fully human; happiness is love. Full stop.

How Would Jesus Feel?

2009-05-06T11:48:00.001-04:00

I've recently been reading Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic and in my normal blog-perusal came across this interview of him by The Guardian. Here is the relevant excerpt that has me thinking:

"[The therapeutic culture is] characterised by a certain vacuity and diffidence. The institutions which were defenders of the second world, or second culture - I think cultures are world creations - have not offered the kind of defence or support that would have been more powerful than therapeutic forces. So Christianity becomes, therapeutically, 'Jesus is good for you.' I find this simply pathetic."
Are therapeutic cultural drives, then, what one might describe as hedonistic?
"Yes, many of them are pleasure driven. But they are not unintelligent. They may be pleasure driven but there's a limit to their stupidity. They don't act in a way that is blatantly destructive or self destructive. Nor do they ostentatiously deny the past. Christianity in America, for example, has in one sense never been stronger. But I don't believe that 'Jesus is good for you, Christ is good for you' is good Christianity. It's therapeutic Christianity. You can find therapeutic motifs in dozens of examples of Christianity around you today."
His own president, of course, is one such example.
"Oh, absolutely. And proud of it. And he's perfectly sincere. He is president and this is a prime example. I am not going to hammer away at this naive man's beliefs. The prey is too easy."

He is referring, of course, to President Bush, who was not above putting his faith to service in defense of a particular political program. Neither, I would add, is President Obama. I want to delve into this view of faith for a moment, though.

Let me take a moment to quickly outline what I (following Rieff) am referring to when I say "therapeutic culture." Therapeutic culture refers to the belief widespread in our society today that what matters most in life is "my happiness." That is, all forms of truth, all systems of power, all relationships between me and my fellow men, must be subservient to my desires. Atheism or agnosticism is the default religious position in such a culture, but having faith is certainly respectable provided it exists for the same ends of self-indulgence and self-enhancement. If I am a Christian, for example, it is because being a Christian "does me some good." Jesus makes me feel good, so I do what Jesus says. The implication is, of course, if Jesus ever made me feel bad, then I wouldn't do what he says anymore.

Listen to prominent preachers today (especially in America) and they will tell you to follow God, because, "He has your best interests at heart." Let Him run your life, because, "He will do a better job than you can do." Joel Osteen telling people to give alms so that God will make them rich, or Ted Haggard telling people that Christians have better sex (no, the irony here is not lost on me) are two prominent examples of therapeutic Christianity. It is the same force that leads to "church shopping" and finding a church that "fits" oneself. It hoists up the mantras of the Reformation like interpreting Scripture on one's own and the rejection of ecclesiastical hierarchy, without any of the discipline or theological seriousness that accompanied them in the first place. It lives and thrives in the mantra: "I'm spiritual, but not religious."

So what does this phenomenon mean for Christianity and culture? We are living in a time in which religious persons, particularly evangelicals and Catholics, are exceptionally active in the political process, weighing in on a variety of issues having to do with "moral values." Many of their political opponents fear that this attempt to express their values in the political process is a grab at social power. I would argue that insofar as these voters are therapeutic Christians, they have nothing to fear: these "values voters" are every bit as subservient to the dominant therapeutic culture as any social liberal.

Take abortion. When the issue first made itself known the culture was divided between those who thought that women ought to have final say over their bodies and those who thought that morality ought to constrain them from making certain immoral decisions. Today the issue is between those who think that women ought to have final say over their bodies and those who think that human babies ought to have the right to live even when their another person's womb. That is, the issue shifted from one of morality vs. individual rights to one of individual rights vs. individual rights. When the issue was first presented to the public, the pro-choice position was politically dominant. Today the pro-life position is gaining ascendancy, and shows every indication of becoming the politically dominant view when the next generation rises to power.

What I'm intending to show by this example is that Christianity was never the reason why abortion would eventually fall out of favor with this culture. Christianity, in fact, was in many ways stronger when the pro-choice position was more widespread and dominant. So why the flip? The success of the pro-life movement did not lay in the ability of Christians to politically manipulate their way into power to foist their theologies upon the nation as their opponents suppose, their success lay in their ability to make abortion antithetical to the dominant therapeutic culture. Rather than arguing that the immorality of abortion, instead they argue that it is "unhealthy" for women. Rather than arguing that we submit to nature's moral order, instead they argue that the unborn baby has "individual rights." The latter arguments resonate with the therapeutic culture which argues that the ultimate instances of human fullness lie in the expression of individual desire. How unfair it would be to not allow other people to experience that desire by cutting off their lives before their even able to do so just because they are unborn! How unfair would it be to allow this without their consent!

And so, abortion, framed in the context of individual rights, crumbles. Not because of Christianity, but because the therapeutic culture can't stomach it.

This is not so for the issue of homosexuality, which is why we see Christians and conservatives of all stripes tripping over themselves as they try to articulate arguments for its wrongness and for the 'sanctity of marriage.' In a culture where nothing is sacred except for individual desire, how can Christianity hope to stand against the gay rights movement? At least with abortion, the issue could be framed using the language of the dominant culture. The issues surrounding homosexuality offer no such recourse.

Listen to the arguments against gay marriage if you want a taste of what I'm talking about. Sociologists make claims that it would be 'bad for children' (that is, it would inhibit certain children from being able to succeed and express themselves as much as they would otherwise). Legal scholars make claims that it would lead to forcing Christians and other religious persons to abandon a tenet of their faith or risk censure or stripping of certain legal protections (that is, it would force people to choose between violating one of two things that make them feel good, and so inhibit their means of self-expression). Few, very few, make arguments about the natural order of things and the rightness or wrongness of certain types of behavior. These are the same types of people that argued against abortion before it became, in a certain way, fashionable to do so.

I bring this up because I think that the issues associated with homosexuality will draw a deep, bright line between orthodox Christians (those that believe Christianity because they believe it is true) and therapeutic Christians (those that believe Christianity because it makes them feel good). If Christianity is a means to an end and not a description of truth, then its doctrines can be changed to fit the culture to avoid having to choose between two things that make one feel good. However, if Christianity is true then one is going to have to make sacrifices whether those sacrifices be in one's lifestyle or in one's comfort in the dominant culture, in order to submit oneself to the authority of truth. It means following Jesus to the cross, not eating with him at supper and wandering off on the way to Gethsemane when no one is looking.

I don't have any predictions about what is to come. Perhaps the orthodox Christian Remnant will stay focused and hidden until a new culture friendlier to her doctrines arises in the West. Perhaps the sun is setting on the West and we must prepare ourselves for a new Dark Age. Or perhaps those made wise enough by God's grace to see where we are headed will find in their hearts and minds the new language we will need to irrefutably speak truth to power. I rest in Hope and Faith that in the end, God will triumph, but I also look around me and can't help but see a trying road ahead.

Same-Sex Compromise

2009-02-24T13:21:00.004-05:00

Blankenhorn and Rauch have put forth an effort at attaining some sort of compromise on the same-sex "marriage" issue. The substance is this: the federal government adopts legislation recognizing same-sex civil unions, and puts in place freedom of conscience barriers for those who disagree with the legislation, and only recognizes civil unions contracted in states that have similar conscience barriers.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. If the rancor over the recent vote on Proposition 8 in California is any indication, this debate is not about the actual rights and privileges (and responsibilities) attributed to married couples. In California same-sex couples have all of those, but they objected strongly (some might say in a bigoted manner) to any attempts to stop them from forcing other people to call what they have a "marriage" which is what Proposition 8 did. The debate is not over material rights or benefits, it is a clash of moral worldviews. In one view, sexual affection defines "marriage;" in another it serves primarily as a family foundation (both views hold mutual love and affection in high esteem, at least publicly). There can be no compromise in such a situation, because there cannot exist one over-arching view to which all must pay homage without someone feeling as though their point of view is marginalized. Anderson and Girgis make an attempt at compromise here, but I'm not certain theirs would be any more effective in the long run.

What people need to realize is that this is a debate about a word, and this word is terribly important, because it defines the character of the family which is the most fundamental unit of society. This debate asks, "What is marriage?" "What is a family?" That is, it asks fundamental questions about how to describe the way the world actually is and how it hangs together. This is a war between two alternative ways of viewing the world, and the two cannot compromise because they focus on one linguistic construct. "Marriage" cannot mean one thing for half of the population and another thing for the rest. In order for society to be whole, one will have to be adopted at the expense of the other, and even if there is some compromise in the beginning, eventually one view will completely supplant and destroy the other. Eventually those who hold the minority view will be isolated and estranged and gradually annihilated whether by proscription or by attrition, it matters not which way.

Of particular interest in this debate is the approach that each view takes towards the other. The conservative view on marriage makes room for "alternative lifestyles" because it understands one ideal as being ideal and the others as being in some degree of secondary importance. That is, the liberal view exists in a state of passive marginalization. Those on the liberal side of this issue not only disagree with the conservatives, but they believe that this entire way of approaching the issue is essentially immoral, that these "alternative lifestyles" are not alternative at all, and any attempt to classify them as such is inherently bigoted. Therefore, conservatives on this issue are not simply mistaken nor do they hold acceptable but wrong views, their entire paradigm in which they view family structures is inherently evil. There is no way that the conservative worldview can exist in a world in which this liberal view has risen to societal favor except in a state of active marginalization.

The motivation to attain a shared moral reality is incredibly strong, and this debate is not going to go away whether we ignore it or attain some sort of "compromise."

Goodness

2009-01-22T08:33:00.004-05:00

So I've come across a new book, not at all by accident, called Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics by Hans Reinders. The book is primarily a book about theology, both about friendship and about the questions of what it means to be human, and it reminded me of something that I've been thinking about for quite some time and might as well air here in the midst of my thoughts about the fall and redemption.

I haven't read Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and I mean to, but I have a feeling I'm going to agree with a good deal of what he had to say, because I deeply believe that our civilization has been dessicated by the disappearance of virtue about 40 years ago, and we're just starting to see the effects of it now.

I'll return to the book I opened with in a moment, but first I want to outline what I see as the problem. We've lost our desire to make people good. Instead we've been focusing our "rights." Granted, thinking about "rights" has certainly improved our lot institutionally speaking in a number of areas, particularly civil rights in the face of segregation and the right to life in the face of abortion and euthanasia. However, what we need to realize is that these were merely institutional changes, and the task of making men moral goes far beyond what the state can accomplish. In fact, it's lead to the erosion of other rights in its attempts to do so.

Now I will return to Reinders's book. He points out in the introduction the momentum that disabled-people's rights groups have gained through the nineties to the present in making people with disabilities equal in the eyes of the law. That is, their "rights" have been recognized and they have full citizenship. However, he notes that in spite of these successes, "they lack friends, which is the one kind of good that rights and justice claims cannot achieve."

He continues:

...that literature [based on "rights"] operates within the political sphere of emancipation, antidiscrimination, and issues of civil rights. It is successful [...] to the extent that it contributes to changes in public policy. While I think these efforts are important [...] I also think we should raise different questions, questions regarding our moral culture. I do not use that term to refer to morality in the narrow sense, as a system of mutual obligations that arise from institutional roles and responsibilities. Rather, I want to use "moral culture" as the domain constituted by the concept of the good that people pursue in their lives, both individually and collectively. [emphasis mine]

I think that in large part, the problems of our society are due to our being overly focused on that "morality in the narrow sense." We're concerned that our children are shirking community service, that our young people aren't giving enough of their time and treasure to the poor and the needy, that our fathers and mothers aren't protecting their children, and that our elderly are dying in pain or alone.

What is our answer to these problems?

"Why doesn't someone DO something about this? Make children do community service! Obligate donations to the poor! Mandate certain things be taught to children and certain parenting strategies!"

Nobody asks the right question:

"Based on the people I know, what can I do to help they and I become the best human beings we possibly can be? What can I do to craft my sons and daughters into good people? What can my community do to foster generous and loving spirits among its members so that no man or woman ever dies alone or in pain?"

Everyone is concerned with rights and obligations; no one is concerned with virtue and love. All we have left is works without faith, and they're nothing but filthy rags. Soon, we'll have no works.

What can we do? What can we change?

If you're asking that question, then you're missing the point.

What can I do? How can I make a difference?

Closer but not quite there yet.

What do I need to do to become a good person?

There you go. One step at a time.

More on this in the future.

Musings on the Fall Part I

2009-01-16T12:33:00.005-05:00

It has been months since I've written anything on this blog, so I suppose I'll use it to throw some disparate thoughts onto "paper" and see if they make anything approaching a coherent image.

I've been thinking about the Fall a lot lately, and about the Creation story and about Genesis. I've also been thinking about justification and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. I'm trying to make it make sense and it won't quite fit together neatly.

Let me begin where I am not. Sometimes I find it helpful to outline a theory about a phenomenon with which I don't agree and then poke holes in that theory and see if I can trace a figure from the spots I make.

One theory of the accounts of the Fall and of Redemption is the substitutionary atonement theory which is generally coupled with a literal interpretation of the Creation story in Genesis. This theory states that it was necessary for God to become human and receive our punishment in our place. That is, our punishment from the actions of the Fall.

According to this theory, the Fall took place in history, and involved the actions of two individual people. These people were given one command from God which they chose to disobey. They disobeyed by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The wages of their disobedience were as God said they would be, "If you eat of it, you will surely die."

And die they did.

Not only them, but also their progeny and all human beings since then. Even God died when He became human, except this time He rose again.

This theory is said to accomplish God's perfect judgment and perfect mercy. In the sacrifice of Himself, God was able to pour out His judgment against all humanity on Himself, and thereby show mercy towards the remainder of humanity.

It seems fairly straightforward, but I have difficulties with some parts of this.

First, I have difficulty with the notion that in order to save humanity, it was necessary that God become human. God is omnipotent and eternal and surely He could have any number of ways to deliver mankind from death. I agree with Aquinas when he says that it was not strictly necessary that God become human in order to save humanity, but that it was surely the most fitting way He could do so.

Second, the concept of the actions of one man having implications for the souls of all humanity prior to their existence grates against most conceptions of justice. Let's approach this philosophically. If there is a difference between form and matter (form being humanity itself, matter being the particular manifestation of the form in the instance; i.e. if I were divided into form and matter, my form would be "human" my matter would be what makes me "James"), then surely Adam was responsible for his human matter, not the human form. That is, we are each responsible for our particular expression of humanity, our story.

This difficulty vanishes when one ceases to read the story of Genesis literally however, because one could then read it as the repeating and continual human story, each man playing the part of Adam (which means "man," of course), and each woman playing the part of Eve.

This leads into my third difficulty. God said that if Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they would surely die. That is, He warned them of the natural consequences of the actions which they may be tempted to take. He never declared that they would die for their disobedience, He declared that they would die for the mere fact of having tasted the fruit. One could see the events of the garden not as a story of crime and punishment, but as a story of action and consequence. Having tasted the fruit of knowledge, now mankind must taste the dust of death. One could also read their expulsion from the Garden in the same way. Their innocence destroyed, man and woman must now toil for their livelihood and will some day bear the wages of their sin. They could have been like the angels, but instead they wished to be like God, and, wish as they did, Nature refused to bend and comply.

There are also interesting side tidbits to consider in light of this interpretation. What is the significance of Adam and Eve becoming aware of their nakedness? What is the significance of the mentioning of the Tree of Life?

I also believe that this interpretation of the story fits better with scientific facts known about the origin of species, but that ought to go without saying.

So what is this thing we call original sin? What did Christ accomplish on the cross? Why was He raised from the dead?

I think that's enough for now.

Dark Night From the Dawn

2008-08-29T01:55:00.001-04:00

Having passed through what St. John of the Cross termed a dark night of the soul, I've grown increasingly curious about them. I've been thinking about some of the questions that plagued me during those dark nights from here in the light of day.

For instance, why must human life contain that detestable thing known as 'decision'? Why must this abhorrent 'free will' plague us at every turn? Why have we been given the awesome and terrible capability to destroy entire worlds, entire selves, quite literally with a thought?

When I decided to live a Christian life, I gave something up. Something that I thought was precious and gave my life meaning--gave me my identity. By doing so I emptied the universe of the person I would have been had I chosen differently.

What is it about dark nights that make me pine to know what life would have been like if I had chosen differently? What is it about the fear of the darkness that makes me long for the comforts of tangible, if transient, transcendence?

But I gave it up. For Christianity. What is that worth?

Christianity is repulsive. An invisible God tells you to give up the things you want for something you can't understand. He demands that you remove from your life those things which most give it meaning and cast yourself into eternal nothingness with naught but the hope that His arms will be there to catch you.

And if He does catch you, He promises you no happiness, no beauty, no riches, no sexual fulfillment, no fame. In fact, He promises that you're going to undergo limitless suffering, and then He is going to kill you.

This is what I have chosen. But here's the funny thing: even with (actually, especially with) what I know today about the totality of all that I've done with my decision, given the same question now...

...I still choose the same thing.

And yet it makes me wonder. How many times must I face and reface these self-doubting questions before they are settled? How many times must I argue victoriously over my feelings about the rightness of the path I've chosen before they finally stand to reason? For how long must I suffer the wrath of thorns in the flesh until they cease to hold power over me? Who will deliver me from this body of death?

I still don't know the answers, but I know that my life is more full of joy and peace than it ever has been. And I know that I am loved.

There's more to this, but it will have to wait. Material dark night is upon us.

Curious

2008-08-22T11:12:00.002-04:00

Em points us to The Big Read on her blog. According to the NEA:

Less than half of the adult American population now reads literature. (In this survey, literature is defined as any novels, short stories, poetry, or drama, with no distinctions made for quality or length.)
The percentage of the U.S. adult population reading any book has declined by seven percent over the past decade.
Literary reading is declining among all age groups, but the steepest decline is in the youngest age groups.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about the decline of literary criticism and the perceived sociological importance of reading good literature. The trouble is that people don't see what benefit they can get from reading novels, so they emphasize it less in schools because it isn't "practical."

But that's because literature is so intrinsically human. Human beings tell stories. They bind communities and transfer knowledge better than any engineering class I know. They also teach us to think in symbols, which is something that is on an extremely rapid rate of decline. No one thinks deeply and reflectively anymore, because no one has been given the tools to do so, because those tools aren't "practical." When was the last time you sat down and spent two hours reading poetry? I know I haven't done that, but on some level I wish I would. I wish everyone would.

Em also includes a list of literature. As a severe bibliophile I absolutely must post the list...because clearly I need more book ideas:

1. Bold the books you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Star next to the books you're reading/have read some of.
5. Copy, paste and repeat.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne*
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding*
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Wow, my amazon.com wishlist just got SO much longer!

Read, people, read!

Making Connections

2008-08-21T09:55:00.005-04:00

Following up on the trouble with us, I may have finally figured out how current beliefs about sexual differences and sexual orientation can coexist in the same head.

Hasn't anyone found it odd that the same people that continually stress the sociological construction, fluidity, and superfluousness of sexual differences simultaneously obsessively declare that sexual orientation is fixed absolutely by physical realities in the human body? That which sex you decide you are; sorry, which "gender" you decide you are completely supercedes the authority of biological reality, but you have absolutely no say in the matter of which sex will fulfill your erotic fantasies?

Maybe it's this obsession with spiritual over corporeal existence that we all seem to silently assent to. Notice that sexual orientation begins with "I." The only way to determine whether or not someone is gay is to ask him or her, you can't simply look at someone and conclude with 100% certainty that he or she or ze or whatever is gay (well, sometimes the identity of the individual expressed in various mannerisms or clothing choices gives it away, but it still begins with the statement "I am gay"). So it is fundamentally an issue of personal identity which is discovered through the interpretation of feelings and emotions (which come from outside of the "I," but are assumed into it), not an assignment on biological grounds. Thus it would be a matter of personal responsibility if one passes judgment over one's experience one way rather than another, particularly if one acknowledged the way assuming an identity and making decisions accordingly led to the strengthening or weakening of that identity (think Kandel's neural plasticity experiments). One can neatly get around this responsibility if one simply concludes that sexual orientation is predetermined and fixed and then builds one's ethical reality around that "fact."

Sexual differences are different, because the assent to the reality of predetermined difference in this case would have the opposite ethical requirements compared to sexual orientation. If one concludes that sexual differences are biologically determined and fixed, then one is forced to build one's ethical reality on something outside of the "I." That is, sex is not fundamentally based on the assumption of an identity. By creating "gender," postmoderns have detached sexual differences from sex, and thus given individuals a way to assume whatever identity they wish based solely again on the interpretation of feelings and emotions ("I may be in a male body, but since I feel like a woman, I must really be a woman").

So the apparent connection between these two otherwise incongruent ways of thinking is in their ultimate effect: the separation of "self" from one's biological givens. The assumption of a spiritual "I" completely detached from corporeal reality, which then uses the body as a tool to follow the whims of the identity which the individual has assumed. Thus an individual is no longer "tied down" by material givens and can acquire a more "spiritual" existence.

The trouble is, I don't see this as making someone more free. The entire ethical purpose of this way of thinking is to avoid the responsibility inherent in free choice. By wiping out free will and making one's identity subject to something as ineffable and transitory as feelings and emotions, one is wiping out oneself. Individuality can only be acquired through the acknowledgement of the constraints placed upon us by material reality, and plotting a story through the pathways that are given to us from the outside. Our authorship of self is only possible as a joint venture, because stories are only stories because they are intelligible. By making a spiritual "I" the ultimate determiner of who I am, I become a bundle of unintelligible desires rather than a human being.

There is no possibility for eternal life, because there is nothing really there.

"I'm spiritual, but not religious."

Side Comment

2008-05-23T12:08:00.000-04:00

The internet is a dangerous place. Search too thoroughly for tech information in forums online and you come across postings on threads with signatures like this one:

"Ever since my experience points went into triple digits, I've had to keep the ladies and valkyries away with a +3 two handed broadsword. "

Welcome to Western Civilization version 2.0.

Not Loving One's Enemies

2008-04-18T12:36:00.004-04:00

I know I'm a bit late weighing in on Barack Obama's "cling" controversy, but I'm interested in it for a reason other than the conventional one. I'm interested in what it says about human morality.

Now, Senator Obama was speaking at an event for a number of affluent leftists in San Francisco and he was trying to "explain" why individuals in different circumstances have different moral and policy preferences. He was in a moral "ingroup." A place where he feels safe to express his opinions because he knows that there is significant if not total moral overlap between him and his audience. He is confident, because the way we obtain relative certainty about our moral judgments (which have no objective scientific standard) is through communal affirmation and assent.

The problem arises when an individual has moral preferences that are other than your own, and you are motivated to not judge that person. Obama was describing individuals that vote Republican, and presumably would vote for his opponent in an election, and was attempting to describe their moral networks in a way where there could plausibly be overlap with his and his audience's, while simultaneously, in this way, dismissing their importance. By doing this, he was able to avoid judgment, i.e. real engagement and respect for the free will and humanity of the persons whose worldviews he rejects.

This was also evident in his attempts to explain the views of one Rev. Jeremiah Wright with whom he presumably disagreed on a number of things, and with whom a substantial majority of the American voting population also disagrees. He tried to describe Wright's moral network in a way that any other American could presumably identify with it, or, at the very least, explain it away, as he did with the moral worldviews of the Pennsylvanian working class. In doing so, he treated Wright as less than human.

This again confirms my hypothesis that when we encounter moral worldviews with which we do not agree, if we are motivated to avoid judging the person with whom we disagree, we will attempt to describe his worldview in such a way that it becomes plausible to us were we to share in his personal experience. By doing so, we can both avoid judgment, and dismiss the opposing worldview as illegitimate. Only legitimate worldviews require engagement and either moral approval or disapproval. Only those arrived at by rational free human beings call for judgment.

In this Obama shows himself to be a product of our age. Someone so committed to avoiding the inconvenience of serious engagement with opposing worldviews, that he would stoop to the delegitimization of them and thus simultaneously dismiss the free will and the humanity of those that hold them. Whatever this is, it is not love.

But what we need to understand is that we all do this. Think of the people who tied themselves into knots trying to avoid sounding judgmental about Jeremiah Wright's comments. Think of all the excuses they made for him.

"Oh, he only believes that because of "x". If he had my experience, if he thought more like the way I do, he would be more like me. That poor confused man; a shame he doesn't get it like I do."

Why do this? Because judging opens you to judgment. Those who looked at Wright as a human being, rather than as sociological spawn, declared unequivocally that Wright's comments were wrong. That his worldview is wrong. That as a human being he has the responsibility of judging rightly, and his judgment is the wrong one.

I can already hear the fanatical accusations of racism.

Take this a step further, to a place of physical as well as verbal violence. We are in an ideological war with an alien civilization bent on submitting the West to its will. The West, fraught with guilt and self-hatred for wrongs committed and judged in the past, is horrified of being open once again to judgment: horrified by thoughts of freedom and responsibility. So what do we do? We describe the moral networks of Islamist terrorists in a way that makes them plausible to our own worldviews, and thus allows us to dismiss their claim to status as human actors. We hide from judgment by refusing to judge.

We think to ourselves, "No human being could possibly believe what these people believe. Therefore, there is no way that they could have arrived at this worldview freely. They must be constrained in some way, otherwise they would think exactly the way I do."

And so we debase them. We lower their standard. We treat them like children or worse, like animals. We claim that these grown men just don't know any better, and that these grown women aren't able to decide for themselves. We refuse to recognize their humanity by refusing to recognize their freedom and responsibility.

We have taken Christ's injunction to "Judge not!" and removed it from the One who declared it. Only under the final judgment of God through Jesus Christ can we live harmoniously in a community without judgment. We have usurped the judgment of Christ with our own judgment and declared the injunction ourselves in His place.

And we do this at our own peril, because by refusing to love our enemies, we offer them justification for murder. If they are no more than beasts, then we can't expect any better of them. So is the trial of our times.

Conflicted

2008-04-17T09:56:00.003-04:00

While I consider myself well onto the "evolution" side of the evolution-intelligent design debate, I must say that I'm very tempted to see this if only to have the opportunity to catch a glimpse of Richard Dawkins sputtering in frustration in an unfruitful attempt to make any of his philosophical views make sense.

I absolutely love stories like these...

2008-03-31T11:27:00.002-04:00

Two scientists are suing a pan-European research organization to stop them from turning on a proton collider because it could destroy the universe.

My favorite line:

"There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”"

Ah, sarcasm.

Knowing

2008-02-29T23:51:00.000-05:00

I know I know what I ought to know,
And I know what my knowings ought
To in my life make known by knowing.
But no; not from my knowings known.

If No Thing in my life is not known
By knowing, and knowing my knowings are
Not things to know without that ought to be
Known, then no, I know no knowings.

I know the knowings to know
Are known in one way to know:
No one you know ought not know
That you know your knowings.

So to know you know your knowings
Your knowings must no one not know
You know. For you know,
If you know No Thing, they’ll know.

Thinking and its discontents

2008-02-29T11:25:00.008-05:00

"Every man is by nature designed to become a thinker--honor and praise to the God who created man in his own image! God cannot be held responsible if habit, and routine, and want of passion, ruin most men, so that they become thoughtless."

-Søren Kierkegaard

I agree with this, but I'm starting to doubt myself here. I mean, obviously there was never a time when every man was a thinker, but wasn't there at least a time when people thought it was good to be one? Am I wrong? I've only been around for a couple of decades so I don't know.

I think that much of what is said here is true. The average person is getting dumber. The average attention span is getting shorter. And people are proud of their idiocy.

Perhaps more depressing is what the academics are doing about it. Here's an excerpt from the inaugural address of the new president of Harvard University, Drew Faust:

"The “Veritas” in Harvard’s shield was originally intended to invoke the absolutes of divine revelation, the unassailable verities of Puritan religion. We understand it quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a possession. Yet in this we – and all universities defined by the spirit of debate and free inquiry – challenge and even threaten those who would embrace unquestioned certainties. We must commit ourselves to the uncomfortable position of doubt, to the humility of always believing there is more to know, more to teach, more to understand."

Embrace unquestioned certainties? Such as the certainty that we are capable of no qualified certainty? Why should anyone want to learn anything if nothing is worth knowing? If, when you are taught something, it comes with the warning label "Caution: statement should not be ingested while credulous"? What is the goal of such a teaching project?

Take what Professor Mark Taylor wrote in the New York Times:

"For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed."

Fantastic. A tenured professor stating (with no small degree of certainty I might add) that the purpose of education is to sow confusion and uncertainty. Strange how often I see this uncertainty evaporate among academics when the subject of Intelligent Design comes up. Shouldn't we maintain uncertainty around the origins of man? Wouldn't our rejection of Intelligent Design as a legitimate theory be akin to the Church's rejection of Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system? Isn't this just another example of the personal prejudices which we harbor against a new strand of science because of our unfortunate human proclivity for dogmatism?

Of course not. The po-mos have turned human learning on its head (and don't think for a second that it's only left-wing postmoderns that are doing this...note the example I used). They've ignored the way that the human mind actually operates. It is our love of understanding which causes us to doubt old ways of viewing the world when a new understanding is a more convincing representation of that which we believe to be our genuine experience. It is this same love which causes us to doubt new ways of understanding when they fall short of the old. It's not the inhuman dogmatism of objectivism, but nor is it the useless relativism of postmodernism. We learn, we strive, we fall short, we correct, and we teach so that our children may do the same.

Instead we've been subjecting our future to a relentless onslaught of sophomoric stupidity which teaches nothing but hatred of self-transcendence through learning and leads to hedonistic solipsism. "I'm sorry, but we have no answers for you. Why don't you just go and have a good time?"

So instead of being taught to learn from engaging with our families, with our friends, with our communities, with our nation, with the world, with our God, we've been taught that that leads only to violence, guilt, and hatred. We have lost our drive for understanding why, and more importantly we've lost our will to teach it to our children.

In short, we've lost our hope.

I'm not discouraged, though. I'm fairly convinced that we're on the verge of a new intellectual movement, one which is going to shake this entire attitude to its foundations. It is not one which rests its hope in future scientific certainty, but nor is it one which rests it comfortably in doubt. It's going to be a movement which doesn't let our hope rest at all. A movement which recalls that we are human, no more and no less.

Maybe we have learned something. Here's hoping.

Thoughts on Communion (the Edible Kind)

2008-02-15T13:05:00.003-05:00

What do we mean when we say that the bread and the wine used in Holy Communion are the body and blood of Jesus Christ? What is the 'real presence' of Christ in the Eucharist?

I think we can make better sense of it when we think about it in terms of that other thing that we can't quite make sense of: creation. Philosophy only allows us to describe how things are in the universe. For this reason it is utterly useless in perfectly accounting for what "creation" is since it occurs necessarily "before" existence (notice how it's impossible to even properly say what I mean here), and reasoning presupposes existence. Thus, reasoning about "creation" in any philosophically objective or empirical way is really quite meaningless (note: I'm talking about the 'why' here, not the 'how'; the philosophy not the science).

This can help us understand then, that the Eucharist is the experience of the risen Christ of the "after" in the present, in the same way as there was a "before" creation. The celebration of the Holy Communion and the consecration process by divine grace cause the elements of the communion to be overthrown (yet retaining their material character so as to be edible) and take on the properties of eternity so that eternity is present in the Eucharist. That is to say, Christ is present in the Eucharist. And Christ magnificently is by this then present to us in history, just as God became present to us once before through the Incarnation.

Let's take this further. All things in the redeemed "after" world are in perfect communion with God, and since God became human, communication with Him is necessarily communication with a body. So when we say that we are in communion with Him through the Eucharist, we are in communion with Him bodily. The body and blood of Christ.

I think, then, that the “point” of the celebration of Holy Communion is to be partakers of this “after, not yet” which is inexplicable in philosophical terms in a strictly Aristotelian sense. The question is how is it fitting that we can partake of this future in the present without ceasing to be ourselves, i.e. ceasing to be in history? Yes, it's due to the fact that the bread and wine retain their material properties and are thus consumable, but why bread and wine? Hold this thought to the side for a moment.

Begin now from the perspective of humanity. What does it mean to be human in relation to God? Before Christ, we were completely incapable of “loving” God qua God (how can you say you love something when you don't really "know" what it is?), so the truest expression of our affection for Him must necessarily then have been the love of creation as creation, i.e. the love of Creatures to the glory of the Creator.

Which human activity is the truest expression of this? I think that the "feast" and the "festival" are the truest expressions of this love, because they delight in creation in the most human way by doing so with all the five senses (the ways in which human beings experience creation), and by doing so in community (the way in which human beings experience creation truly).

Return to the original thought. How can God come to us? Can we see how these two lines are consummated in Holy Communion? He has ordered creation so that we can partake of the Divine in that celebration of divinity and yet remain human, i.e. in history. Christ’s risen body must come to us in the form of food and drink because food and drink are (1) wholly consumable by us, becoming part of us, literally, and (2) the object of the fullest expression of love for the creator. In this unique action, we are actually able to love (really love, now, since Christ has revealed God to us) the creator by loving His creation at the same time! Our humanity is fulfilled!

So in the bread and wine of the Eucharist we partake of all that is human and all that is divine of our Lord Jesus Christ by being in perfect communication with His body and blood. We are in perfect communion with all congregations of Christians past and present and most importantly with God through Jesus Christ. We are swept up into the Trinity for one unfathomable moment and become fully ourselves--the ones whom God created us to be.

Think about that the next time you masticate that little wafer. I think it's pretty darn cool.

Milk and Meat

2008-02-04T10:15:00.001-05:00

Someone over at Mere Comments posted something on the same subject that I wrote on earlier about the differences between the churches, this one focusing more on those which have grown content with milk and won't grow up and switch to meat for various reasons.

For those who might have a similar story, I actually made the switch from a casual, "non-denominational" church to a heavily-liturgical Episcopal church for this very reason. I just didn't feel challenged to grow at the former place, i.e. I didn't feel like every mass was a call to a higher plane of existence which is something that I feel should be inherent to every truly Christian church.

Now I do want to say one thing, and that is that I don't think the worship "style" necessarily has anything to do with it in general, but it did necessarily have something to do with it for me. I think it is quite possible that a person could leave a heavily liturgical church which offers no connection between God and community for a more relaxed contemporary church for the same reasons that I made the opposite trek: because the latter church challenges them to be better human beings; it shows the cross prominently before them. It forces Christianity upon them.

I should also say that I've come to believe that every church needs some sort of liturgy, and given that conclusion, for the sake of unity, they should all have liturgies which say the same thing (even if they use different words and actions to do it). But that's a different argument altogether.

This is not an easy topic to wrestle with, which is why I should probably be happy that we have bigger fish to fry in our generation.

*Sigh*

Po-Mos in Academia

2008-02-01T12:22:00.000-05:00

This post by Rusty Reno on the First Things blog is brilliant on so many levels.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

2008-01-24T13:55:00.000-05:00

That's the name that this article gives to modern American Christianity, and I'm inclined to agree. It's an old article, but Rod Dreher referred to it in a post today, with which I am also inclined to agree.

It reminds me of a number of conversations I've had with many people on the subject of denominations, particularly when I decided to join one (I used to be a Moralistic Therapeutic Deist). Some of them went like this:

Me: "What denomination is your church?"

Young Person: "We're non-denominational. We accept people of all denominations in our church."

Me: "Do you have a liturgy?"

YP: "No."

Me: "Do you baptize infants?"

YP: "No."

Me: "Do you take communion regularly?"

YP: "No."

Me: "Well you just alienated about 98% of Christendom right there."

Now don't get me wrong, I love the fact that every church has its own particular personality (even within denominational lines) and that we've all attained this Type B attitude towards relationship with churches that worship differently, but I have two caveats:

1.) We need to take theology seriously. There are theological arguments for and against infant baptism, for example, and if your church practices it or doesn't practice it, the congregation of the church ought to know why. Also, they shouldn't go around pretending that everything that they do ought to be perfectly acceptable to everyone else if they can just "get past the labels." Which brings me to point number...

2.) Each church community needs to be honest about who they are. We are the body of Christ, our members are going to be different from one another, and we need to be ok with that. But rather than smear over the differences in doctrine and expression with clapping and smiles, we need to be honest about how Christianity expresses itself in our part of the body, and how that makes us different from other Christian churches. As C.S. Lewis wrote to one of his friends after she went from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church, "I believe that, in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes." Our churches don't need to each be all things to all people; that's why God blessed us with a varied body!

So please, when someone asks you to describe the type of church you go to (or asks the draconian 'denomination question'), in your response don't pretend that your church is "just Christian." There's no such thing.

Hate and Politics

2008-01-18T12:21:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting piece from Arthur Brooks in the WSJ yesterday.

Apparently his thesis is that far from being the pols of open-mindedness and tolerance, liberals actually are guilty of equal or worse hatred of conservatives than the righties are of the lefties. He writes:

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

The numbers referring to liberals' feelings towards the current president and vice president vis-à-vis conservatives' feelings towards the previous presidential pair are even more revealing:

Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

[...]

In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

There are two plausible explanations for these differences that I'm willing to entertain. First, I will say that the animosity that liberals have towards Bush and Cheney can be somewhat explained by the comparatively huge helping of major policy that has been enacted under the current administration versus the previous one. Sure, conservatives think that Clinton was an immoral man and an awful president, but, with the exception of his disastrous foreign policy which essentially ignored the terrorist threat, he didn't really enact any liberal legislation which has had long-term staying power (his greatest legacies are probably taxes--reversed by Bush--and welfare reform and NAFTA--two conservative policies). Bush on the other hand, armed with a Republican congress, has put through a number of policies which will be with us for years to come (not least of which is the Iraq War).

That said, I'm not terribly surprised that liberals dislike conservatives. This brings me to my second point of explanation. I find this paragraph from Brooks' column the most helpful in illustrating it:

Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

If we return to the studies done by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia, we will remember that there were two primary points of morality which conservatives and liberals both rate as highly important. Three other points of morality were rated as having importance by conservatives only, not liberals. So the morality endorsed by liberals can be described as a "subset" of sorts compared to that endorsed by conservatives.

It can only be assumed, then, that at least conservatives (sharing sympathies with liberals, but dividing them between those and other sympathies) can see and acknowledge where liberals are coming from. Liberals are unable to do the same on behalf of conservatives. They are completely unable to explain their voting patterns and behavior unless--and this largely leads into my own theories of moral judgment--they can be judged as evil.

Human beings expect other human beings to act in a particular "human" way. When the normal schemata of "human" (read "moral") behavior are violated by a particular individual's behavior, the observer's brain reacts by attempting to find an explanation for the behavior (evolutionarily speaking, most likely in order to better plan for the behavior again in the future to succeed better in responding to it). It can then adapt or judge. If the observer is in a position in which he is willing to learn or has a particular fondness for the actor, or if the behavior can be attributed to situational factors, he will engage in moral learning. Otherwise, he will judge.

If no explanation can be found in either an understanding of what a human being is, or in external environmental triggers that are controlling in the particular situation, the human is judged to be acting in a manner that is "less than human" or in an evil or bad way. Since liberals are unable to explain the voting patterns of conservatives in terms of sympathies which they are unable to grasp, and they are not typically predisposed to liking the person with whom they disagree, they turn either to external stimuli ("You only vote that way because your parents vote that way") or to moral judgment ("You vote that way and pursue those policies because you are evil and must be stopped") to explain conservative policy initiatives.

These are just some theories floating around in my brain, and I haven't tested them in any way, but they seem plausible enough to me. Obviously, in dealing with the political world, it is important to remember that the American electorate can be best represented by a bell curve with extreme liberals and conservatives accounting for only a fraction of the whole population on either side of the aisle. In other words, most people are moderates, so we shouldn't assume this little psychological indictment applies to all people who disagree with us.

That said, while there are bigots on both sides of the aisle, this piece and other research does seem to suggest that they may be a bit more extreme on the Left than they are on the Right; at least in the current American political scene.

Not quite Christmas yet, but I couldn't resist...

2007-12-23T14:20:00.001-05:00

Nature human, good created
By Word and Spirit, Father made.
But death's conclusion was instated,
When fruit consumed by Serpent's bade.

No more to live, but born to die;
For this was Man by Father made?
Yet Law once giv'n exposed this lie
Death's naught but sinner's wages paid.

So Truth revealed, but profit none
Could from this truth by Man be made.
But Prophets spake about a Son
By whose death, Death's sting be staid.

Could this be that Rock of Ages
In stable lain by Virgin maid,
By whose consent Hope once more rages
Against the storm of Satan's raid?

To Thee, sweet Jesus, do all hearts bow
By Whom all heav'n and earth were made
Thy tiny hands and perfect brow
By those same hearts pierced and betrayed.

And so rejected King of kings,
Against whom all Men's sins are made,
We praise thee babe whom heaven brings
For through Thy death, all sin's unmade.

So nature human, reconciled;
In Jesus all perfection made.
Love, thanks to that baseborn child
Whom Mary in the manger laid.

Random Thoughts...

2007-12-06T11:07:00.000-05:00

One thing is universally agreed upon across all faiths and all traditions: we are a broken people living in a broken world. The disagreement lies in the means of solving that problem. One possible solution is to pretend that there is no problem; that this immutable sense of right and wrong, good and evil, is merely an aberration and the world is truly cast in one uniform shade of grey. Another possible solution is to brutally punish those offenders which transgress and tarnish our communal reality. The final solution is to erase evil from the face of the earth by bringing creation into communion with the Creator. The first is suicide; the second is murder; the third is Christ. The first was the rule of conscience before the flood, the second was the rule of the Law before Christ, and the last is the Gospel.

Truth rests on the edge of a knife; we need to be constantly vigilant not to slip into either the former (read: liberal) or latter (read: conservative) falsehood.

A word about words

2007-10-14T19:32:00.000-04:00

All of the turmoil in the Anglican Communion over gay and lesbian clergy and same-sex blessings has brought one of my many pet peeves to the fore: the use of the word 'gender' as a replacement for the word 'sex.'

Many writers on the subject of the travails seem to think it necessary to refer to "same-gender unions" and "same-gender blessings;" some know full well what they're accomplishing by doing that, others may be unaware but nevertheless complicit in the linguistic usurpation.

The word "sex" denotes a biological categorization which is dichotomous by necessity: one is either male or female. The word "gender" refers to whether a thing, living or non-living, exhibits masculine or feminine characteristics. The sexes are mutually exclusive; genders are not. It is also worth noting that in most languages outside of English, things have genders as well (perhaps speaking French would aid in understanding the distinction).

I think the concerted effort by those of a more liberal bent, and their media co-operates, is to replace the idea of "sex" with the idea of "gender" in order to diminish the importance of "sex." This had much to do with feminism, which was an attempt to distinguish womanhood from femininity, so that women would be free to pursue lives and careers which most viewed as "masculine" in spite of their female sex. That is, the gender of the individuals became superior to their sex. Rather than attempting to find ways to integrate the feminine gender with a generally masculine working world and point to their benefits, women both adopted a masculine attitude (shunning their more feminine traits) and convinced society that this gender was independent of and more important than their female sex. Ironically, in the attempt to elevate women, feminism destroyed femininity.

That isn't to say feminism is all bad; far from it. In a lot of ways, "sex" needed to be put in its place; it was popularly viewed as too much of a controlling factor. However, movements may have unintended consequences, as do the way that they use words and convince society to use words. By making "gender" prominent, many have come to believe that "sex" doesn't matter. This is most apparent when someone who has moral difficulty with condoning a transsexual (notice how most would say "transgendered" here) sex change operation attempts to make the case against a friend's seeking one. The subjugation of sex, that is the subjugation of the body in favor of some "true self" which supposedly supercedes it, has led us as a society to begin to view the body as merely a means to an end. It has nothing to do with who we are, only with what we happen to want to do at any given time (in which case it can be either an impediment or an asset). When adopting the language of "gender" and the "true self" as superior to "sex" and the reality of the body, this person may find it very difficult to argue with a man who is convinced that his "real self" is a woman and explain why he should not have a sex change operation (it's hard to argue against Gnosticism when you begin by agreeing with the Gnostics by saying that the spiritual is necessarily better than the material).

Now before I end, I want also to say that "sex" shouldn't be controlling here either. Only that it needs to be elevated higher than our culture currently does. Our bodies are not means to an end, but a part of who we are. The gender of our personality traits are important too, but they alone aren't who we are. Who we are takes into account everything about ourselves from the material to the biological to the environmental to the social to the spiritual. We are complex beings and whenever one aspect of our self seeks to overthrow another, we should tread very carefully before proceeding.

But please, if you mean "sex" don't say "gender."

Philip Jenkins on Africans

2007-10-12T12:50:00.001-04:00

Philip Jenkins, whom I regard as the West's foremost scholar on Christianity in the Global South, had a piece this week in The New Republic regarding Africans and their trouble with homosexuality. The article is behind a firewall, but here is a relevant excerpt:

"Why, then, did opposition to gay rights become so critical for many African Christians? The answer has a lot to do with the rapid spread of Christianity on the continent in a relatively short time. In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians, representing around 10 percent of the population. By 2000, that figure had grown to 360 million, or 46 percent. As a result, most African Christians today are first- or second-generation members of the faith, and many are adult converts. Sociologists generally agree that newer religious groups tend to have more literal approaches to scripture. In practice, of course, literalism still leaves plenty of room for debate and interpretation; but, when the Bible specifically condemns a particular sin — and same-sex interaction is repeatedly denounced in both the Old and New Testaments — that makes it difficult for literalists to find wiggle room.

In other ways, too, the rapid expansion of Christianity has conditioned African views on homosexuality. African churches exist in a ferociously competitive environment, one where traditional groups — like Anglicans and Catholics — must fight to maintain their market share against newer Pentecostal denominations, with their enticing promises of miracles and healings. The last thing the older churches need is a suggestion that their commitment to scriptural truth is anything less than absolute or that they are any less rigorous than their rivals in condemning sin.

The other key rival — and another factor shaping moral attitudes — is Islam. Over the past century, African Christianity has grown much more rapidly than Islam, a fact that puzzles and infuriates Muslims who regard the continent as naturally theirs. In 1900, for instance, Christians accounted for just 1 percent of the people of what would become the state of Nigeria; Muslims made up 26 percent. By 1970, however, the religions had achieved parity, each having around 45 percent of the population. And some recent polls suggest that, today, the nation has a Christian plurality. Against this background of rivalry and potential violence, Christians cannot be seen to concede anything to Muslims in terms of their commitment to strict morality.

In the region later known as Uganda, Christianity first arrived in the 1870s, when the area was already under Muslim influence and a hunting ground for Arab slave-raiders. The king of Buganda had adopted Arab customs of pederasty, and he expected the young men of his court to submit to his demands. But a growing number of Christian courtiers and pages refused to participate, despite his threats, and an enraged king launched a persecution that resulted in hundreds of martyrdoms: On a single day, some 30 Bugandans were burned alive. Yet the area's churches flourished, and, eventually, the British expelled the Arab slavers. That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism — both symbolized by sexual deviance. Reinforcing such memories are more recent experiences with Muslim tyrants, such as Idi Amin, whose victims included the head of his country's Anglican Church. For many Africans, then, sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive."

While I probably wouldn't be too quick to try to psychoanalyze the African Christians to discover why they're so hung up on sexual morality (I'm waiting for an African scholar to hypothesize why Westerners are so hung up on personal sexual gratification), I think this a very insightful piece. It also mentions Islam which everyone forgets is a huge factor in everything that happens in the region.

Some Afternoon McCabe

2007-10-02T16:26:00.000-04:00

He's speaking specifically about being a part of the Dominican Order, but I think reading this would be helpful to anyone considering a call to one form of religious life or another:

"There are no boundaries to the Church, she is just the human race, but there are boundaries to our community: we are for some people and not for others, there are some good things, some human things, some Christian things, we do not have; we are just one way of being Christian. It has always been essential to our sanity that we should be jealous of our own traditions but not be envious of others. It is only in those moments when we lose our jealousy for the special mystery that is ours, when we neglect our own life-story, that we start imagining we are imitation Benedictines or Jesuits or social workers or charismatic groups. And to do this is to lose touch with the life-giving depths, the mystery, in our own tradition and to gain nothing of importance in exchange. It takes a real Benedictine to draw life from that monastic mystery; our only source of living water is our own tradition. Although our life is not, as such, a sacrament, nevertheless it is an engagement in mystery because although it is only one way of being Christian, it is the whole way of being Christian for us: it is everything to us even if it is not everything to the Church."

This strikes me as correct

2007-09-28T11:00:00.001-04:00

Rod Dreher points out that businessmen are usually only conservative fiscally, and tend to be socially progressive. This is because, he says, everything to them is based on the "bottom line," and they don't tend to think too deeply about higher matters or broader purposes. They're Republican insofar as they don't like taxes or regulation on their businesses, but they couldn't care less how society is ordered so long as they have the means to defend their property. They just want to be left alone.

This is where I find most libertarians (and many liberals who emphasize their social liberalism) are. What I find interesting is that these people tend to be quite well off monetarily speaking, but they take it for granted. They don't recognize that their wealth and comfort is dependent upon having a well-ordered, interdependent society. If word that the government will collapsed tomorrow reached their ears, they'd say, "Who cares? I have my money, my house, and a gun to defend it with. The only thing I'd lose are those pesky taxes. Good riddance I say. I'd be better off."

They are content to remove themselves from the big picture so long as the money keeps coming in and they feel themselves secure. Gays want to marry? Let them; I don't care. Someone wants an abortion? I certainly wouldn't condone it myself, but who am I to stop them? Just let me buy and sell freely and I'm happy to do my own thing. My business is my own, and theirs is their own. I want no part of it. Their problems don't concern me.

There's a profound disconnectedness betrayed here. Where is love? I don't mean the "compassion" that liberals always ask for when what they really want is contempt: "I want to do my thing; you have no right to be bothered by it!" "Leave me alone; stop caring about what I do!" "If you really loved me, you'd see that what I want is best for me!"

But that's what real love does, and why it's so hated by our individualistic society. Love actually does give a damn how other people live their lives because it gives a damn about other people. Evil action diminishes the humanity of the actor, and we should grieve for the sins of our brothers and sisters as much as we grieve for our own. Real love wants the people around us to grow and flourish and connect with one another. We're not meant to be islands unto ourselves--going through life thinking only about Number One trying not to step on toes lest our toes be trampled--but that seems to be where we're headed. We're absolutely terrified that we might suddenly find ourselves at the mercy of the love of another human being.

Love makes people uncomfortable. No wonder we killed it.

Ahmadenijad at Columbia

2007-09-27T09:52:00.000-04:00

I haven't talked about this at all, because I think I might be in a minority opinion here. I still think that Columbia should have refused the Iranian egomaniac an audience, and I found Bollinger's diatribe against him at his introduction to be more of an exercise in self-congratulation for one's moral superiority than an actual heartfelt appeal to cosmic justice in the face of a tyrant.

As for the issues of "free speech" and whether or not allowing Ahmadenijad to speak accomplished anything, I defer to Ross Douthat.

Regarding the wisdom of the whole ordeal, I turn to an old speech by William F. Buckley regarding a contemporary visit by the head of the Communist Party in America to Yale University in 1963. Here's an excerpt:

"What will you do when Gus Hall, the human being, comes here to defend the cause of what you know ahead of time to be the cause of organized inhumanity? Will you show that "shudder of polite disgust"? ... Is it not likely that among those of you who applaud there will be those who are in fact applauding their own courage in applauding a real live apologist for human atrocity? ... Fight him, fight the tyrants everywhere; but do not ask them to your quarters, merely to spit upon them: and do not ask them to your quarters if you cannot spit upon them: to do the one is to ambush a human being as one might a rabid dog; to do the other is to ambush oneself, to force oneself — in disregard of those who have died trying to make the point — to force oneself to break faith with humanity."

The whole ordeal strikes me as colossally dumb and sophomoric.

Moral Psychology

2007-09-21T11:57:00.001-04:00

While attempting to avoid talk about what's happening down in New Orleans today, I've come across a good deal of chatter on the internet regarding a recent article citing the ideas of Jonathan Haidt in the Times. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I'm very much interested in what folks like he, Joshua Greene at Harvard, Paul Bloom at Yale, and David Pizzaro at Cornell are researching.

Most of these academics come to this subject from a different academic area or are primarily interested in something else with a side interest in it (with the probable exception of Pizarro). Despite this, I think it may be one of the most important subjects of study in academia today eventually affecting how we choose to organize ourselves as a society what we collectively mean when we say 'good.' Ross Douthat had some interesting comments on it today, and he quotes a number of others so I figured I'd link to him. He's more skeptical of the picture that Haidt is painting than I am, but I can see where he's coming from with some of objections (although I think he exaggerates the blame due for the injustices of the conformism of the 1950s and is incorrect regarding where this blame ought to be placed).

The problem I have with most of this research is that it too often comes from the following perspective: if we can just figure out where our moral impulses come from, then we can belittle those with which we do not agree (here I have to unequivocally disagree with Douthat, as I see the rise of "contractualism," as Haidt calls it, leading to a utilitarian justification of moral decision making--that is, a sort of "ends justification" which quite bizarrely demands statistics and data for the defense of a moral position--something I've blogged about in the past). It never seems to flow from the notion that through this research we may be able to (1) understand more perfectly what that which Aristotle called 'the good life' really is and (2) we may be able to determine which of these moral axioms are inherent to all humanity and thus provide us with a position from which we can more successfully and peacefully dialogue with other cultures. These are just two examples, but the point I'm trying to make is that those who are conducting the research are too monolithic in their belief systems (although Haidt as I understand it is more moderate than the others, and Bloom is generally more open to discussing the subject from the viewpoint of different disciplines), and this can preclude them from taking their subject (morality) seriously in a certain sense (read Greene's very consequentialist dissertation if you don't believe me, which inspired this post from the University of Pennsylvania's Jon Baron--the last paragraph of which is particularly revealing).

One of the most salient characteristics of this research is that it is new (notice Greene's dissertation was written in 2002). Going forward, I think it could benefit from someone within a religious institution participating and offering a different view (of course, I would think that wouldn't I?). As it stands the investigation is quite stilted and I think the research could suffer for it. Not only from answering questions in a particular way, but by not taking some questions seriously.

For example, most contractualists (a category to which all the researchers listed above belong) begin talking about "morality" from the understanding that an action which is immoral is only that which causes harm to another. They are thus perplexed (or enraged) when a Christian or Jew or other religious or "beehive-minded" (for the record I don't like this term) person comes along and tells them that their, for example, sexual behavior is immoral. The contractualist then states that all the sex in which he or she has engaged has been completely consensual, and the communalist (a bit of a nicer term I think) responds by pointing out that consent does not a moral action make. Some philosophers get this; I'm not convinced that these researchers do, and such moral judgments may be subsequently dismissed or at least not taken very seriously.

I think, just as an example, researchers could benefit from reading Herbert McCabe's description of "evil" for a start:

"...there may well be those who think that what makes an action morally wrong is the harm it does to others, and they may be a little surprised that I say that what makes an action morally wrong is the harm it does to the perpetrator. An action may be morally wrong because it does harm to others, but what we mean by saying that it is morally wrong is that it damages the perpetrator. I can after all do a great deal of harm to others without doing morally wrong at at all. I may bring with me to a foreign country some deadly infectious disease that I don't know about, so that in a few weeks people are dying in agony because of my arrival. If so, I have certainly harmed them by my arrival but I have not done anything morally wrong. If however I knew about it and went all the same, then you could well say that I was acting unjustly, that I was behaving in an irresponsible way in which no human being should behave, that I was defective in my humanity, that I was committing a moral evil. The moral evil would consist in the injustice and the way that I had diminished myself in acting like that."

Where is this philosophical perspective (a very old one, I might add) in today's research into the psychology of morality? Evolution and social cognition certainly can help lay the groundwork for explaining morality and I hope that the research continues. However, I think that it can only take us so far as it currently stands. It leaves to many questions unanswered as the chatter on the internet about this Times article illustrates.

As a side note, one could draw interesting parallels between this work and the current debate threatening to rend the Anglican Communion, though I won't, because this post is too long already.

As I said before: interesting times we live in.

What's at stake

2007-09-20T12:25:00.001-04:00

I thought the contents of this article were very telling regarding where one side sits in this row in the ECUSA and the Anglican Communion.

This part especially:

"As one Episcopalian put it at a congregational meeting in Raleigh earlier this week, "We don't dictate to them how they should behave, they shouldn't dictate to us how we should behave.""

As many on the 'conservative' or 'traditional' side of this debate have said before me: this isn't about homosexuality. Specific doctrines regarding homosexuality have brought much more important issues to the fore and those are what we is at stake in this debate. This debate is about the place of Scripture in our church laws and canons, this debate is about a Christian response to a fallen and imperfect world, but most of all, this debate is about growing together in our common understanding of revealed Truth in community and in Communion.

The statement of the Episcopalian quoted above is thoroughly individualistic, thoroughly postmodern, thoroughly Western, and utterly and completely un-Christian. Love doesn't stop at one person and begin separately with another; it necessitates risking knowing one another for better or for worse. Live and let live; I'm ok, you're ok: these philosophies don't know love, and thus cannot coexist with the faith once given.

Surprising statistics

2007-09-19T12:18:00.000-04:00

I obviously take such things with a large grain of salt (for example, the wording of the questions is quite biased), but according to a new Harris Poll, the "Echo Boomer" generation (something I've referred to here as the "Millennial Generation," also known as "Generation Y") is the most 'conservative' when it comes to abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, and the separation of church and state. They are also the most 'liberal' when it comes to gay rights (which is never defined), the death penalty, and same-sex marriage. Although more Millennials oppose same-sex marriage than support it.

The makings of an interesting future.

Archbishop Rowan Williams as Zero-Hour approaches for the Communion

2007-09-12T11:49:00.001-04:00

"It helps enormously to have not only the discipline of the daily Offices, the daily Eucharist here, but actually a praying community. Prayers are offered quite early. Every morning, therefore, I have an opportunity to remind myself that what matters is not the Church of England or the Anglican Communion but the act of God in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. When I am inclined to think that the whole thing is falling apart and that I am making a more than usually bad job of it, the transforming thing has got to be, and in my experience always is, renewing a sense of gratitude. Whether the Church of England survives or not, whether the archbishop of Canterbury survives or not, Christ still died on the cross and rose again, and that's enough to keep you going for quite a few lifetimes."

October FT

2007-09-12T11:06:00.000-04:00

The most recent issue of First Things has been released, and the featured article on their website is an excellent one. Avery Cardinal Dulles is doing what precious few people in our society are willing to do today: demonstrate that for the thinking person there is no conflict between science and religion. A few highlights to follow.

He speaks of three groups who don't see evolution and religion as mutually exclusive. The first sees evolution as the mechanism by which God carried out his divine plan and can say nothing as to His existence or non-existence ('theistic evolutionism'). The second says that God intervened periodically throughout history to bring about things as they are today ('Intelligent Design'). The third says that evolution, while true, is incapable of answering ultimate questions about non-material things. The third is where Cardinal Dulles lies. I would probably put myself in the first category.

It's interesting to note how many Anglicans are mentioned in this article.

Promised key quotes; in reference to 'Intelligent Design':

"In favor of Behe and his school, we may say that the possibility of sudden major changes effected by a higher intelligence should not be antecedently ruled out. But we may take it as a sound principle that God does not intervene in the created order without necessity. If the production of organs such as the bacterial flagellum can be explained by the gradual accumulation of minor random variations, the Darwinist explanation should be preferred. As a matter of policy, it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained, because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches us that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion."

And some great stuff about the writings of evolutionary psychologist and believing Christian Justin Barrett:

"Some evolutionists contend that morality and religion arise, evolve, and persist according to Darwinian principles. Religion, they say, has survival value for individuals and communities. But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system. Since questions of this higher order cannot be answered by science, philosophy and theology still have an essential role to play.

Justin Barrett, an evolutionary psychologist now at Oxford, is also a practicing Christian. He believes that an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good God crafted human beings to be in loving relationship with him and with one another. “Why wouldn’t God,” he asks, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Even if these mental phenomena can be explained scientifically, the psychological explanation does not mean that we should stop believing. “Suppose that science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me,” he writes. “Should I then stop believing that she does?”"

All I can do in response to this is offer up an unambiguous and heartfelt AMEN!

Very sad...

2007-09-08T09:06:00.000-04:00

The author of one of my favorite books growing up, Madeleine L'Engle, has passed away.

Interesting

2007-09-07T10:48:00.000-04:00

Well, it's not the Book of Life, but it still sounds pretty cool.

A bit of a switch

2007-08-24T21:28:00.000-04:00

I found this article in The New Republic interesting because I feel that it reflects intelligently on the reasons why I moved from a non-denominational church into an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian parish.

A little Friday laugh

2007-08-24T19:06:00.000-04:00

Swiped from The Corner:

Since the late 1960s, much of the North Atlantic Ocean has become less salty, in part due to increases in fresh water runoff induced by global warming, scientists say.
—Michael Schirber, LiveScience, 29 June 2005

The surface waters of the North Atlantic are getting saltier, suggests a new study of records spanning over 50 years. They found that during this time, the layer of water that makes up the top 400 metres has gradually become saltier. The seawater is probably becoming saltier due to global warming, Boyer says.
—Catherine Brahic, New Scientist, 23 August 2007

2007-08-22T11:20:00.000-04:00

A disturbing piece in the New York Times. I don’t know enough about the situation to make any statements regarding whether or not Dr. Bailey did in fact violate research ethics. I can say that the manner in which he interviewed individuals to write his book did not in any way require something like the approval of an IRB or formal informed consent. Such research needs to fit the definition of “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation.” None of this occurred. Imagine if interviews required informed consent and IRB approval; the news media would go out of business!

I think this story is very telling in terms of where a wing of academia (I’ll leave it to you to guess which one) is headed. We’ve sacrificed truth and reason on the altar of good feelings. I find it remarkable that this story contains no evidence that Dr. Bailey’s detractors ever engaged his ideas objectively in order to debunk them or present alternative theories supported by experimental evidence. They simply attacked him personally and called “his ideas” (known as “research” when in the favor of the establishment) dangerous. The closing of the American mind indeed.

Too true!

2007-08-18T20:31:00.000-04:00

I've always mused to myself that it's very possible that presidential elections may be entirely random and issues may have absolutely nothing to do with the outcomes. I'm pretty sure I agree with those who think that the ability to vote should be contingent on some sort of test of civics knowledge and of candidate political positions. This may sound very illiberal, but I just don't think that those who can't name their current senators ought to be deciding the next ones.

Ergo, I thought this post by Ross Douthat was awesome.

Look before you leap

2007-08-07T12:27:00.001-04:00

A lengthy article by Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins Keenan details what we "know" about same-sex attraction and humbly suggests that we ought to have firmer footing to stand upon if we're going to make such a sweeping change in our theology as the ECUSA is advocating.

There is more to be said here, and there's more to add to what Dr. Keenan has written, but I think it's worth reading in its own right for now without additional commentary.

Grappling Inconsistencies

2007-08-06T22:10:00.000-04:00

I'm currenly reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and it's really getting my brain going off on all sorts of related tangents. The book is primarily built around Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and uses the artwork of M.C. Escher and the music of J.S. Bach to illustrate the principles contained therein. I like it because it's reminding me of a lot of the math that I've learned across the years and forgotten, and once again that so many different disciplines cross one another's boundaries in magnificent ways. And, in case you were wondering, yes, I have once again found culturally relevant material in this almost 30-year-old book.

First, some background: Gödel's proof was an essentially negative answer to the questions posed by Russel and Whitehead in the Principia Mathematica. Basically what they had attempted to do was create an entirelly self-consistent mathematical language with which to attack every possible mathematical problem. The issue they were trying to address was the paradox, and they were attempting to create a language free of paradox. These problems arose particularly in mathematics when self-reference was involved. Here is a linguistic example of the problem:

"This statement is false."

The "system" of language is incapable of processing such a self-referencing phrase, so it basically crashes without human reasoning coming in and thinking "behind" or "above" the phrase and recognizing it as a paradox. You need to get into "meta-language" mode to process it. Notice it's possible to transcend such a statement, but it's also possible to stay within language and try to comprehend its meaning fruitlessly. This is a problem which Whitehead and Russel attempted to solve by inventing a language which avoided such paradoxes.

They succeeded in creating such a self-consistent language. It did this by applying the "get above the paradox" principle by systematically creating "levels" of mathematical language. Self-reference (the source of the mathematical paradox) was effectively banished because all sets were themselves contained by higher sets, and each set contained only "lower" sets. Paradox is no longer possible in such a system.

Of course, upon its publishing, Principia Mathematica raised another question: can this language be used to prove all true statements of number theory? Years went by as mathematicians tried over and over again to prove that it was so, until Gödel came along and did something no one expected: he didn't just demonstrate that Russel and Whitehead's language could not, but that no internally consistent language possibly could. Having looked at paradoxes like the one I mentioned earlier, he realized that what we do as humans to get around such inconsistencies is move into "meta-" mode (get "above" the statement), and that this is translatable into mathematical language. That is, statements about number theory can be made using number theory, and any language inherently contains these contradictions or is without the means to express them. The statement he made which annhilated Principia Mathematica in written in English (rather than mathematical language) was simple:

"This statement of number theory does not have any proof in the system of Principia Mathematica."

This is a huge discovery, and it may have heralded the end of modernism and the beginning of post-modernism. The entire Principia Mathematica project was based upon the assumption that we human beings would finally be able to perfectly systematize the world and understand everything as being very complex machines--including ourselves (perhaps it's relevant to note here that Russel was somewhat of a professional atheist). Gödel showed us that the search for such a way of explaining everything is inherently futile and that any attempt to perfectly systematize the world would either end in internal inconsistency or incompleteness. It's sort of analogous to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics.

What struck me recently in this book was this statement regarding one of Escher's prints (Relativity; one of my favorites):

"It is particularly interesting in the case of...Relativity, in which there occur blatantly impossible images. You might think that we would seek to reinterpret the picture over and over again until we came to an interpretation of its parts which was free of contradictions--but we don't do that at all. We sit there amused and puzzled by staircases which go every which way, and by people going in inconsistent directions on a single staircase. Those staircases are "islands of certainty" upon which we base our interpretation of the overall picture. Having once identified them, we try to extend our understanding, by seeking to establish the relationship which they bear to one another. At that stage, we encounter trouble. But if we attempted to backtrack--that is, to question the "islands of certainty"--we would also encounter trouble, of another sort. There's no way of backtracking and "undeciding" that they are staircases. They are not fishes, or whips, or hands--they are just staircases. (There is, actually, one other out--to leave all the lines of the picture totally uninterpreted, like the "meaningless symbols" of a formal system. This ultimate escapre route is an example of a "U-mode" response--a Zen attitude towards symbolism.)

And here is the pearl in the quotation:

"So we are forced, by the hierarchical nature of our perceptive processes, to see either a crazy world or just a bunch of pointless lines."

I must admit that I almost cheered when I read that last line. Every day we're bombarded by innumerable events and circumstances, and we have the ultimate choice of either grappling with them and doing the best we can with what we have, or simply shrugging our shoulders and going on with blinders on our lives and clouds in our consciousnesses.

Life doesn't make sense. Life isn't fair. Life is absolutely crazy, inconsistent, and incomplete. Fine.

You have two choices: (1) give up and stop being human, or (2) stand up and fight and don't stop fighting until you take your last breath. In our post-modern world, where we're rising from the rubble of our mathematical Towers of Babel, it's so tempting to simply throw up one's hands and become one with the utter nonsense of reality. The other option is to live as hard as one can or die trying. I choose the latter.

More to come from this book for certain.

And...

2007-08-02T12:30:00.000-04:00

I also agree with what Jonah Goldberg is generally getting at here.

Existential Drift

2007-08-01T22:27:00.000-04:00

After reading That Hideous Strength, I think I've finally become able to pinpoint that about our techno-society which grates against something within me. No I don't really think that Google is going to take over the world or that Steve Jobs is the antichrist. It's much more subtle than that; which explains why until now I've failed to put my finger on it precisely. It's ironic since the reason is itself insidious because of its subtlety.

In C.S. Lewis's third installment in the space trilogy, one of the characters, Mark Studdock, is repeatedly faced with opportunities to choose between good and evil. These opportunities, however, are somewhat overlooked. What was remarkable about them was that he continually made the wrong decision not because he actively chose to do the wrong thing, but because he didn't take any great care in his choosing. His tragic fault lay in his shrinking of consciousness, not in a desire to do evil. Happily, when he was finally confronted with a choice so blatant that he couldn't help but actively choose, he chose the good. The joy of that story is that this choosing was enough to redeem the wrongs.

What I'm digging at here is something which I see as pervasive in our society. There is a lack of moral awareness, because people are confronted day by day by shades of grey in which they tend toward the darker, not because they actively choose it, but that's the way fallen societies flow while unchecked. It's kind of like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy. Randomness will naturally and steadily increase unless work is applied to maintain the order. We humans are higher than beasts because we seek to bring order out of the chaos which naturally surrounds us. We are lower than gods because we can never perfectly succeed. What I see happening in our world today is a diminishing of that distance between man and beast which seeks to chasten the madness around us with Reason. Instead we're trapped in what I think could properly be called 'existential drift.'

What part does technology play in this? Technology is the means by which we have managed to increase our information intake so dramatically that we are forced to overlook the difficult moral choices that would otherwise dominate our consciousnesses if we were able to see them. One could imagine the parable of the good Samaritan playing out in modern times with the priest on his iPhone and the Levite with his Blackberry. Neither of these things are bad in and of themselves, but they and their kind (iPods, television, cellphones, etc.) serve to cause our heads to be cloudier, hazier, and more preoccupied with things that ultimately are unimportant. The result is a diminishing of consciousness when forced to confront moral decisions, and a tendency to "go with the flow" in one's distracted state rather than reflect and choose one way or the other wholeheartedly. In a perfect world this wouldn't matter, but in a fallen world which tends downward, one could end up crossing a moral line without ever even being aware of it.

I often wonder at places like Africa where lines between good and evil, right and wrong seem from here in our nation of grey to be so ubiquitous. One only need worry about survival and the survival of one's family. Often this means standing up to unjust authority figures and enduring persecution such as in Zimbabwe or Sudan respectively, and can easily result in death or death of loved ones. But one's conscience in such places is always clear (there are moral ambiguities such as taking sides in a war, but the choices are reflected upon since their consequences are so severe). It's not that they always make the right choices, it's that they're always actively making choices.

I've said before that I think that the challenge to Christians in our generation is not convincing people that Jesus Christ is the answer to life's great question, but convincing people that they ought to be asking the question. In many ways it's worse. If a man is confronted by the Divine, he has three choices. He can kneel, turn, or ignore. Those who obey or disobey have both made a choice, and are both closer to God simply in their actively choosing. Even the one who chooses against God must fully grapple with who God is. It is only the one who ignores the Light that hasn't even grasped what he faces. One almost wishes God would shake the ground from beneath his distracted feet and ring His voice through the grey-minded one's grey matter bellowing, "CHOOSE!"

America is too busy texting to be bothered by silly questions like the meaning of life. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check my email.

Another thought

2007-07-13T12:42:00.000-04:00

David Sloan Wilson disagrees with Dawkins' explanation for the nature of religion in society. I am a huge fan of Wilson's, so this is worth a read. Essentially, this is a duel between two atheist evolutionary biologists. Dawkins' believes some bizarre theory which states that religion is best thought of as a societal common cold, a "virus" if you will. If you read his book he goes into some detail, though I find his arguments terribly unconvincing.

Wilson takes the perspective of religion as a societal good which performs a particular function which makes it adaptive. That is, he takes evolution to a broader level treating societies as though they were organisms. I actually really like this idea, and I appreciate much of what he says in this article.

The trick is making the final leap of faith. Certainly one could formulate a true natural explanation for Christianity's (and all religion's) success in the world. Philosophically speaking, this leaves the door open for religion to be either true or false. That is, once again, evolution has nothing to say on the truth or falsehood of religion. Some fundamentalists may not like "mere" natural explanations for the success of global Christianity, but I think they're rather poetic when you consider that God made nature and He loves it.

What is wrong with saying that Christianity is successful as it is, because human society is built as it is, because human organisms evolved as they did, because other organisms evolved as they did, because the earth has the properties that it did, because the laws of physics are what they are? You can stop there (which I feel it is intellectually sloppy to do), or you can seek out the philosophical First Cause. It's up to you.

Speaking of genetics

2007-06-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

Evolution apparently isn't finished with us yet; at least in terms of genetic drift. I would think this is obvious to most people who take a moment to think about it. None of this suggests that we've diversified into anything that could be identified as different species, however. This article is cool too.

The implications of this history in our post-modern instant communication global society are very interesting to ponder.

Cats rule and dogs drool

2007-06-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

Or so says a new genetic study.

Dare I hope?

2007-06-29T12:22:00.001-04:00

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a Supreme Court decision handed down yesterday.

President Bloomberg?

2007-06-22T15:03:00.001-04:00

I was going to say a few words about what a Mike Bloomberg race would look like, but Jonah Goldberg has already said everything I wanted to say.

Mike Bloomberg remains close to the top of my "Most Irritating Public Figures" list.

More mind candy

2007-06-21T10:15:00.001-04:00

Failed states index.

Neat little thing

2007-06-21T07:14:00.000-04:00

A cultural map of the world.

Good and Evil; Individual and Community

2007-06-20T18:12:00.001-04:00

I've been thinking lately about the failure of the constitutional amendment in Massachusetts defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman to pass the legislature so that the people could vote on the matter. I tend to see the same-sex marriage issue as a symptom of a wider moral sickness in our society than a particular problem in and of itself. I think we've deviated greatly from what it means to be a moral human society, and we've adopted a number of problematic ways of thinking which inevitably carry us to things like same-sex marriage. So rather than going into a long post about how I feel on this particular issue, I thought I'd digress to where I see our society going in terms of moral discourse. This is the product of a number of discussions I've been having lately, and I think the same-sex marriage issue is very illustrative of our current state.

There was once a general consensus on the basic question of what it means to live well as a good human being. Morality was assumed to exist, though there may have been slight cultural deviations in its final espoused formulae. However, there were (and I believe there are) fundamental principles upon which all moral discourse was (and is) grounded and by which all cultures argue their morality is superior. I liken it to human language, where there are certain universal principles which exist in each human’s capacity to verbalize when born, which then are slowly developed based upon the language within which the child is raised. Think of a massive switchboard in which all the switches are set mid-way between ON and OFF. All people are born with the same switches. As human life progresses, some switches are set to ON and some are set to OFF based upon the society in which one is raised. Morality is analogous to that. Think of any moral argument you’ve had with someone with whom you disagree, notice that both of you fervently believe that your position is the “right” one. How do you convince your opponent of the truth of your position? You appeal to justice, to sympathy, and to other universal moral principles, and attempt to demonstrate why your position is most in line with a general concept of how humanity ought to behave. Your opponent will do the same. Instead of simply declaring, “I’m ok; you’re ok,” in order to genuinely reach a consensus you must appeal to what is common between you.

Human discourse involves an appeal to the common, not to the individual. This is because individuals cannot exist in a vacuum; fundamental human functions which separate us from the beasts (such as language; or reasoning which impossible without language) exist solely for use in community. The irony of our current situation is that ethical discourse (that is, the philosophy of how humans ought to behave) begins with the individual apart from the community. This can be useful when codifying law, but it has always been understood that the law exists for the sake of the society, not for the sake of the individual. Law in its basic conception exists to punish individuals which deviate from social norms, not to chasten societies which do not hearken enough to individual desires.

There once was a time when people believed that we started in different places, but were progressing towards a universally understood fullness of being. What was important was not where you began, or what path you took, but your final destination. Now it’s stated that where you are when you begin is who you are, and there ought not to be incentive to change that. Everyone is expected to fit into the identity into which he or she is born, and perform the roles of that identity. Instead of encouraging the progression from these points into full humanity, we are supposed to tell each person that full humanity is already achieved. There is no gap between perfection and us; there is no evil separating us from the ultimate Good. There is only comfort and discomfort. Our responsibility as humans is to make our start-points as comfortable as possible, and to ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room: the desire to achieve fullness of being. For this reason, goodness is mocked, and the desire for the genuine good of others is reviled. It makes people uncomfortable. The only sin in modern society is the sin of genuine love for oneself and for one another.

What is the alternative to simply blotting out our humanity to achieve comfort? If we all progress towards the same end in our natures, don’t we lose our distinctiveness as human beings? Scholastic Christians have always stated that the individual exists in the matter of being, not in the nature. That is, in what makes someone distinct, not what makes them human. Character is achieved by becoming fully human, no matter where you begin. The matter is in the journey you travel to reach the endpoint: in the story of your life. Your nature is to be one with God, and we are all called to be carried into the perfect love of the Trinity through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who did not leave His humanity behind at the time of His Ascension. Our stories will remain distinct; and they will all go on forever.

Some things to think about going forward.

Well then

2007-06-12T09:05:00.000-04:00

I owe a series of updates regarding my time in Minnesota, but I'm still processing some things as well as beginning a new job which occupies my time much more fully than my previous one. In the meantime enjoy the headline of the day.

The things people test

2007-05-25T11:34:00.000-04:00

About tests. This is interesting. And bizarre.

For the record, my ring and index fingers are almost exactly the same length.

Quote of the moment

2007-05-23T17:26:00.000-04:00

"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay beneath everything, what would life be but despair?"
-Søren Kierkegaard

I think I'm going to like this book.

The Gospel according to Darwin

2007-05-15T10:10:00.000-04:00

I typically love everything put out by First Things, but I find myself to some degree disagreeing with the contents of this article.

What Webb seems to be saying here is that evolution ought to have boundaries, and shouldn't be used to "explain" certain phenomena, because that will lead to a falling away of appreciation for those phenomena. Sort of analogous to Plato's Republic in which the reign of philosophy has undermined the natural reign of parents over their children, because the fear of the gods has been removed from their immediate consciousness.

But is this really the case? What does religion, specifically here I would say Christianity, have to fear from evolutionary theory exactly? Are Christians afraid that evolution will explain how Christianity was "necessary" and "adaptive" and thus 'explain away' its significance? Does that even make any sense? To my understanding, being necessary and adaptive are good things. And as far as I am aware, Christian theologians are adamant about the necessity of the Gospel for our achievement of spiritual salavation. Why then are we so afraid to be told that Christianity may also serve a natural purpose, and even, horror of horrors, a sociological purpose as well? Why can we not be content with the fact that we as fallen beings need God to work his salvation into society through many doors, natural and supernatural alike? Biology, psychology, and sociology exist just as much for God's glory (when pursued honestly) as theology does. Theologians, likewise, are just as capable of obscuring God's truth as scientists and philosophers.

That said, I am a little concerned about where the discourse on evolutionary theory is taking us. On one side we have those enemies of Darwin who uphold Christian morality and revelation, but then act to drive away the face of God revealed through nature and science. On the other side we have those archeologists of reason who dig into the human condition and are finding gold and silver and instead of crafting icons, they're smelting idols. We now have academics and scholars seriously talking about an inherent biological and evolutionary root to morality, but it's being perverted into a form of utilitarianism, because there is no Truth present to guide it. The Gospel is being jealously guarded by preachers and pastors too wrapped up in their own culture wars to realize that they're fighting the wrong enemies. Both make false conclusions based on the fact that they each only hold part of the evidence. Faith and reason are being rent apart by sloppy philosophy.

My main problem with Webb's article is the dismissive attitude that it takes towards evolution. Even when Christians today admit that evolution might be true, they do so with much reservation as if they're trying to swallow cob liver oil. They miss the evangelistic opportunities revealed in this theory, as in any theory which genuinely seeks the truth. I say that evolution is not only elegant in its simplicity, but is illustrative of the human condition and a greater reflection of the fundamental 'way things are' and, thus, a reflection of God. Why is an instantaneous creation preferable to one realized across the centuries? Think about it in terms of individual salvation: theoretically speaking, God could just snap his incorporeal fingers and make me perfect. But how can I be certain that the perfect being standing before Him is really me? Without the material continuity, without the underlying story connecting my drudgery to my fullness of being, how can I really be certain of who I am when I have finally reached the end of the long road to complete sanctification? I may be made perfect, but God wants me to retain my essentially human nature, and that entails a life lived, not merely a moment experienced. Turning to evolution: isn't it that much more glorious that He should reveal that same endless struggle for perfection, that same rage against all impurity in the very nature which surrounds us and shares in our history? Nature evolves, and so do we. God is the master of it all.

How can anyone look at evolution and not see its poetry?

Creationism is for the gods of the philosophers; I worship the God who became man. I really hope the tenor of this debate changes in a big way, otherwise we're in for a very damaging and needless fight.

In other news

2007-05-04T15:19:00.000-04:00

This is really, really cool.

I love it when different disciplines get a nonzero return on their truth exchange.

IQ and Sex

2007-05-01T15:00:00.000-04:00

Feel free to make your own jokes.

The End of an Era

2007-04-30T23:32:00.000-04:00

Before leaving class today for the last time, my psychology professor told us with some profundity, "In spite of everything that we've learned in this course, of all the outside factors which influence our behavior, remember that the most powerful determinant remains human choice."

As we move from one chapter to the next in our lives, we must remember that the most powerful force shaping our characters is our free will. Our choices shape our brains, our relationships, our environments: everything which determines our behavior, and thus everything that determines our character. In the end, it is that character that will matter; that character which will embody who we are on the most fundamental level.

Perhaps this is why death strikes us as so unjust. Everything in this world is a gift. We have no right to what we own, to the families that we have, not even to biological wholeness. None of this is our doing; we can lay claim to none of it. But our selves are our selves. We have helped to write the story of who we are, and this fallen universe has no right to take that from us. Our liberty, yes; our property, yes; even our lives, yes. But it has no right to destroy our personhood; to wipe out our character.

My professor understood that we have the responsibility to write our stories as best we can, but she only got part of the way. What happens when we run out of words and the book is slammed shut?

There is an answer, but unfortunately, His name is not often spoken in the classroom.

Pages are turning. It's time to begin a new chapter.

Well-Ordered Loves

2007-04-25T22:44:00.000-04:00

"But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looking into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni, which is to say, Master."
-St. John 20:26

Mary was so taken by grief and concerned with the tasks at hand, that the very appearance of the one whom she really sought was overlooked. Jesus first calls her to reflect seriously upon these things which seem so important at this moment, "Why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?" Mary, human that she is, misses the irony. She believes she knows what she wants, and in her obsessive pursuit of it, she misses the appearance of the true object of her seeking. "Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him and I will take him away." Tears blur her vision; duty masks His face.

Jesus then calls her by name. "Mary," is all He says. Mary is suddenly drawn from these concerns which have taken hold of her, and she turns to look at the man with whom she has been speaking. She realizes that the one whom she sought has already been restored to her. The light of God speeds peace through the haze of the petty concerns of her life. Jesus is alive; what else now matters? "Master," is all she is able to say. Humanity is now free; we no longer live in vain. Our tears fall for a world with hope of restoration; our works now aim toward a new day of resurrection. "Why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?"

Without Christ these questions seem absurd. Why weep? Man is born to die. Why seek? All things are dust.

With His resurrection, for the first time these questions actually carry significance, and yet for the exact same reason their hold on our lives has been overcome.

Why weep? Why seek? Yes, death is real and worth our weeping. Yes, love is beautiful and worth our seeking. But be filled with joy! Our Lord is risen!

It's a small wonder that Mary, surely knowing the profundity of all these things, could only utter one word: "Master."

St. John's gospel is my favorite, mostly because it seems written with the intent that it be interpreted less strictly than the synoptic gospels. The truth found here is within the text; more than merely its literal meaning. For this reason it is easy to see oneself in the place of the characters of the narrative.

"Jesus saith unto him, Young man, why worriest thou? What seekest thou? He, supposing him to be simply another well-meaning adult, saith unto him, Mister, if you know the path which God has lain before me, show it to me and I will walk it. Jesus saith unto him, James. He turned himself, and saith unto him, Master."

Sometimes things need to be put into perspective; only then can we properly understand the longings of our hearts.

I know I can't be the first to notice this...

2007-04-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

Can someone please explain why sporadically around New York I see mailboxes (bought and paid for with taxpayer dollars) shaped like R2-D2 from Star Wars? I'm not angry, I just don't understand.

Oh, School...

2007-04-16T14:15:00.001-04:00

I've been informed that before publishing, my politics thesis has to be edited for "clarity and political correctness."

A Curious Thing

2007-04-15T22:13:00.000-04:00

In case you hadn't gathered from the note off to the side of this blog, I'm currently reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins. Now, I want to reserve final judgment for this charming piece of literature until I finish it completely, but I just stumbled across something which I wish to write down, so that I don't forget about it later.

I am currently in Chapter 7: The 'Good Book' and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist. Dawkins has just spent the first 90% of the chapter explaining why everyone in the Bible is morally depraved and religious people are the source of all war and animosity in the world today, then, I assume in an attempt to counter an obvious detraction, he seeks to deal with the colossal counter-examples of Hitler and Stalin—non-religious architects of mass-murder both. While he concedes (as any rational person ought to) that these two totalitarians were deplorable monsters, he follows this admission with a clarification:

"The interesting question is not whether evil (or good) individual human beings were religious or were atheists. We are not in the business of counting evil heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity."

Oh, we're not? Because it certainly seemed that way for the past 35 pages. As I said, I will reserve final judgment until I finish the book in its entirety, but this ought to give you a flavor for the sort of sanctimonious preening and sophomoric hand-waving masquerading unconvincingly as argument with which I've been dealing for the past week or so.

Back to chapter seven.

On the Other Side of Annihilation

2007-04-13T15:40:00.000-04:00

The nerd in me thinks discussions like this are cooler than the atmosphere during the Middle Ages. Few people really understand just how remarkable it is that we even exist at all. Personally, I don't think the anthropic argument for God's existence really holds much water, but sometimes when the universe is particularly amazing it's hard not to be taken in by it a little.

NY Times and Sexuality

2007-04-11T10:36:00.001-04:00

This is an interesting article; though I probably disagree with the author as to what it shows us and what we should do about it.

Obviously, sexuality—to the degree which it is contingent upon biological structures—is inborn. However, there are two things which this article doesn’t mention which I think are extremely important if one is to have an informed conversation on this matter. The first is the work of Eric Kandel who demonstrated that different environmental stimuli actually cause the alteration of neural structures. That is, your environment messes with your brain—literally. This article seems to be saying that the brain you have when fully grown is the brain that you were born with; this is simply untrue.

Second, this article completely underestimates the power of the human mind in thwarting and guiding biology. Any serious psychologist today adopts and interactionist perspective vis-à-vis the person and the environment. Our biology and genetics influence our environment and vice versa to make a fully integrated person (ask any cognitive-behavioral therapist, for example). I’m skeptical, therefore, that sexuality is something that is analogous to skin color—and is completely predetermined and immutable to change. Obviously, neither is it analogous to a pair of shoes, but that’s another false dichotomy that seems to be popular in today’s culture.

I will say that I am intrigued that this article is taking a serious look at this from an evolutionary perspective. Personally, I think evolutionary theory might be the undoing of essentialist theories of human sexual orientation. No matter how you try to slice it, homosexual behavior is evolutionarily maladaptive. It then falls to purveyors of the “born that way” theory to explain why it is that men and women still experience same-sex attraction; especially when humans also seem to be evolutionarily predisposed to finding same-sex relationships unsavory at best and morally depraved at worst.

One caveat of course: one can’t simply say, “See! It’s a problem; we should just get rid of it!” Theorists on the other side of things have a duty to see things in terms of the evidence as well. In spite of its evolutionary impracticality and social and religious stigma, same-sex attraction does continue to exist, and it seems to arise unconsciously among a certain number of men and women (more men than women and with more of a “fixed” experience in men…how come no one talks about this?), and so there must be something about it that makes it adaptive that we’re not seeing if evolutionary theory is correct.

It should go without saying that none of this has anything whatever to do with the issue of the morality of same-sex relations, but that probably won’t stop some people from saying it does.

Of course, this is all speculation, but I'd venture to guess it's informed speculation.

Ecumenical Entertainment

2007-04-10T21:46:00.000-04:00

Try this.

(100%) 1: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England

(93%) 2: Lutheran

(92%) 3: Roman Catholic

(90%) 4: Eastern Orthodox

(73%) 5: Presbyterian/Reformed

(67%) 6: Congregational/United Church of Christ

(58%) 7: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic)

(53%) 8: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene

(51%) 9: Church of Christ/Campbellite

(35%) 10: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God

(32%) 11: Seventh-Day Adventist

(23%) 12: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist

(22%) 13: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.)

Evil and Free Will

2007-04-09T14:52:00.000-04:00

Coming off Holy Week, I’ve been reminded again of that famous (and strange) argument against God’s existence: the so-called 'problem of evil.' The formulation is tired and old, and it runs as follows:

1.) God exists
2.) God is omniscient
3.) God is omnipotent
4.) God is good
5.) Evil exists

An all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God cannot possibly coexist with evil, therefore God does not exist.

Basically, some people have difficulty squaring the existence of God with the existence of evil (“How could a good God allow x to happen?”). In his Good Friday homily, one of my priests decided to take on the question in reference to the crucifixion of Jesus. His argument was also familiar: evil exists because we have free will; we have free will so that we can choose to love, but that also means that we can choose not to. We, in fact, chose not to and continue to choose not to, and the crucifixion of the Son is therefore necessary.

Allow me to wax arrogant here and politely suggest that I don’t think this adequately addresses the original argument. Here’s why I think so.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that God exists. What do we know about God in relation to His creation? We know that He is the source of all being; of all that is in creation. He is the First Cause; the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

Now we come to the question of free will. My priest seems to be saying that by causing free will in the hope that man would choose to love, God was taking a risk that mankind would choose not to love.

Problem.

How exactly does God take a risk? The laws of probability and chance are in creation and are thus not ascribable to a Creator who is distinct from His creation. In short, God doesn’t play dice. He knew (being omniscient) that when he created Adam, His creation would turn away from Him—ok, so far I’m in agreement with my priest. However, what this also means is God deliberately created a universe in which there existed a being created in His image that would turn against Him. There is absolutely no reason why God could not have created a world in which human beings could be fully free and yet always choose not to sin.

So the so-called 'free will defense' falls flat on its face.

Does this mean that God creates sin? I wouldn’t go that far (see what I said about morality). He does, however, create sinners, and there’s nothing essential to that creation (i.e. He didn’t have to create sinners).

What does this say about God’s goodness? Nothing. Who are we to judge God? By what standard are we to judge whether or not God is ‘well-behaved.’ Do we have a set of rules that a god follows in order to be “good?” That seems to presuppose some standard that is coexistent with God, which is philosophically problematic. If God exists, then He is the First Cause, and thus the cause of morality. God creates moral codes for everything according to its nature; He is not coequal with moral codes.

So why the crucifixion then? The truth is I don’t know. When terrible things about life don’t make sense, and I'm tempted to shake my fist at God, I turn to the book of Job:

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

“Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer it.”

-Job 38:4-7, 40:2

God’s ways are inscrutable. We can’t properly ask ‘why’ God does things. When we ask “why” something happens, we are looking for a cause. If God is the First Cause, how can we look for causes of the First Cause? When trying to ascribe causation to God we are making him into a "god"—a thing in the universe.

I think my priest’s homily was probably more elegant, and more comforting. Then again, what can be more comforting than the love of God? Why the crucifixion? Why anything? I don’t know. However, I do know one thing: Christ is a great savior. This world is broken. I don't understand why. But one man smashed the vicious cycle of death and passed through pain and Hell and came out the other side. In Him I put my hope and it is Him whom I will follow.

"Here is another person Jesus had to die for"

2007-04-08T21:31:00.000-04:00

Read this.

Listen to this.

Christ is risen!

Happy Easter everyone.

Thinking about Morals

2007-04-02T14:50:00.000-04:00

I was randomly checking out the psychology department at Penn just to see if there was anything I liked there. I found Jon Baron's website and I started sifting through his stuff. I liked a lot of his work, but I wasn't too taken by his conclusions. Then I found his blog and it had a link to the dissertation of another professor teaching at Harvard (Josh Greene), and I started reading it.

Basically Baron says that morality isn't real, and so objecting to a policy on the grounds that it isn't "ethical" is like saying that it isn't "blorf." This is an argument I usually come up against with libertarians, and I don't think it holds any water. I think if you hold this view to this extreme and do so consistently, you're going to collide with this problem on a host of other things (like questions of value or utility, which are inherently partially subjective to a degree like morality). Most people who espouse such views don't follow them very well.

Greene's argument is a little more nuanced and interesting, because I've never heard it before. From what I can tell from perusing his dissertation, he thinks that moral intuitions are simply conglomerations of internal states that we assign to particular people and actions, albeit with patterns (this part I had heard before). That is, to say something is morally "wrong" isn't to say anything "true" about the world. He continued by examining knowledge, and how we really "know" very little. Here I agree with him. His specific example refers to how we can't really "know" that there is an actual landmass to the south of us called Antarctica (this is true; just like I can't really "know" I'm in New York, but I assume I am because I trust the authority of signs and people and such...I think C.S. Lewis went into this in one of his books), but we can still state what would need to be the case in order for the statement "There is a large landmass to the south called Antarctica" to be true--namely, that the place actually exists in reality. Then he points out (correctly) that you can't do the same thing with morality. I can't say that something has the characteristic of being evil in that I can't put forward a set of circumstances which would validate the statement "killing babies for fun is wrong," for example. You can't really "know" that the way you "know" things about the world.

So where does this take us? He goes on to say that this means that we should limit the force of moral arguments. I encountered the same argument (though less-developed) in 'The Moral Animal' (a book on evolutionary psychology and human behavior) when the journalist who was writing it departed from the science and got into moral philosophy. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say they're both wrong. Their science is great, but I think they're reading too much of their own views into it and its causing them to misunderstand the nature of morality.

I don't think it's a failure of the reality of moral sentiments to say that they can't meet the same epistemological standards as other statements, because I don't think we should hold them to that standard. I agree that moral statements don't carry the same kind of truth quality as statements about the world, but that's because morality in practice inherently makes use of a world which does not exist. When we make a moral judgment, we are not only making a claim about the universe as it exists, we are making a comparative claim about how it could be otherwise and yet is not. Evil is not an entity, it is the difference in being between the world as it is and the world as it could (ought to) be. How can we expect such statements to be "true" in the same way as "objects at rest tend to stay at rest" is true? It's just an absurd question built on bad premeses; like arguments about God's moral standing. To borrow from Herbert McCabe, it's like asking, "What color is Thursday?"

But Greene's science is good, and that's why I think something needs to be put up in his theory's place. Psychologically speaking, I would argue that every person has an unconscious internal representation of the "cosmos" (the universe as it "ought" to be) and we intuitively assign the attribute "wrong" to those circumstances which differ from that cosmos; the bigger the difference, the more "evil" the action or circumstance. Since the internal cosmos precedes consciousness, we can't assign truth categories about moral judgments the way we do about factual statements. So in this sense, moral statements are "real," but not "true" in the sense that we can really "know" them; we can only make attempts at formulating them. Now, the assumption on which this rests is that this internalized cosmos is saying something that is metaphysically true, and that's where this theory gets grey. I haven't thought through the precise implications of this, and I'm only in the hatching stage of this theory and have no means currently at my disposal for testing it, but there it is. Could make for some fun dissertation material down the road if no one else tests it first.

Just some musings; funny how all of these neat disciplines seem to come together.

Test For Fun...

2007-02-04T22:39:00.000-05:00

You scored as Neo orthodox. You are neo-orthodox. You reject the
human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither
do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue
for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation
to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology.
The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of
Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth.

Neo orthodox

93%

Roman Catholic

82%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

82%

Emergent/Postmodern

54%

Classical Liberal

46%

Reformed Evangelical

46%

Modern Liberal

29%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

21%

Fundamentalist

18%

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

More From 'The Faith of a Physicist'

2007-02-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

"For the theist, the rational beauty of the physical world is not just a brute fact, but a reflection of the mind of the Creator. Aesthetic experience and ethical intuitions are not just psychological or social constructs, but intimations of God's joy in creation and of his just will. Religious experience is not illusory human projection, but encounter with divine reality. There is an integrating wholeness in the theistic account which I find intellectually satisfying, even though it must wrestle with the mystery of infinite Being.

"The theist and the atheist alike survey the same world of human experience, but offer incompatible interpretations of it. My claim would be that theism has a more profound and comprehensive understanding to offer than that afforded by athism. Atheists are not stupud, but they explain less.

"There is an interesting analogy with case in physical science where theoretical physicists survey the same domain of physical experience but offer conflicting interpreations of it. SUch instances rare - despite the philosophers of science talk about the underdetermination of theory by data - for it is seldom possible to find competing candidates in fundamental physics capable of offering ontologically incompatible accounts of equal empirical adequacy in relation to the same broad swathes of experience. Yet quantum theory provides and example of such a Wittgensteinian 'suck/rabbit': the 'Copenhagen' (indeterministic) and Bohmian (deterministic) accounts of quantum physicis. Both entail exactly the same (successful) empirical consequences, but they offer sharply contasting ontologies of the quantum world. Despite there being no crucial experiment to discriminate between these two theories, almost all physicists adhere to the 'Copenhagen' point of view. It is the more mysterious (counterintuitive and unpicturable) account, but it is felt to be more intellectually satisfying because it offers an explanation of the Schrödinger equation which Bohm's theory must accept as brute fact. I believe that preference to be a rationally defensible one, and to bear some analogy with the theist's preference for his or her account of a wider reality. Although atheism might seem simpler conceptually, it treats beauty and morals and worship as some form of cultural or social brute facts, which accords ill with the seriousness with which these experiences touch us as persons."

-John Polkinghorne

I've been devoting a large number of posts to the subject of atheism; I should try to mix it up a bit.

Une Petite Pensée

2007-01-30T14:15:00.000-05:00

“I marvel at the boldness with which these people presume to speak of God.

“In addressing their arguments to unbelievers, their first chapter is the proof of the existence of God from the works of nature. Their enterprise would cause me no surprise if they were addressing their arguments to the faithful, for those with living faith in their hearts can certainly see at once that everything which exists is entirely the work of the God they worship. But for those in whom this light has gone out and in whom we are trying to rekindle it, people deprived of faith and grace, examining with such light as they have everything they see in nature that might lead them to this knowledge, but finding only obscurity and darkness; to tell them, I say, that they have only to look at the least thing around them and they will see in it God plainly revealed; to give them no other proof of this great and weighty matter than the course of the moon and the planets; to claim to have completed the proof with such an argument; this is giving them cause to think that the proofs of our religion are indeed feeble, and reason and experience tell me that nothing is more likely to bring it into contempt in their eyes. This is not how Scripture speaks, with its better knowledge of the things of God. On the contrary it says that God is a hidden God, and that since nature was corrupted he has left men to their blindness, from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ, without whom asll communication with God is broken off. Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

“This is what Scripture shows us when it says in so many places that those who seek God shall find him. This is not the light of which we speak as of the noonday sun. We do not say that those who seek the sun at noon or water in the sea will find it, and so it necessarily follows that the evidence of God in nature is not of this kind. It tells us elsewhere: Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.”
-Blaise Pascal

I cannot fathom why so many Christians today argue like angry anti-theists—i.e. as though their truth is self-evident and only an ignorant fathead committed to the most close-minded fundamentalism could miss what is plainly in front of him. Who are we to judge people’s questions or despair? This type of argument will only serve to drive away the desperate. The irony of this matter is that only one who believes in God—and thus the reality of an objective purpose in human affairs—can truly understand and sympathize with the colossal struggle that is faith.

But this leaves the matter of atheism. In my experience, atheists tend to argue in this dismissive way because they cannot fully engage Christianity, only cartoonish manifestations of it—particularly those atheists of the reductionism school. They believe that the fact that biological and physical processes underlie these life-altering religious struggles experienced by billions undermines their reality. They often fail to realize that this very dismissal is based upon a metaphysical premise which requires the reality of human thought and experience in order to sustain it as truth. How can we determine the importance or non-importance of particular human thoughts and experiences if we don’t trust our intuitions and our reason as a rule, and thus develop a standard by which to judge them?

Oftentimes, I find atheists are merely trying to establish an alternative metaphysical reality to the one which Christians submit to, rather than trying to do away with metaphysical realities altogether.

The religious have no trouble explaining atheism, but atheists tie themselves into philosophical knots trying to explain religion.

“I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
-C.S. Lewis

"Proving" God

2007-01-22T23:25:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about atheism lately; mostly because a friend of mine has been speeding through Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. I managed to snatch it for enough time to read the chapter entitled "Why There Almost Certainly is No God".

I was generally disappointed. Dawkins detailed why he found the arguments for God's existence laid out by St. Thomas Aquinas as unconvincing, and why he thought the theory of Intelligent Design was untrue (I'm being very generous here; Dawkins is not typically known for his civility when discussing religion). To my understanding, Aquinas's arguments were presentations of why it is reasonable to suppose there is a God, and were not intended as rigorous logical 'proofs,' so essentially I see Dawkins as assembling a straw man in his case and then lavishly bowling it over with a monster truck. However, I do agree with his characterization of Intelligent Design and his undoing of the "747" argument (that positing that evolution is true is like suggesting that a storm passing through a junkyard would produce a 747), but the argument that he puts in its place is wholly unsatisfying.

This struck me at first considering the flippant and sarcastic manner with which he dismissed the other arguments, and yet he valiantly places his own argument into the fray with a smug challenge for anyone to prove him wrong:

"A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right."

This is to say that naturalism is "more likely" than the existence of God. I am struggling not to merely dismiss this argument with a terrific yawn or pithy quip in a Dawkins-like fashion.

I am often irked by the hubris of contemporary atheists, which I see on display here. Does Dawkins sincerely believe that he is the first person to level this argument against Christianity or religion in general? The reduction of the argument to one of probability is necessarily imposing a naturalist premise in order to prove the correctness of that premise. That is, if God exists, then he exists in a manner totally unrestrained by the laws which he imposed on the created universe. The only way one could pose the question of the "likelihood" of the existence of God, is if one assumes some mechanistic ordering of things which includes God within it; to my knowledge no individual has now or ever worshipped such a being.

To Dawkins credit, he does in his own fallacy point out the problems with those who argue for such things as Intelligent Design (though ID has its own specific flaws which I will save for a different post). Personally, I find no argument for or against the existence of God convincing which relies solely upon particulars of creation.

If you accept that God exists (for the sake of the simplicity of argument let's use the Christian conception of "God"), then reason as a means of knowing was created by Him. If it was created by Him then He transcends reason. We do not transcend reason; we are within reason. Reason is the agency of our ability to "know" things. We "know" things by transcending them; that is, being capable of explaining them sufficiently from alpha to omega. Reason, employed in this manner, cannot by its very nature be expected to transcend God because God transcends His creation. We cannot "prove" God exists because if it were possible to do so then God would not be God (He would be transcendable by that which He transcends).

So basically, I would argue nothing in creation can be used as a means of "proving" God's existence. I would even argue that nothing within creation which we are capable of transcending could even be used adequately as evidence for God. How could you look at something and say, "That's the sort of thing God would make"?

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the fact that there is something rather than nothing is suggestive of God (or at least it forces us to confront the question), and the seemingly natural way which humanity seems ordered towards the supernatural is suggestive of the existence of the supernatural (though the biological underpinnings could be reducible to physical mechanics...this is not problematic for me as a Christian, but that, again, is for another post for another day).

It's one of those things where something seems right, but there's no purely rational means to demonstrate that it is so by the very nature of the situation. Arguments for the reasonableness of God (for God is thoroughly reasonable) are comforting and stimulating for the believer, but useless for convincing one committed to materialism/reductionism.

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."
-G.K. Chesterton

An Excerpt from 'The Faith of a Physicist'

2007-01-16T20:12:00.000-05:00

"To these signals of transcendence may be added a less focused recognition of unbounded aspiration in the face of human finitude, a stubborn refusal to give the last word to human insignificace on the cosmic scene. For the believer this may lead to a casting of oneself upon God in submission to that feeling of absolute dependence which Schleiermacher thought was the essence of religion. For atheists like Jacques Monod or Steven Weinberg it may lead to the not ignobal stance of heroic defiance in the face of a universe perceived as hostile or farcical. For many in the Western-educated world today in may lead to a kind of wistful fellow-travelling with religion, able neither to accept it nor wholly to dismiss it, retaining a memory of old tales of deity kept echoing in the caverns of the mind more by poetry than by argument. There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people's lives, and Langdon Gilkey is right to say that 'One of the most striking things about our human existence in this epoch is that we notice this relation to the unconditional as much by its absence as its presence.'"

-John Polkinghorne

St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo

2007-01-03T12:51:00.000-05:00

For New Year's Eve my grandparents suggested that we make an outing of mass and brunch. My grandparents are themselves now Methodists, my grandmother once belonging to the United Church of Christ, and my grandfather once an Episcopalian like myself, but they thought it would be nice to go to the Episcopal cathedral in downtown Buffalo, St. Paul's, followed by brunch before their grandson left for New York. I thought it was a wonderful idea.

My grandfather used to be in the choir at St. Paul's, a choir of men and boys like the one at St. Thomas in New York. He went to the church until the 70s when he left with his wife and children to a Methodist church closer to their home in Tonawanda. As we drove down the barren streets of Buffalo, flanked on either side by boarded up shops and apartment buildings, he told me stories of his time at St. Paul's, how the pews were always full to see the choir that toured around the world, hear the sermon by the Dean of the cathedral, and receive the Blessed Sacrament.

We had little trouble finding parking space despite there being no nearby parking lot or garage. Parking on the street on the weekends in Buffalo is free, in an attempt to encourage citizens to patronize the dwindling restaurants, bars, and small businesses scattered about its streets. The wind was cold so we were more than happy to enter the first door we came to, and eventually wound up in the narthex.

There were only a handful of people in the pews, and we were some twenty minutes early, so I elected to putter around the immediate area. The stained glass windows shone in the grey winter sunlight, and the stone floors looked none the worse for wear. My eye was caught by a display of literature off to the left, so I began flipping through to see what the church had to offer. I found pamphlets for senior citizens, victims of domestic violence, and for those who wish to join the pacifist movement in Buffalo. Another described the cathedral's history and architecture and included a card to attach to a donation to provide for its upkeep.

My grandmother had wandered into the sanctuary, so my grandfather and I followed. We selected a pew about 2/5 of the way back on the right side. At the time there were two middle-aged men seated alone together in the pew in front of us, and back and to the left were three generations of people belonging to the same family. Eventually an older couple came in and sat behind us, and a woman with dangling earings depicting crosses sat two pews ahead with her son who looked uncomfortable in his Sunday morning clothes. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the last two rows of pews had almost breached half capacity with families that appeared to be visitors like us.

My grandfather leaned over, "Wow, attendence has certainly dropped off since I was here last."

I asked him when that was; he said 1975. He told me when he sang in the choir here it was impossible to find a seat the parish was always so full.

We stood as the procession entered, surprisingly without the choir. We sang a Christmas hymn and I bowed respectfully as the crucifix passed. The Dean, the Very Rev. N. DeLiza Spangler delivered the opening acclamation and Collect for Purity. I crossed myself as she said it as usual, though the "amen" muttered by the tired and aged congregation wasn't more than a murmur.

The lectors read the Scriptures ably, and the service included a wonderful selection of hymns. Despite being a smoker since he was fifteen, my grandfather (now in his late 70s) still has a voice that rings out clearly.

We sat for the sermon, delivered by the canon, the Rev. Paul Lillie. He told us a tale about how he played a game with some friends in Israel for the New Year last year, in order to remind us that it is this time of year when we must remember the good times, and those we spend them with. I remember my grandmother later commenting that the sermon was "nice." That's what it was. "Nice."

The sanctuary seemed to be growing increasingly cold. I began getting lost as the ordering of service jumped between Rite I (the 1928 version) and Rite II (the 1979 version). I found myself sifting through my Book of Common Prayer for the majority of the prayers. I no longer even bothered to try to cross myself. The congregation was similarly confused, some responding "and with thy spirit" and others responding "and also with you" to many of the Dean's acclamations. It seemed a miracle that we could all actually say the Lord's Prayer in unison before Communion.

Communion was exceedingly short, given the size of the congregation. After Communion I didn't even bother to kneel, I simply bowed my head and recited the Postcommunion Prayer with which I was familiar. The Dean's voice echoed off the stone walls as she informed us that the peace of God would go with us, and we replied in one voice "Thanks be to God!" I couldn't tell whether people were crying out to our Lord for His peace or thanking Him for bringing this cold, empty celebration of the Eucharist to a close.

The procession walked out without much fanfare. I looked behind me; at some point about half of the individuals in the last two pews had left. I sat in my pew and gathered up my coat.

As we turned to leave, a woman behind us said, "Hello! Are you visiting here?"

My grandmother explained to her that her husband used to sing in the choir and I was in town and an Episcopalian at a parish in New York.

"That's lovely! You should come back! It's a wonderful place," she turned to me, "So, will you be joinging us for coffee hour?"

Truth be told, I felt bad telling her no. The hopeful smile on her face seemed to evaporate as I informed her that we would be going to brunch since I was leaving for New York in a couple of days. She just said, "That's nice."

As we made our way to the narthex, the regulars had little smiles on their faces. They weren't warm smiles, they weren't devious smiles, they were nice smiles. At the door, the lone usher who oversaw the procession of the congregation at Communion said, "It's nice to see you."

Outside a gust of wind took me by surprise and I shivered with the cold. I looked around at all the grey-lit buildings highlighted by the partially obstructed sun.

"Well that was a nice service," my grandmother offered.

"Yes. Yes, that's what it was," I replied.

Justice or tragedy? Or both?

2007-01-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

A number of Roman Catholic thinkers weigh in on the question of whether Saddam Hussein's execution was 'just' or 'tragic'. I go back and forth on the death penalty.

I definitely see the moral imperative for execution when one man takes another man's life. The question then is who and which means are appropriate for meting out justice? The state is best suited for doing so, because it is able do it dispassionately (with some exceptions). But then is it more appropriate to lock someone up for the rest of his natural life, or to hang him? Generally I find myself supporting the latter and not the former.

Some may raise the typical Catholic and mainline Protestant objection saying that the tragedy of the death penalty is that it leaves no room for redemption. I disagree, but that is because I take a rather unorthodox view of the afterlife seeing no end to the opportunity for human redemption. If one held the view that the moment of death was the last possible moment for one's justification, then it is conceivable that the death penalty would be an inhibitor for the evangelical mission of the Church. This doesn't make the death penalty unjust, however, only inconvenient. I am also wary of basing public policy exclusively on religious revelation.

In addition, there is the argument that mistakes can be made or that the system is corrupt. Both of these arguments are sound, but they are circumstantial. If these arguments are the only ones on which an individual relies, then in a situation in which there is no question of a criminal's guilt, and a fully impartial jury to weigh the overwhelming evidence, that person would need to conclude that the death penalty is just. I don't think this is a bad caveat to attach to the death penalty, given its finality. The appeals process and the careful procedural rights that we have enshrined in our judicial system work to lessen the possibility of mistakes. New advances in technology make this probablity even smaller. Still, even if these arguments cause one to disapprove of the death penalty as applied, it says nothing to whether it is unjust or wrong in principle.

Finally there is the argument that the death penalty is inappropriate because it is "too easy." That is, a life full of anguish and solitude is worse than the gallows, and thus criminals ought to be punished the more painful way. I think this position arises out of anger and a desire for vengeance, not out of a need to see justice done. If someone takes a life, his life is forfeit. God is just; the murderer's self-inflicted torment in the next life will be punishment enough (punishment, I might add, that we all deserve), and should he come to repentence, his purgation will be that much more painful. For this reason, and because I don't think a civilized society should become comfortable with torturing prisoners, I don't see the death penalty as falling short of justice.

All of this being said, I do not find arguments in favor of the death penalty which rely on deterence and incapacitation for their justification convincing either. Too often this results in its being applied where it would be unjust and inappropriate to do so (such as for adultery or kidnapping). I would argue that the death penalty should only be used in cases where another human life was taken.

This position of mine is still in quite a precarious place, and I will need to do more reading on the subject. I am aware that a great many thinkers and historians whom I respect, such as N.T. Wright, oppose the death penalty and likely have excellent reasons for doing so. I will need to consider their evidence as well. Until then, my support for the death penalty remains small, but my opposition to it smaller.

An Excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov

2006-07-21T21:10:00.000-04:00

"I like observing realism, Smurov," Kolya suddenly spoke. "Have you noticed how dogs sniff each other when they meet? It must be some general law of their nature."
"Yes, and a funny one, too."
"In fact, it is not a funny one, you're wrong there. Nothing is funny in nature, however it may seem to man with his prejudices. If dogs could reason and criticize, they would undoubtedly find as much that is funny to them in the social relations of humans, their masters--if not far more; I repeat, because I am convinced of it, that there is far more foolishness in us. That is Rakitin's thought, a remarkable thought. I am a socialist, Smurov."
"And what is a socialist?" asked Smurov.
"It's when everyone is equal, everyone has property in common, there are no marriages, and each one has whatever religion and laws he likes, and all the rest. You're not grown up enough for that yet, you're too young. It is cold, by the way."

The Brothers Karamazov was written in 1879. Funny how things never change.

I think some day I'll do a professional exegesis of the book of Revelation and combine it with Aristotelian philosophies about politics. I think there's something to the idea that whenever a just form of government arises out of necessity due to technological advances, an unjust perversion of it formulates almost immediately in its wake. One is the author of Justice; the other of Tyranny. One recognizes the natures of man, and does its best to work with them; the other works to control them.

The Market, the Family, and Religion are the three barriers between us and tyranny. They've always been under assault, and they will continue to be so long as government seeks to meet all the needs of mankind.

"They have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy."

Market, Family, Religion

Sort of like the Holy Trinity of Liberty. And the anti-liberty state attempts to control us by creating perverted alternatives to any or all of the above, and such perversions always end in bloodshed. Oh St. John the Divine, how consistently relevant you are.

I'm feeling very classically liberal today.