“…[Alasdair] MacIntyre writes, ‘At the beginning of modern moral philosophy- which I date in the 1780s- the moral agent as traditionally understood almost, if not quite, disappeared from view. The moral agent’s character, the structure of his desires and dispositions, became at best a peripheral rather than a central topic for moral philosophy, thus losing the place assigned to it by the vast majority of moral philosophers from Plato to Hume.’ Choice- conceived by Kant and Reid as deciding between desire and the requirements of morality and later by Sartre as the condition of an individual’s authenticity- replaced character as crucial for moral agency. And the rest, as the story goes, is history.” – Stanley Hauerwas, “The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre”, First Things, October 2007, p. 37.
What is said above by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas in summary of the philosopher and Catholic Christian Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of moral philosophy of modernty is interesting to me. When I discovered many years ago in an obscure nook in my dad’s library a copy of a book with the intriguing title, Celebration of Discipline, which resonated for me as one adrift in a slouchy milieu, I was quickly swept into its challenging and serious depth. It was especially through Richard Foster that talked of the “spiritual disciplines” began to revive at least in the populist Christian culture in which I was growing like a weed. Foster’s book issued a challenge that still resonates with me over the years. It was a book that was the fruit of prayer and listening. He opens his book: “Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people. The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths.” –Celebration of Discipline, p. 1.
A few pages later he writes, “We are accustomed to thinking of sin as individual acts of disobedience to God. That is true enough as far as it goes, but Scripture goes much farther. In Romans the apostle Paul frequently referred to sin as a condition that plagues the human race (i.e., Rom, 3:9-1. Sin as a condition works its way out through the ‘bodily members’; that is, the ingrained habits of the body (Rom. 7:5ff.). And there is no slavery that can compare to the slavery of ingrained habits of sin. In Isaiah 57:20 we are told, ‘The wicked are like the tossing of the sea; for it cannot rest, and its waters toss up mire and dirt.’ The sea does not need to do anything secial to produce mire and dirt; that is the result of its natural motions. That is also true of us when we are under the condition of sin. The natural motions of our lives produce mire and dirt. Sin is part of the internal structure of our lives. No special effort is needed. No wonder we feel trapped. Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on willpower and determination… Willpower will never succeed in dealing with ingrained habits of sin…The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that He can transform us…Law-bound Disciplines breathe death…” p. 3-4, 6, 7.
My mind has often returned to this book and its pregnant words on “spiritual disciplines” such as fasting and study and prayer and service. I heartily commend the book but can tell you some criticisms of it too that I am aware of but which do little to my mind to deface some of the rich veins that can be found in it. I bring it up because what is said of modern moral philosophy, and MacIntyre’s revitalizing critique of it, and work in it, parallels what Foster observed. Richard Foster’s book, if it is taken like a self-help book with maxims for the go-getter to hyper drive the will-to-power-it into the megadeath, bezerker-rage blackout and destruction, becomes of miserably little use. However, as a call to deeper Christian living, to Christian vision in Christian community that calls us to walk with God (not whim with God in a flash-fire of energetic, violent, ineffectualness), to depth as people of God who, no bones about it, know God, who know the Shepherd’s voice and come, it impresses me as on the mark.
Freshly from seeing the film “3:10 to Yuma”, I am still struck by what I take to be the abject poverty of the moral vision, the moral philosophy, expressed in the movie. It seems in some ways to me a popular expression of the long trend in the impoverishment of “the Western world” in its moral philosophy which MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Foster and so many others have noted, and in their way, done their best to counteract. In this movie the character played by Russell Crowe is a Satanic figure who quotes the Bible and accuses others for crimes he himself does. The bizarre thing is how the character seems to be held up to emulate when nothing consequential in the movie is done to establish any redeeming virtue in his character, it seems to me. He points out that a bounty hunter he knows, though being an outwardly pious man, has participated in genocidal acts against Indians in retaliation for attacking trains. Yet, his character also participated in genocidal acts, killing families. The death throes of the moral philosophy in this film seem to me so weak that hardly the slightest movement can be detected. The film is interesting at times in its degree of accuracy of depiction of evil but then it merely becomes an embrace of evil and a lionization of a fool. There is at the end a bizarre feint at a ‘redemptive moment”, so to speak, where the violent and senseless killer is beguiled by the thought of joining in league with the father of a boy in order to create a show, a legend to write on the heart of the boy of nobleness with purpose that does not actually exist. Both the father and Crowe’s character want to appear good instead of be good and they hope that a story instead of the truth will have a benign effect on the boy. The miserable poverty of this view evokes a pity. (People (me above all) need the Lord!)
What in the end appears to me a whim, a very violent whim, is supposedly the redemptive moment. This is the weak climax of the decline of moral philosophy. This is the whimper that T.S. Eliot refers to when he asks how the world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. That Crowe’s character has not made a substantive change seems clear to me in the end in that once the story he wishes to paint seems securely imprinted on the boy, he is ready to go back to what he was before the moment. Nothing has changed. It was merely catharsis instead of grace. His character has not changed. He has merely had a self-delusional, self-help moment, in his case involving the death of a lot of others, for a cathartic “choice”. The story of moral action, according to this view, is a mere story we construct- a captive truth, like the ark born away by the Philistines. Crowe’s character bears away the ark, the symbol of the Lord’s presence, as a story he cherishes like an aesthetic bauble, something he does not comprehend. Moral action has become merely an aesthetic notion, a “glinting transiency”. (Nietzschean aesthetic materialism, anyone?)
The character is similar in some ways to the main character played by Tom Cruise in Collateral, another violent movie which lionizes a character who is a fool, a Social Darwinist Nietzschean materialist, who like Wade, mentors others to sieze life by embracing his ethos of moral fog, “beyond good and evil” mentality, like a beast, a wolf, freeing itself to live at bottom by the fundamental truth of its assumed biological nature, a sham authenticity from which springs a fountain of evil. (In that movie the character invokes Darwin’s name as justification for his nihilism).
Contrast that with what Hauerwas says of Alasdair MacIntyre’s lifework: “If I am right about the trajectory of MacIntyre’s work, the central contention in After Virtue is his remark that ‘the concept of an intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action”. If I understand right, this means, applied to moral philosophy and to “3:10 to Yuma” that the choices have become almost unintelligible and absurd, mummified returns of the dead, because they are removed from the context of character in community upheld by the grace and provision of God. As the sociologist/philosopher Charles Taylor says, the moral sources have been occulted. The assumptions of modernity are driving one to it. It is better to seek a respite from the object lessons God gives in such cases by prayer and fasting and humbling ourselves before the Lord and listening to the deep call to our depths rather than giving way to the pretentious mystique of the Satanic.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
"Fools"
“One would think that the generation I have the honor of living in must be a kingdom of gods. But this is by no means so.; the vigor, the courage, that wants to be the creator of its own good fortune in this way, indeed, its own creator, is an illusion, and when the age loses the tragic, it gains despair. In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he becomes ludicrous.” –Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part 1, “The Tragic in Ancient Drama”, I-123, (p. 145).
“Now, what will this human voice say? It will say: Man must be biologically re-bred. The obsolete apparatus of the created human organism must be modernized. ‘Biometrics’ (as this new method is called) will take these long-since outworn designs of the Creator, this hoary and antiquated old dodderer, and breed the new man, the space man. Why do I mention this story? Because it expresses a feeling about life which is shared more or less by all of us, even though it may not be stated as drastically as it is here. We can describe this feeling by reference to an idea which has already become almost a commonplace: we are convinced that we can make anything. Good heavens, what have we not made with out technology! We can see things that happen a thousand miles away, [etc.]…why shouldn’t we be able also to change the biological construction of the author of all these things, man himself? After all, this is what the Marxists have always wanted to do. All you need to do- this is their formula- is to change the social conditions and man will change. Then you can turn him from a person with an unpredictable will and an unmanageable conscience into a compliant marionette, indeed, into an insect which will conform without friction to the termite state. The possibilities are endless. No rules are laid down for us, nothing is prescribed as far as creation is concerned; we are not limited by any alleged Lord of the world. “Everything is created,” you say. Nonsense! Everything can be made!... They have their proper place in it because all this concerns our soul. For anybody who holds that everything can be made must want to make everything. And anybody who has taken everything into hand must then keep on moving that hand. He can no longer be still. Our overactivity, which constantly keeps us on the merry-go-round and yet, no matter how fast we go, gets us nowhere but only makes us dizzy, is not caused by the fact that we were so nervous or that we had no time. It is just the opposite. We are nervous and we have no time because we think everything will stop without us and because we think we are so tremendously important- we parvenus in this old business of creation! And this is why we can never let anything get out of our hands and be entrusted to others. That’s why we hold on to everything convulsively and thus wear ourselves out all over again. Undoubtedly, all this is connected with the ultimate decisions of our life and not so much at all with medicine or with the problem of our modern way of life. And because we have thus taken over the management of the bankrupt assets of creation, because now we do everything ourselves and therefore must always be producing something, we never get away from constant care and concern. For anybody who takes everything upon himself finds that everything depends on himself…Luther once said, ‘While I drink my little glass of Wittenberg beer the gospel runs its course.’ That is truly the finest and most comforting thing I have ever heard said about beer and trust in God….The fanatics who believe that man can “make” everything are really fools at bottom. They are not realistic at all, even though they have the cold, sober eyes of hardheaded men of fact. But the man who has grasped the mystery of the seed growing secretly and, like the farmer in the parable, goes out and does his part of the job and then commits the fields to God and lies down to sleep in his name- that man is doing not only the most godly thing but the wisest thing. For godliness and wisdom are far more closely related than out philosophy and the wisdom of the ‘managers’ ever dream.” –Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus, (1959), “The Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly”, p. 84-85.
"Of course, there was always a certain oafish audacity in Fletcher’s degenerate driveling about “morons” and “defectives,” given that there is good cause to suspect, from a purely utilitarian vantage, that academic ethicists—especially those like Fletcher, who are notoriously mediocre thinkers, possessed of small culture, no discernible speculative gifts, no records of substantive philosophical achievement, and execrable prose styles—constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world? And should those men be permitted, in their turn, to sire offspring? I ask this question entirely in earnest, because I think it helps to identify the one indubitable truth about all social movements towards eugenics: namely, that the values that will determine which lives are worth living, and which not, will always be the province of persons of vicious temperament. If I were asked to decide what qualities to suppress or encourage in the human species, I might first attempt to discover if there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to moral idiocy and then, if there is, to eliminate it; then there would be no more Joseph Fletchers (or Peter Singers, or Linus Paulings, or James Rachels), and I might think all is well. But, of course, the very idea is a contradiction in terms. Decisions regarding who should or should not live can, by definition, be made only by those who believe such decisions should be made; and therein lies the horror that nothing can ever exorcise from the ideology behind human bioengineering. Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so risibly fabulous in its prognostications, and so unrelated to anything that genomic research yet promises, that it can scarcely be regarded as anything more than a pathetic dream; but the metaphysical principles it presumes regarding the nature of the human are anything but eccentric. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a manifestly brutal mind, desperately anxious to believe himself superior to the common run of men, one who apparently received some sort of crypto-erotic thrill from his cruel fantasies of creating a slave race, and of literally branding others as his genetic inferiors, and of exercising power over the minds and bodies of the low-born. And yet his principles continue to win adherents in the academy and beyond it, and his basic presuppositions about the value and meaning of life are the common grammar of a shockingly large portion of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however modest, of improving the species through genetic planning and manipulation, it will be exclusively those who hold such principles and embrace such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/hart.htm
“I repeat: Let no one take me as a fool. But if you do, then tolerate me just as you would a fool, so that I may do a little boasting. In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would but as a fool. Since many are boasting in the way the world does, I too will boast. You gladly put up with fools since you are so wise! In fact, you even put up with any who enslave you or exploit you or take advantage of you or push themselves forward or slap you in the face. To my shame I admit that we were too weak for that!” 2 Corinthians 11: 16-21
“Now, what will this human voice say? It will say: Man must be biologically re-bred. The obsolete apparatus of the created human organism must be modernized. ‘Biometrics’ (as this new method is called) will take these long-since outworn designs of the Creator, this hoary and antiquated old dodderer, and breed the new man, the space man. Why do I mention this story? Because it expresses a feeling about life which is shared more or less by all of us, even though it may not be stated as drastically as it is here. We can describe this feeling by reference to an idea which has already become almost a commonplace: we are convinced that we can make anything. Good heavens, what have we not made with out technology! We can see things that happen a thousand miles away, [etc.]…why shouldn’t we be able also to change the biological construction of the author of all these things, man himself? After all, this is what the Marxists have always wanted to do. All you need to do- this is their formula- is to change the social conditions and man will change. Then you can turn him from a person with an unpredictable will and an unmanageable conscience into a compliant marionette, indeed, into an insect which will conform without friction to the termite state. The possibilities are endless. No rules are laid down for us, nothing is prescribed as far as creation is concerned; we are not limited by any alleged Lord of the world. “Everything is created,” you say. Nonsense! Everything can be made!... They have their proper place in it because all this concerns our soul. For anybody who holds that everything can be made must want to make everything. And anybody who has taken everything into hand must then keep on moving that hand. He can no longer be still. Our overactivity, which constantly keeps us on the merry-go-round and yet, no matter how fast we go, gets us nowhere but only makes us dizzy, is not caused by the fact that we were so nervous or that we had no time. It is just the opposite. We are nervous and we have no time because we think everything will stop without us and because we think we are so tremendously important- we parvenus in this old business of creation! And this is why we can never let anything get out of our hands and be entrusted to others. That’s why we hold on to everything convulsively and thus wear ourselves out all over again. Undoubtedly, all this is connected with the ultimate decisions of our life and not so much at all with medicine or with the problem of our modern way of life. And because we have thus taken over the management of the bankrupt assets of creation, because now we do everything ourselves and therefore must always be producing something, we never get away from constant care and concern. For anybody who takes everything upon himself finds that everything depends on himself…Luther once said, ‘While I drink my little glass of Wittenberg beer the gospel runs its course.’ That is truly the finest and most comforting thing I have ever heard said about beer and trust in God….The fanatics who believe that man can “make” everything are really fools at bottom. They are not realistic at all, even though they have the cold, sober eyes of hardheaded men of fact. But the man who has grasped the mystery of the seed growing secretly and, like the farmer in the parable, goes out and does his part of the job and then commits the fields to God and lies down to sleep in his name- that man is doing not only the most godly thing but the wisest thing. For godliness and wisdom are far more closely related than out philosophy and the wisdom of the ‘managers’ ever dream.” –Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus, (1959), “The Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly”, p. 84-85.
"Of course, there was always a certain oafish audacity in Fletcher’s degenerate driveling about “morons” and “defectives,” given that there is good cause to suspect, from a purely utilitarian vantage, that academic ethicists—especially those like Fletcher, who are notoriously mediocre thinkers, possessed of small culture, no discernible speculative gifts, no records of substantive philosophical achievement, and execrable prose styles—constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world? And should those men be permitted, in their turn, to sire offspring? I ask this question entirely in earnest, because I think it helps to identify the one indubitable truth about all social movements towards eugenics: namely, that the values that will determine which lives are worth living, and which not, will always be the province of persons of vicious temperament. If I were asked to decide what qualities to suppress or encourage in the human species, I might first attempt to discover if there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to moral idiocy and then, if there is, to eliminate it; then there would be no more Joseph Fletchers (or Peter Singers, or Linus Paulings, or James Rachels), and I might think all is well. But, of course, the very idea is a contradiction in terms. Decisions regarding who should or should not live can, by definition, be made only by those who believe such decisions should be made; and therein lies the horror that nothing can ever exorcise from the ideology behind human bioengineering. Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so risibly fabulous in its prognostications, and so unrelated to anything that genomic research yet promises, that it can scarcely be regarded as anything more than a pathetic dream; but the metaphysical principles it presumes regarding the nature of the human are anything but eccentric. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a manifestly brutal mind, desperately anxious to believe himself superior to the common run of men, one who apparently received some sort of crypto-erotic thrill from his cruel fantasies of creating a slave race, and of literally branding others as his genetic inferiors, and of exercising power over the minds and bodies of the low-born. And yet his principles continue to win adherents in the academy and beyond it, and his basic presuppositions about the value and meaning of life are the common grammar of a shockingly large portion of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however modest, of improving the species through genetic planning and manipulation, it will be exclusively those who hold such principles and embrace such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/hart.htm
“I repeat: Let no one take me as a fool. But if you do, then tolerate me just as you would a fool, so that I may do a little boasting. In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would but as a fool. Since many are boasting in the way the world does, I too will boast. You gladly put up with fools since you are so wise! In fact, you even put up with any who enslave you or exploit you or take advantage of you or push themselves forward or slap you in the face. To my shame I admit that we were too weak for that!” 2 Corinthians 11: 16-21
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Poor, Powerless America
"Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by the measure of our refusal to accept this fact and its implications. Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themsleves, since they must always react to the forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame." -Marilynne Robinson, "Facing Reality", The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.78-79.
Truth is God.
[Something we should pause to consider, it seems to me, is the stress these two men of unquestioned moral strength and courage lay on truth, which in one place Ghandi calls "my God". The vey concept of truth is now questioned among the church as well as outside but we should ask, it seems to me, whether we can act nobly like these men if we forsake the concept, the quest and the life of truth. A book by Richard Rorty and another has the title "What Use Is Truth?" but it seems the wrong question to ask. If truth is used it is abused in our hearts and minds. Truth is God.]
Ghandi on Truth (and Study): "Generally speaking, observation of the law of Truth is understood merely to mean that we must speak the truth. But we... should understand... Truth in a much wider sense. There should be Truth in thought, Truth in speech, and Truth in action. To the man who has realized this Truth in its fulness, nothing else remains to be known, because all knowledge is necesaarily included in it. What is not inlcuded in it is not Truth, and so not true knowledge; and there can be no inward peace without true knowledge. If we once learn how to apply this never-failing test of Truth, we will at one be able tofind out what is worth doing, what is worth seeing, what is worth reading." - from Yeravda Mandir, qtd. in Ghandhi: A Man for Humanity, p. 19. Ghandhi's word cause me to recall Solzhenitsyn's, which parallels Ghandi's so I will also quote at length a relevant passage from Solzhenitsyn here what I have quoted elsewhere: ""When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ``I am violence. Run away, make way for me--I will crush you.'' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally--since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies--all loyalty lies in that. And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me. This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism. We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth out loud or to express aloud what we think. It's not necessary. It's dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think. This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier--it's dangerous even to say this--than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated. Our path is to talk away fro the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world. So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood--of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies--or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries. And from that day onward he: Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth. Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role. Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music. Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue. Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept. Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities. Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question. Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda. Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed. Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook. No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice. But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude. " -Sozhenitsyn in "Live Not by Lies!", http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/livenotbylies.html
Ghandi on Truth (and Study): "Generally speaking, observation of the law of Truth is understood merely to mean that we must speak the truth. But we... should understand... Truth in a much wider sense. There should be Truth in thought, Truth in speech, and Truth in action. To the man who has realized this Truth in its fulness, nothing else remains to be known, because all knowledge is necesaarily included in it. What is not inlcuded in it is not Truth, and so not true knowledge; and there can be no inward peace without true knowledge. If we once learn how to apply this never-failing test of Truth, we will at one be able tofind out what is worth doing, what is worth seeing, what is worth reading." - from Yeravda Mandir, qtd. in Ghandhi: A Man for Humanity, p. 19. Ghandhi's word cause me to recall Solzhenitsyn's, which parallels Ghandi's so I will also quote at length a relevant passage from Solzhenitsyn here what I have quoted elsewhere: ""When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ``I am violence. Run away, make way for me--I will crush you.'' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally--since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies--all loyalty lies in that. And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me. This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism. We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth out loud or to express aloud what we think. It's not necessary. It's dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think. This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier--it's dangerous even to say this--than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated. Our path is to talk away fro the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world. So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood--of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies--or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries. And from that day onward he: Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth. Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role. Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music. Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue. Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept. Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities. Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question. Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda. Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed. Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook. No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice. But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude. " -Sozhenitsyn in "Live Not by Lies!", http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/livenotbylies.html
Brave New World, Materialism and Artificial Happiness
"Brave New World at 75" “‘Mr. Huxley, of course, sees so clearly what the psychologists do not see, that such a world must give up not only war, but also spiritual conflicts of any kind, not only superstition, but also religion, not only literary criticism but also great creative art of whatever kind, not only economic chaos, but also all the beauty of the old traditional things, not only the hard and ugly parts of ethics, but the tender and beautiful parts too.’ Lamenting the death of metaphysics, Needham wrote that science, which was born of philosophy, had overtaken its parent to become “the only substratum for Reason” and “nothing more nor less than the Mythology accompanying a Technique.”
[ME: *Science was born of philosophy, especially Baconian and Cartesian philosophy. It is not a surprise that science has overtaken its parent, philosophy, when one considers that the philosophy that it was largely born from heaped contempt on philosophy and religion. See Descartes’s Meditations.
*Suppressing spiritual conflicts based on a wager that everything is material would seemingly be sensible if materialism was adequately shown to be true. But if it is not, solving spiritual conflicts by trying to suppress spiritual reality is bound to exacerbate the spiritual condition causing the conflict to express itself in more extreme ways. That is what happened in the political mass movements of modernity.
*The Epicurean mythos of materialism attempts to solve mankind’s problems by dismissing religious claims altogether. This “terrible simplification” is hardly a cure. The Soviet Union was powered by a materialist philosophy whose ostensibly humanitarian motives of justice did not end as the materialists predicted. The Enlightenment solution to the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proven a hoary nightmare. One might consider Nietzsche’s maxim at this point (paraphrasing from memory): “When you go to hunt monsters, be careful that you do not become one yourself.” That is indeed what happened. Now collective amnesia is cultivated to prop up the materialist narrative of the world, the meaning of unmeaning that they fitfully ascribe to the cosmos.]
“Needham saw in Huxley’s book an illustration of something Russell had observed: the mutinous tendency of the modern scientific enterprise, as the means of mastering nature overtake its original intended ends. “It is as if a number of passages from Mr. Bertrand Russell’s recent book The Scientific Outlook had burst into flower, and had rearranged themselves in patches of color like man-eating orchids in a tropical forest,” he suggested. Indeed, Russell’s blueprint of a scientifically ordered society in his 1931 book is very similar to Huxley’s World State, highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency.” - Caitrin Nicol , “Brave New World at 75”, New Atlantis, Number 16, Spring 2007. (Quoting Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist and embryologist contemporaneous with Aldous Huxley). http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/16/nicol.htm
[ME: “highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency”. In other words, Epicurean ataraxia. The lukewarmth of it and the repugnance naturally felt toward this including by Russell is of the essence. The root suppression of primal reality in order to make the flashing, soulless halls of power is sensed but not understood by the materialist who axiomatically, schematically can not incorporate the signals of transcendence into his understanding, making his understanding a mockery of knowledge the more perfect it gets. Only in the materialists imperfection and backsliding from their doctrine is their knowledge good. ]
“In a review of Brave New World called “We Don’t Want to Be Happy,” Russell elaborated on the promise and perils of this scientific deliverance. Huxley, he wrote, “has undertaken to make us sad by the contemplation of a world without sadness.” After describing the material comforts of the fictional society, he reflected on the puzzling instinct to recoil from it:In spite of these merits, the world which Mr. Huxley portrays is such as to arouse disgust in every normal reader, and obviously in Mr. Huxley himself. I have been asking myself why, and trying hard to think that his well-regulated world would really be an improvement upon the one in which we live. At moments I can make myself think this, but I can never make myself feel it. The feeling of revulsion against a well-ordered world has various sources: one of these is that we do not value happiness as much as we sometimes think we do.Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley’s World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the governed rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force—and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of something people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling should be able to distinguish these things while reason cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called “the natural forms and expressions of life itself.One such expression, of course, is a certain measure of autonomy over the meaning and direction of our lives. Its total absence in the World State is ominously signified by the professional title of the genetic engineers: the Assistant Predestinators. But conflating the influences and experiences that shape our identities with the biological reconstruction of life, Russell, revolted but bemused, reasoned himself into a corner:But we are shocked—more, I think, than we ought to be—by the idea of molding people scientifically instead of allowing them to grow. We have a notion that we can choose what we will be, and that we should not wish to be robbed of this choice by scientific manipulators drugging us before we are born, giving us electric shocks in infancy, and whispering platitudes to us throughout our childhood.But this feeling is, of course, irrational. In the course of nature the embryo grows through natural causes. The infant learns haphazard lessons of pleasure and pain which determine his taste. The child listens to moral propaganda, which may fail through being unscientific, but which, none the less, is intended to mold the character just as much as Mr. Huxley’s whispering machines. It seems, therefore, that we do not object to molding a human being, provided it is done badly; we only object when it is done well.”In the end, Russell said, “what we cling to so desperately is the illusion of freedom, an illusion which is tacitly negated by all moral instruction and all propaganda. To us human life would be intolerable without this illusion. In Mr. Huxley’s Brave New World men live quite comfortably without it.”[ME: Russell, like Dawkins today and so many other materialists, in their idolatrous exuberance for the power of the method, become apologists for the enslavery of man. He, like Dawkins, must axiomatically call freedom an illusion. To me this seems fundamentally because freedom can not be incorporated into the mathematical method, which would mean that Descartes was wrong in his extrapolation, the modern materialistic extrapolation. No, man must be cipherable under the Method as well. This is the initial commitment. You don’t want to have an embarrassing God of the Gaps exposure moment do you? So stick to the Method like a madman even when it means sacrifice, massive sacrifice. Thus an expression of faith such as the following by Sam Harris is commonplace: “In a follow-up article, Fish deepens his inquiry by looking at the kind of evidence that atheists like Dawkins and Harris present for their "scientific" outlook. Harris, for example, writes that "there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain." (Qtd. in: http://www.tothesource.org/7_17_2007/7_17_2007.htm)For the sake of these future dream worlds present life is to be sacrificed. Such was the Communist schtick as well, and they sacrificed millions of lives to that illusory end.What I find especially interesting in this article’s treatment of Russell is what it reveals of Russell’s ambivalence, of his unrest in exerting his “logical”, “scientific” point of view when it comes to human freedom and happiness. He struggles with Huxley’s insight. After all, it is a story envisioning his materialist dream world. He cannot figure out why it is repugnant and suggests it is because we don’t value happiness. His ambivalence is revealing of the materialist suppression of reality in their pursuit, in an idolatrous fever, of a feeling-less world of quantified happiness, one that repulses them when it is reflected to them in a prophetic mirror. The aspect of human freedom is a key aspect of materialism. I do not understand those who claim freedom and meaning as materialists (perhaps if they could explain) but their adopted spokesmen are clear enough in their repudiation of these. But it necessarily involves a suppression and disingenuousness to go forward with the materialist program. I sympathize with those who call Marx and Nietzsche “intellectual swindlers” on this point. If everything is determined by things outside of us, who is driving the boat? And why are materialists moralizing and avidly, in some cases, rabidly, trying to persuade and move the course of events as if they were, well, free agents? Because they lie and suppress. That seems the best reason I can make out for how they could hold such belief contradictory to their behavior. Has anyone come up with a better answer?]."In the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment, he pits Christ’s offer of redemption against the church’s promise of security:With us everyone will be happy, and they will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in your freedom, everywhere. Oh, we shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us. Will we be right, do you think, or will we be lying? They themselves will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom led them."{ME: How to escape the weight of glory in being free? Succumb to materialist doctrine}.“In the thematic climax of the novel, Mond defends his spiritually arid civilization by recalling the terrible history that preceded it. Love, literature, liberty, and even science itself are sacrificed in this most scientific of societies—all to serve the goals of happiness and stability. “Happiness,” Mond says, “is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.” To achieve lasting social happiness, all else must be given up…”“Christ’s answer is a resurrection and a kiss; John parries, thrusts, and grandstands. His haphazard education has ill prepared him to argue with the World Controller—but armed with Shakespeare, desperation, and an excess of nobility, he bravely embraces those things which once made bravery necessary:
“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond.
“Quite apart from God—though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”
“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied.
“Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”
“V.P.S.?”“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re welcome,” he said.”
---
“… In the foreword to Brave New World’s 1946 edition, Huxley regretted not giving John an alternative to “insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other,” an alternative he would later try (unconvincingly) to negotiate in his positive techno-utopia Island. But read in conversation with The Brothers Karamazov, West saw that something deeper is on trial: “Mr. Huxley is attacking the new spirit which tries to induce man to divert in continual insignificant movements relating to the material framework of life all his force, and to abandon the practice of speculating about his existence and his destiny.”…
[ME: This is another key aspect, it seems to me, of embracing philosophical/ religious materialism: suppression of primal questions. One of the evasive movements in currency today of the practice of elevating to the level of certainty speculation about multi-verses, to replace the ancient materialist belief in the eternality of matter. With such a “warranted” belief in place, the question why anything exists at all is put at a further remove, allowing materialists to assume the answer to this question as part of their core doctrine: The universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be (Democritus originally, before Carl Sagan)].“By shifting the question from political control to personal conscience, West’s reading anticipated the decentralized way that many of the particular scientific and cultural furnishings of Huxley’s world have made appearances in ours. Orwell’s and Zamyatin’s predictions of inevitable centralized totalitarian government have not come to pass—and indeed, neither have Huxley’s. But the separation of sex from procreation, and love from sex; the consumption-saturated culture threatening to commodify the consumers; the increasingly physico-chemical attempt to explain and treat a troubled psyche—we did not need bureaucratic threats or hypnopaedic repetitions to want these things, and in this sense Huxley profoundly overestimated (or is it underestimated?) mankind, and his book may, in the deepest sense, have gotten our present all wrong. We chose these things ourselves, uncoerced by terror or war or social engineers. They have been developed to respond to real human hurts and desires; and, as might be expected of human choices, the results and motives have been mixed.”
[ME: *Science was born of philosophy, especially Baconian and Cartesian philosophy. It is not a surprise that science has overtaken its parent, philosophy, when one considers that the philosophy that it was largely born from heaped contempt on philosophy and religion. See Descartes’s Meditations.
*Suppressing spiritual conflicts based on a wager that everything is material would seemingly be sensible if materialism was adequately shown to be true. But if it is not, solving spiritual conflicts by trying to suppress spiritual reality is bound to exacerbate the spiritual condition causing the conflict to express itself in more extreme ways. That is what happened in the political mass movements of modernity.
*The Epicurean mythos of materialism attempts to solve mankind’s problems by dismissing religious claims altogether. This “terrible simplification” is hardly a cure. The Soviet Union was powered by a materialist philosophy whose ostensibly humanitarian motives of justice did not end as the materialists predicted. The Enlightenment solution to the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proven a hoary nightmare. One might consider Nietzsche’s maxim at this point (paraphrasing from memory): “When you go to hunt monsters, be careful that you do not become one yourself.” That is indeed what happened. Now collective amnesia is cultivated to prop up the materialist narrative of the world, the meaning of unmeaning that they fitfully ascribe to the cosmos.]
“Needham saw in Huxley’s book an illustration of something Russell had observed: the mutinous tendency of the modern scientific enterprise, as the means of mastering nature overtake its original intended ends. “It is as if a number of passages from Mr. Bertrand Russell’s recent book The Scientific Outlook had burst into flower, and had rearranged themselves in patches of color like man-eating orchids in a tropical forest,” he suggested. Indeed, Russell’s blueprint of a scientifically ordered society in his 1931 book is very similar to Huxley’s World State, highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency.” - Caitrin Nicol , “Brave New World at 75”, New Atlantis, Number 16, Spring 2007. (Quoting Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist and embryologist contemporaneous with Aldous Huxley). http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/16/nicol.htm
[ME: “highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency”. In other words, Epicurean ataraxia. The lukewarmth of it and the repugnance naturally felt toward this including by Russell is of the essence. The root suppression of primal reality in order to make the flashing, soulless halls of power is sensed but not understood by the materialist who axiomatically, schematically can not incorporate the signals of transcendence into his understanding, making his understanding a mockery of knowledge the more perfect it gets. Only in the materialists imperfection and backsliding from their doctrine is their knowledge good. ]
“In a review of Brave New World called “We Don’t Want to Be Happy,” Russell elaborated on the promise and perils of this scientific deliverance. Huxley, he wrote, “has undertaken to make us sad by the contemplation of a world without sadness.” After describing the material comforts of the fictional society, he reflected on the puzzling instinct to recoil from it:In spite of these merits, the world which Mr. Huxley portrays is such as to arouse disgust in every normal reader, and obviously in Mr. Huxley himself. I have been asking myself why, and trying hard to think that his well-regulated world would really be an improvement upon the one in which we live. At moments I can make myself think this, but I can never make myself feel it. The feeling of revulsion against a well-ordered world has various sources: one of these is that we do not value happiness as much as we sometimes think we do.Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley’s World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the governed rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force—and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of something people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling should be able to distinguish these things while reason cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called “the natural forms and expressions of life itself.One such expression, of course, is a certain measure of autonomy over the meaning and direction of our lives. Its total absence in the World State is ominously signified by the professional title of the genetic engineers: the Assistant Predestinators. But conflating the influences and experiences that shape our identities with the biological reconstruction of life, Russell, revolted but bemused, reasoned himself into a corner:But we are shocked—more, I think, than we ought to be—by the idea of molding people scientifically instead of allowing them to grow. We have a notion that we can choose what we will be, and that we should not wish to be robbed of this choice by scientific manipulators drugging us before we are born, giving us electric shocks in infancy, and whispering platitudes to us throughout our childhood.But this feeling is, of course, irrational. In the course of nature the embryo grows through natural causes. The infant learns haphazard lessons of pleasure and pain which determine his taste. The child listens to moral propaganda, which may fail through being unscientific, but which, none the less, is intended to mold the character just as much as Mr. Huxley’s whispering machines. It seems, therefore, that we do not object to molding a human being, provided it is done badly; we only object when it is done well.”In the end, Russell said, “what we cling to so desperately is the illusion of freedom, an illusion which is tacitly negated by all moral instruction and all propaganda. To us human life would be intolerable without this illusion. In Mr. Huxley’s Brave New World men live quite comfortably without it.”[ME: Russell, like Dawkins today and so many other materialists, in their idolatrous exuberance for the power of the method, become apologists for the enslavery of man. He, like Dawkins, must axiomatically call freedom an illusion. To me this seems fundamentally because freedom can not be incorporated into the mathematical method, which would mean that Descartes was wrong in his extrapolation, the modern materialistic extrapolation. No, man must be cipherable under the Method as well. This is the initial commitment. You don’t want to have an embarrassing God of the Gaps exposure moment do you? So stick to the Method like a madman even when it means sacrifice, massive sacrifice. Thus an expression of faith such as the following by Sam Harris is commonplace: “In a follow-up article, Fish deepens his inquiry by looking at the kind of evidence that atheists like Dawkins and Harris present for their "scientific" outlook. Harris, for example, writes that "there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain." (Qtd. in: http://www.tothesource.org/7_17_2007/7_17_2007.htm)For the sake of these future dream worlds present life is to be sacrificed. Such was the Communist schtick as well, and they sacrificed millions of lives to that illusory end.What I find especially interesting in this article’s treatment of Russell is what it reveals of Russell’s ambivalence, of his unrest in exerting his “logical”, “scientific” point of view when it comes to human freedom and happiness. He struggles with Huxley’s insight. After all, it is a story envisioning his materialist dream world. He cannot figure out why it is repugnant and suggests it is because we don’t value happiness. His ambivalence is revealing of the materialist suppression of reality in their pursuit, in an idolatrous fever, of a feeling-less world of quantified happiness, one that repulses them when it is reflected to them in a prophetic mirror. The aspect of human freedom is a key aspect of materialism. I do not understand those who claim freedom and meaning as materialists (perhaps if they could explain) but their adopted spokesmen are clear enough in their repudiation of these. But it necessarily involves a suppression and disingenuousness to go forward with the materialist program. I sympathize with those who call Marx and Nietzsche “intellectual swindlers” on this point. If everything is determined by things outside of us, who is driving the boat? And why are materialists moralizing and avidly, in some cases, rabidly, trying to persuade and move the course of events as if they were, well, free agents? Because they lie and suppress. That seems the best reason I can make out for how they could hold such belief contradictory to their behavior. Has anyone come up with a better answer?]."In the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment, he pits Christ’s offer of redemption against the church’s promise of security:With us everyone will be happy, and they will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in your freedom, everywhere. Oh, we shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us. Will we be right, do you think, or will we be lying? They themselves will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom led them."{ME: How to escape the weight of glory in being free? Succumb to materialist doctrine}.“In the thematic climax of the novel, Mond defends his spiritually arid civilization by recalling the terrible history that preceded it. Love, literature, liberty, and even science itself are sacrificed in this most scientific of societies—all to serve the goals of happiness and stability. “Happiness,” Mond says, “is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.” To achieve lasting social happiness, all else must be given up…”“Christ’s answer is a resurrection and a kiss; John parries, thrusts, and grandstands. His haphazard education has ill prepared him to argue with the World Controller—but armed with Shakespeare, desperation, and an excess of nobility, he bravely embraces those things which once made bravery necessary:
“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond.
“Quite apart from God—though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”
“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied.
“Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”
“V.P.S.?”“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re welcome,” he said.”
---
“… In the foreword to Brave New World’s 1946 edition, Huxley regretted not giving John an alternative to “insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other,” an alternative he would later try (unconvincingly) to negotiate in his positive techno-utopia Island. But read in conversation with The Brothers Karamazov, West saw that something deeper is on trial: “Mr. Huxley is attacking the new spirit which tries to induce man to divert in continual insignificant movements relating to the material framework of life all his force, and to abandon the practice of speculating about his existence and his destiny.”…
[ME: This is another key aspect, it seems to me, of embracing philosophical/ religious materialism: suppression of primal questions. One of the evasive movements in currency today of the practice of elevating to the level of certainty speculation about multi-verses, to replace the ancient materialist belief in the eternality of matter. With such a “warranted” belief in place, the question why anything exists at all is put at a further remove, allowing materialists to assume the answer to this question as part of their core doctrine: The universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be (Democritus originally, before Carl Sagan)].“By shifting the question from political control to personal conscience, West’s reading anticipated the decentralized way that many of the particular scientific and cultural furnishings of Huxley’s world have made appearances in ours. Orwell’s and Zamyatin’s predictions of inevitable centralized totalitarian government have not come to pass—and indeed, neither have Huxley’s. But the separation of sex from procreation, and love from sex; the consumption-saturated culture threatening to commodify the consumers; the increasingly physico-chemical attempt to explain and treat a troubled psyche—we did not need bureaucratic threats or hypnopaedic repetitions to want these things, and in this sense Huxley profoundly overestimated (or is it underestimated?) mankind, and his book may, in the deepest sense, have gotten our present all wrong. We chose these things ourselves, uncoerced by terror or war or social engineers. They have been developed to respond to real human hurts and desires; and, as might be expected of human choices, the results and motives have been mixed.”
Saturday, April 07, 2007
"When you go to the Barbarian tribes"
"Zixia said: 'The various craftsmen occupy workshops in order to complete their tasks, but the gentleman studies in order to develope his Way." ]."- Confucius, Analects, Bk. 19, 7.
"Fan Chi asked about humaneness. The Master said: 'Courtesy in private life, reverence in handling business, loyalty in relationships with others. They should not be set aside even if one visits the barbarian tribes."- Confucius, Analects, Bk. 13, 19.
[There is no one I am willing to call Master but Jesus Christ and there is no Way but the Way now that I know enough to think of it. But this does not prevent me from seeing the good and the nobility in the writings of Confucius. The two sayings somehow struck a note in me. Though I remembered them slightly different than they appear upon review, the first helped me to reflect and sharpen my awareness of the necessity of making studies subservient to the goal of the transformation of the mind in Christ. They must serve this end, all the more now that He is known to me through the gospel witnessed in human context. The second I remembered paraphrased like this: "When you go to the barbarian tribes, do not cease to be a gentleman." Frankly, I see a certain level of barbarity and lazy brutishness and decadent indirection and glorying in sin. I see it but Isaah would really see it, I think. But, again, the idea is not to be trapped in the hostilities of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of ours minds. So the expected power over one, may it be broken by willing acceptance of the cross.]
"You, have you heard the six sayings about the six hidden consequences?' When he replied that he had not, the Master went on: 'Sit down and I will tell you. If one loves humaneness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is folly; if one loves understanding but does not love learning, the consequence of this is unorthodoxy; if one loves good faith but does not love learning, the consequence of this is damaging behavior; if one loves straightforwardness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is rudeness; if one loves courage but doe not love learning, the consequence of this is rebelliousness; if one loves strength but does not love learning, the consequence of this is violence." Bk. 17, #7.
[What can the part I emboldened mean in Confucius's context? What does his conservatism mean? I don't fully know so I wonder how much I am just using these sayings as a convenient peg to impose my meanings. I don't know. But I want to look at what such a statment might mean in a Christian context because it seems helpful... (the others are more clearly helpful, it seems to me). Understanding without love is judged for what it is in 1 Corinthians 13- a resounding gong. Pascal writes:
"I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God" (#77).
It may be that the resounding gong of nuclear explosions will be the peak of scientific achievement that would destroy all flesh except for the return of Christ at the end times, if we allow ourselves through science and technology to become pathologically materialistic (methodological naturalism becoming pathological naturalism). Or perhaps, the gong of machines still running after the heat has killed the last human. Or, we show some restraint for the sake of the really valuable and livable.]
"Fan Chi asked about humaneness. The Master said: 'Courtesy in private life, reverence in handling business, loyalty in relationships with others. They should not be set aside even if one visits the barbarian tribes."- Confucius, Analects, Bk. 13, 19.
[There is no one I am willing to call Master but Jesus Christ and there is no Way but the Way now that I know enough to think of it. But this does not prevent me from seeing the good and the nobility in the writings of Confucius. The two sayings somehow struck a note in me. Though I remembered them slightly different than they appear upon review, the first helped me to reflect and sharpen my awareness of the necessity of making studies subservient to the goal of the transformation of the mind in Christ. They must serve this end, all the more now that He is known to me through the gospel witnessed in human context. The second I remembered paraphrased like this: "When you go to the barbarian tribes, do not cease to be a gentleman." Frankly, I see a certain level of barbarity and lazy brutishness and decadent indirection and glorying in sin. I see it but Isaah would really see it, I think. But, again, the idea is not to be trapped in the hostilities of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of ours minds. So the expected power over one, may it be broken by willing acceptance of the cross.]
"You, have you heard the six sayings about the six hidden consequences?' When he replied that he had not, the Master went on: 'Sit down and I will tell you. If one loves humaneness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is folly; if one loves understanding but does not love learning, the consequence of this is unorthodoxy; if one loves good faith but does not love learning, the consequence of this is damaging behavior; if one loves straightforwardness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is rudeness; if one loves courage but doe not love learning, the consequence of this is rebelliousness; if one loves strength but does not love learning, the consequence of this is violence." Bk. 17, #7.
[What can the part I emboldened mean in Confucius's context? What does his conservatism mean? I don't fully know so I wonder how much I am just using these sayings as a convenient peg to impose my meanings. I don't know. But I want to look at what such a statment might mean in a Christian context because it seems helpful... (the others are more clearly helpful, it seems to me). Understanding without love is judged for what it is in 1 Corinthians 13- a resounding gong. Pascal writes:
"I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God" (#77).
It may be that the resounding gong of nuclear explosions will be the peak of scientific achievement that would destroy all flesh except for the return of Christ at the end times, if we allow ourselves through science and technology to become pathologically materialistic (methodological naturalism becoming pathological naturalism). Or perhaps, the gong of machines still running after the heat has killed the last human. Or, we show some restraint for the sake of the really valuable and livable.]
The Power Which Posited Us From Two Different Perspectives
There is a wonderful documentary film named Emmanuel's Gift which tells of the overcoming spirit and triumph of a handicapped boy from Ghana who grew to be a man that is inspiring those who are largely discarded and considered accursed in his society, the handicapped, to take courage and to believe and live joyously and overcoming though given a difficult lot in life. The film introduces you to others that have had in some ways even starker challenges- a man hit by a car twice, the founder of an association for handicapped athletes shows an amazing spirit of faith and overcoming. I think of this in relationship to my reading of Kierkegaard today who also had his own personally gigantic struggles in which it seems he overcame in his Christian faith. Kierkegaard describes the psychology of a kind of despair that one is tempted to in suffering a misfortune, and as part of his overcoming he is able to to diagnose it, it seems to me, to some extent, to discern the sorrowful state and to affirm the good instead.
"A self which in despair is determined to be itself winces at one pain or another which simply cannot be taken away or separated from its concrete self. Precisely upon this torment the man directs his whole passion, which at last becomes a demoniac rage. Even if at this point God in heaven and all his angels were to offer to help him out of it- no, now he doesn't want it, now it is too late, he once would have given everything to be rid of this torment but was made to wait, now that's all past, now he would rather rage against everything, he, the one man in the whole of existence who is the most unjustly treated, to whom it is especially important to have his torment at hand, important that no one should take it from him- for thus he can convince himself that he is in the right. This at last becomes so firmly fixed in his head that for a very peculiar reason he is afraid of reternity- for the reason, namely, that it might rid him of his (demoniacally understood) infinite advantage over other men, his (demoniacally understood) justification for being what he is. It is himself he wills to be; he began with the infinite abstraction of the self, and now at last he has become so concrete that it would be an impossibility to be eternal in that sense, and yet he wills in despair to be himself. Ah, demoniac madness! He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him!"- Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, (p. 205-206).
This and other sections in this tightly weaved masterwork (which Kierkegaard said was one of the two best things he had ever written) describes a Christian psychology that it seems to me is a valuable curative given by God to help bring us out of Nietzshcean and Freudian diminuitive psychology. It seems that the greatest and most effective answers to the challenge of Nietzsche is in providing the profounder, more authentic psychology, something which it seems to me Doestoevsky and Kierkegaard provide essential aids for. Part of what I think surpasses Nietzsche in Kierkegaard and Doestoevsky is a grasp of a structure that is more comprehensive and sturdy enough to withstand the tempestuous blast of the arch fury of someone like Nietzsche which it seems is described by Kierkegaard here and even more precisely in the following pages some of which I will quote here:
"it does not even in defiance or defiantly will to be itself, but to be itself in in spite; it does not even will in defiance to tear itself free from the Power which posited it, it wills to intrude on this Power in spite...Revolting against the whole of existence, it thinks it has hold of a proof against it, against its goodness. This proof the despairer thinks he himself is, and that is what he wills to be, therefore he wills to be himself, himself with his torment, in order with this torment to protest against the whole of existence. Whereas the weak despairer will not hear about what comfort eternity has for him, so neither will such a despairer hear about it, but for a different reason, namely because this comfort would be the destruction of him as an objection against the whole of existence..."
(He goes on to make an imaginative analogy here.)
Kierkegaard, like Doestoevsky and Nietzsche, wrote out of experience of intense personal suffering (much of it brought on themselves). Nietzsche had an evangelical Christian father who when Nietzsche was young boy had fallen and suffered brain damage and for a period of time had gone insane before he died. Called the "little pastor" as a child, Nietzsche grew into a virulently anti-Christian writer- perhaps more so than has ever occurred before. What it seems to me is that he excercises in a kind of systematic way an option God has left open to humans and made of himself an objection to God, willing to be by his very self an objection to "the Power which posited him". Kierkegaard was inflicted with a spinal curvature and his relationship too the oppostie sex is said to have amounted to a black comedy. This is not to equate the suffering. How are we to measure the suffering of a person?(I eschew utilitarian calculations of pain as imaginary mathematics. ) In the writings of Kierkegaard, which I am a new comer to, it seems one sees a monumental struggle ending with faith in the living God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He too suffered but rather than succumbing to the despair of being that he describes, probably with no conscious relationship to Nietszche (I have no idea if they were ever aware of each other's writings), it seems he found a vantage point, like the best kind of Danish mountain climber, the vantage point from which to rightly reject the despair that leads to death with which he had been tempted. He testified to a reality and authenticity that are in opposition to Nietzsche's account. So did Doestoevsky who wrote once that his "hallelujah was born out of a furnace of doubt." Nietzsche said of Doestoevsky that "he is the only psychologist from which I have anything to learn." Nietzsche was not all wrong. He had deep perceptions which is why he is largely worthy of his aura of danger. But Kierkegaard and Doestoevsky, in my judgment, had greater and more psychologically and mentally and authentically advantageous perspectives.
"A self which in despair is determined to be itself winces at one pain or another which simply cannot be taken away or separated from its concrete self. Precisely upon this torment the man directs his whole passion, which at last becomes a demoniac rage. Even if at this point God in heaven and all his angels were to offer to help him out of it- no, now he doesn't want it, now it is too late, he once would have given everything to be rid of this torment but was made to wait, now that's all past, now he would rather rage against everything, he, the one man in the whole of existence who is the most unjustly treated, to whom it is especially important to have his torment at hand, important that no one should take it from him- for thus he can convince himself that he is in the right. This at last becomes so firmly fixed in his head that for a very peculiar reason he is afraid of reternity- for the reason, namely, that it might rid him of his (demoniacally understood) infinite advantage over other men, his (demoniacally understood) justification for being what he is. It is himself he wills to be; he began with the infinite abstraction of the self, and now at last he has become so concrete that it would be an impossibility to be eternal in that sense, and yet he wills in despair to be himself. Ah, demoniac madness! He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him!"- Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, (p. 205-206).
This and other sections in this tightly weaved masterwork (which Kierkegaard said was one of the two best things he had ever written) describes a Christian psychology that it seems to me is a valuable curative given by God to help bring us out of Nietzshcean and Freudian diminuitive psychology. It seems that the greatest and most effective answers to the challenge of Nietzsche is in providing the profounder, more authentic psychology, something which it seems to me Doestoevsky and Kierkegaard provide essential aids for. Part of what I think surpasses Nietzsche in Kierkegaard and Doestoevsky is a grasp of a structure that is more comprehensive and sturdy enough to withstand the tempestuous blast of the arch fury of someone like Nietzsche which it seems is described by Kierkegaard here and even more precisely in the following pages some of which I will quote here:
"it does not even in defiance or defiantly will to be itself, but to be itself in in spite; it does not even will in defiance to tear itself free from the Power which posited it, it wills to intrude on this Power in spite...Revolting against the whole of existence, it thinks it has hold of a proof against it, against its goodness. This proof the despairer thinks he himself is, and that is what he wills to be, therefore he wills to be himself, himself with his torment, in order with this torment to protest against the whole of existence. Whereas the weak despairer will not hear about what comfort eternity has for him, so neither will such a despairer hear about it, but for a different reason, namely because this comfort would be the destruction of him as an objection against the whole of existence..."
(He goes on to make an imaginative analogy here.)
Kierkegaard, like Doestoevsky and Nietzsche, wrote out of experience of intense personal suffering (much of it brought on themselves). Nietzsche had an evangelical Christian father who when Nietzsche was young boy had fallen and suffered brain damage and for a period of time had gone insane before he died. Called the "little pastor" as a child, Nietzsche grew into a virulently anti-Christian writer- perhaps more so than has ever occurred before. What it seems to me is that he excercises in a kind of systematic way an option God has left open to humans and made of himself an objection to God, willing to be by his very self an objection to "the Power which posited him". Kierkegaard was inflicted with a spinal curvature and his relationship too the oppostie sex is said to have amounted to a black comedy. This is not to equate the suffering. How are we to measure the suffering of a person?(I eschew utilitarian calculations of pain as imaginary mathematics. ) In the writings of Kierkegaard, which I am a new comer to, it seems one sees a monumental struggle ending with faith in the living God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He too suffered but rather than succumbing to the despair of being that he describes, probably with no conscious relationship to Nietszche (I have no idea if they were ever aware of each other's writings), it seems he found a vantage point, like the best kind of Danish mountain climber, the vantage point from which to rightly reject the despair that leads to death with which he had been tempted. He testified to a reality and authenticity that are in opposition to Nietzsche's account. So did Doestoevsky who wrote once that his "hallelujah was born out of a furnace of doubt." Nietzsche said of Doestoevsky that "he is the only psychologist from which I have anything to learn." Nietzsche was not all wrong. He had deep perceptions which is why he is largely worthy of his aura of danger. But Kierkegaard and Doestoevsky, in my judgment, had greater and more psychologically and mentally and authentically advantageous perspectives.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
State Lotteries are Civic Corruption
“Libertarian defenders of state lotteries can’t have it both ways. If a lottery is, like dry cleaning, a morally legitimate business, then why should it not be open to private enterprise? If a lottery is, like prostitution, a morally objectionable business, then why should the state be engaged in it?
…Not surprisingly, lotteries direct their most aggressive advertising at their best customers- the working class, minorities, and the poor.
…Massachusetts, with the highest grossing per capita lottery sales in the country, offers stark evidence of the blue-collar bias. A 1997 series in the Boston Globe found that Chelsea, one of the poorest towns in the state, has one lottery agent for every 363 residents; upscale Wellesley, by contrast, has one agent for every 3,063 residents. In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, this ‘painless’ alternative to taxation is a sharply regressive way of raising revenue. Residents of Chelsea spent a staggering $915 oer capita on lottery tickets last year, almost 8 percent of their income. Residents of Lincoln, an affluent suburb, spent only $30 per person, one tenth of 1 percent of their income.
…With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across America must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune consigns them.”
-Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, “Against State Lotteries”, pgs. 70-72.
…Not surprisingly, lotteries direct their most aggressive advertising at their best customers- the working class, minorities, and the poor.
…Massachusetts, with the highest grossing per capita lottery sales in the country, offers stark evidence of the blue-collar bias. A 1997 series in the Boston Globe found that Chelsea, one of the poorest towns in the state, has one lottery agent for every 363 residents; upscale Wellesley, by contrast, has one agent for every 3,063 residents. In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, this ‘painless’ alternative to taxation is a sharply regressive way of raising revenue. Residents of Chelsea spent a staggering $915 oer capita on lottery tickets last year, almost 8 percent of their income. Residents of Lincoln, an affluent suburb, spent only $30 per person, one tenth of 1 percent of their income.
…With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across America must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune consigns them.”
-Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, “Against State Lotteries”, pgs. 70-72.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
A Community Focused on the Good and Realizing Its Telos
"Humility, like all the virtues, comes as a gift made possible by being part of a community that has, quite literally, no use for pretense. Pretense can be defeated only when a people have such good work to do that they have no time for the games of status. Such work is no better exemplified than the l'Arche movement begun by Jean Vanier. L'Arche is the community in which some learn to live with those whom the world calls mentally handicapped. Those who live with the mentally handicapped want to help them grow, but according to Vanier, before
'doing for them, we want to 'be with them.' The particular suffering of the person who is mentally handicapped, as of all marginal people, is a feeling of being excluded, worthless and unloved. It is through everyday life in a community and the love that must be incarnate in this, that handicapped people can begin to discover that they have value, that they are loved and so lovable.' (Vanier 1979, 3)
Such a community both makes time and takes time." -Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, p. 162.
I am attracted to this section of Hauerwas especially by his stress on focus as a community and not just as individuals on the great good of reaching thos marginalized by our society. "Talk is cheap, brother", I feel some of you say sometimes. There is a great need in Baltimore and here in DC, a great crying need. There is a good work to do and in the doing it I hope we might find the focus together which increasingly humbles us as Hauerwas describes. I don't think that community in all cases is necessary for humility. It seems that many prophets had to go without. But maybe I am wrong. Certainly to be a prophet of God you've got to be humble. Think of the company they keep. I am thinking of the focus implied here in conjunction with something I read from Michael Sandel about commercials in public classrooms:
"But, even if corporate sponsors supplied objective teaching tools of impeccable quality, commercial advertising would still be a pernicious presence in the classroom because it undermines the purposes for which the school exists. Advertising encourages people to want things and to satisfy their desires: education encourages people to reflect on their desires, to restrain or to elevate them. The purpose of advertising is to recruit consumers; the purpose of public schools is to cultivate citizens." Public Philosophy, p. 75.
Sandel argues in a way that I find persuasive that the purpose for which the schools exist is undermined by the commercials in the classroom and the manifold little compromises. I remember seeing the kids subjected by the arm of the State to captive commerical watching when I was a substitute teacher so that the schools could have free TVs for every room. I knew something was deeply disturbing and outrageous about this but I couldn't articulate it very well at the time. It seems that the time has come for us to learn to articulate just what is wrong with this kine of excessive encroachment. Jesus said we should watch and pray so that the cares of this world and the love of it do not snuff out our faith. We should ask what is our purpose as a church for existing and see that our focus is increased and not drawn away into the world's manifold distractions whether commercial or ascetic.
'doing for them, we want to 'be with them.' The particular suffering of the person who is mentally handicapped, as of all marginal people, is a feeling of being excluded, worthless and unloved. It is through everyday life in a community and the love that must be incarnate in this, that handicapped people can begin to discover that they have value, that they are loved and so lovable.' (Vanier 1979, 3)
Such a community both makes time and takes time." -Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, p. 162.
I am attracted to this section of Hauerwas especially by his stress on focus as a community and not just as individuals on the great good of reaching thos marginalized by our society. "Talk is cheap, brother", I feel some of you say sometimes. There is a great need in Baltimore and here in DC, a great crying need. There is a good work to do and in the doing it I hope we might find the focus together which increasingly humbles us as Hauerwas describes. I don't think that community in all cases is necessary for humility. It seems that many prophets had to go without. But maybe I am wrong. Certainly to be a prophet of God you've got to be humble. Think of the company they keep. I am thinking of the focus implied here in conjunction with something I read from Michael Sandel about commercials in public classrooms:
"But, even if corporate sponsors supplied objective teaching tools of impeccable quality, commercial advertising would still be a pernicious presence in the classroom because it undermines the purposes for which the school exists. Advertising encourages people to want things and to satisfy their desires: education encourages people to reflect on their desires, to restrain or to elevate them. The purpose of advertising is to recruit consumers; the purpose of public schools is to cultivate citizens." Public Philosophy, p. 75.
Sandel argues in a way that I find persuasive that the purpose for which the schools exist is undermined by the commercials in the classroom and the manifold little compromises. I remember seeing the kids subjected by the arm of the State to captive commerical watching when I was a substitute teacher so that the schools could have free TVs for every room. I knew something was deeply disturbing and outrageous about this but I couldn't articulate it very well at the time. It seems that the time has come for us to learn to articulate just what is wrong with this kine of excessive encroachment. Jesus said we should watch and pray so that the cares of this world and the love of it do not snuff out our faith. We should ask what is our purpose as a church for existing and see that our focus is increased and not drawn away into the world's manifold distractions whether commercial or ascetic.
Monday, March 12, 2007
An Adulterous Generation
Sometimes when I am reading a book an author will say something which strikes me as a window into their heart, their soul, their cherished belief. It seems to me that Stanley Hauerwas made such a statment in his commentary on Matthew when he was speaking about Yoder, the author of The Politics of Jesus, and was saying that he thinks one of the greatest tasks before the church today may be to encourage and house prophets. He apparently reveres Yoder as something of a prophet and it seems he also selects Wendell Berry for some of the same reasons. He quotes Wendell Berry who writes:
"This is true both literally and figuratively: The dominant tendency of our age is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that once were joined. This story obviously must be told by somebody...But how has it been told, and how ought it to be told?...The story can be told in a way that clarifies, that makes imaginable and compassionable, the suffering and the costs; or it can be told in a way that seems to grant an easy permission and absolution to adultery and divorce. (Berry 2000, 133-34)." - from Life is A Miracle.
By the way, I have about about four Wendell Berry books including this one. One I put in my church library that was recommended by the emergent village reading list. I thought it very good with excellent things to say about Christians and the environment and the economy and in supporting local farms,etc. and overall a hardy and wholesome contribution toward a good turn in the road that I hope we will all have contributed to in the end when all is said and done.
Someone else I think was something of a prophet in terms of one with deep perception of the signs of the time was the poet and literary critic of the late Victorian era, Matthew Arnold. A line which seemed to capture something of the same thing to which Berry is referring to in the quote above is taken from his poem "To Marguerite," or at least it struck me that way when I read it:
"Or if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things-
...Of happier men!- for they, at least,
Have dream'd two human hearts might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end..."
Bummer. Arnold was in the processing of "losing his religion" so he didn't have for instance the strength of my friend Isaac who remains strong spirited even in bodily weakness and with the prospect of death. But what I was focusing on is not so much Arnold's melancholy merely but what it evoked at least in me of a sense of the character of the age, an adulterous age that finds it hard to even conceive of the desirabilty of lifelong, conjugal love.The prevailing philosophy has obscured the good and we need good philosophy to help articulate the case for everlasting love. But more than that we need the blood of Christ and our faithful Lord to lean upon along the Way.
"This is true both literally and figuratively: The dominant tendency of our age is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that once were joined. This story obviously must be told by somebody...But how has it been told, and how ought it to be told?...The story can be told in a way that clarifies, that makes imaginable and compassionable, the suffering and the costs; or it can be told in a way that seems to grant an easy permission and absolution to adultery and divorce. (Berry 2000, 133-34)." - from Life is A Miracle.
By the way, I have about about four Wendell Berry books including this one. One I put in my church library that was recommended by the emergent village reading list. I thought it very good with excellent things to say about Christians and the environment and the economy and in supporting local farms,etc. and overall a hardy and wholesome contribution toward a good turn in the road that I hope we will all have contributed to in the end when all is said and done.
Someone else I think was something of a prophet in terms of one with deep perception of the signs of the time was the poet and literary critic of the late Victorian era, Matthew Arnold. A line which seemed to capture something of the same thing to which Berry is referring to in the quote above is taken from his poem "To Marguerite," or at least it struck me that way when I read it:
"Or if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things-
...Of happier men!- for they, at least,
Have dream'd two human hearts might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end..."
Bummer. Arnold was in the processing of "losing his religion" so he didn't have for instance the strength of my friend Isaac who remains strong spirited even in bodily weakness and with the prospect of death. But what I was focusing on is not so much Arnold's melancholy merely but what it evoked at least in me of a sense of the character of the age, an adulterous age that finds it hard to even conceive of the desirabilty of lifelong, conjugal love.The prevailing philosophy has obscured the good and we need good philosophy to help articulate the case for everlasting love. But more than that we need the blood of Christ and our faithful Lord to lean upon along the Way.
Solzhenitsyn, Arch-Enemy of Totalitarianism, Attacked Out of Shallow and Transparent Adherence to Anti-Telos World Blindness
From the First Things blog for today, with my coments interspersed:
"Solzhenitsyn reiterated a claim that was central to his controversial commencement address at Harvard University in 1978: “if there are neither true or false judgments, man is no longer held [accountable] for anything. Without universal foundations, morality is not possible.” For this, as much as for his defense of a humane and self-limiting Russian patriotism, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the most powerful and sustained critique of totalitarianism ever written, was denounced as an enemy of liberty and the spiritual architect of a new authoritarianism."
[This seems to hit on a central point of struggle between the teleological and the anti-telos worldviews. The charge of authoritarianism and coercionism seem to be aimed at each other, from both sides. The liberal voluntarist position which emphasizes self-creation and freedom from moral limits cries “theocracy!” when the older tradition in politics is urged, one which included in its politics the aim of instilling in its citizens civic virtues necessary for self-government. This seems to me the temporary victory of the anti-telos, Nietzschean perspective.]
"As I argued in a 2004 article in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” these tendentious assaults helped shape a “new consensus” about Solzhenitsyn. Moreover, this consensus has been remarkably resistant to correction on the basis of a balanced critical analysis of what Solzhenitsyn actually says in his writings. …
Which makes it all the stranger that the review of the book in the March 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement could have appeared in Syntaxis thirty years ago.
Written by the émigré novelist Zinovy Zinik, the review recycles all the same tired charges of “stale traditionalism” in literature and politics, authoritarianism, and neo-Stalinist rhetoric—as if the old fights have to be re-fought one more bloody time. But this time they are presented without deep conviction and with plenty of internal evidence that contradicts the author’s claims.
Thus Zinik readily concedes that Solzhenitsyn a literary innovator, but somehow a “stale traditionalist” anyway. It would be “preposterous,” he says, to call Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite, though he goes on to insinuate it anyway. Solzhenitsyn has given support to the most “reactionary” elements in Russian politics and literature, Zinik insists—even while noting Solzhenitsyn’s continuing denunciations of the “maladies of Russian nationalism” and his unflagging opposition to the Red-Brown coalition of unrepentant communists and racialist nationalists.
In his only reference to the actual contents of the Reader, Zinik concedes the accuracy of the portrait of Solzhenitsyn’s views found in our “comprehensive preface” and “informative introductions to each part” of the volume. He admits that the Solzhenitsyn who emerges from the book is a “moderate conservative, a religious but tolerant old-fashioned thinker.”
But it turns out that none of this is of any importance. Instead of analyzing Solzhenitsyn as a writer, historian, and moral philosopher, Zinik issues a thunderous, if a rather passé, attack on a man whose views are disqualified by his moralizing, “theocratic” character.
Zinik can assert all this only by saying nothing, absolutely nothing, about the actual contents of the seven-hundred-page book. If he had to refer to real texts he would have to concede that Solzhenitsyn is a critic of “stale traditionalism” in both politics and literature. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his 1993 “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” the task of a “healthy conservatism” is to remain “equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without which no future can ever be born.” Zinik sees no need to consult texts since he believes Solzhenitsyn has been excommunicated from civil discussion by his unwillingness to confuse human freedom—an inestimable good—with the tenants of relativistic ideology.
Zinik ends his review by insinuating that Solzhenitsyn is a prisoner in an authoritarian Russia of his own making (although once again he concedes—quite rightly— that Solzhenitsyn’s “most cherished” political idea is that of “saving Russia by strengthening the independence of local government, Swiss-style”).
In truth, Solzhenitsyn remains—as he has been for decades now—a thoughtful and passionate advocate of “repentance and self-limitation,” a critic of the “lie” in all its forms, an advocate of what he calls a “clean, loving, constructive Patriotism” as opposed to a radically nationalist bent” that “elevates one’s nationality above a humble stance toward heaven.” In contrast to the consensus that increasingly dominates in both liberal and conservative circles in the West, Solzhenitsyn saw Russia in the 1990s—with its criminal corruption, unholy alliance of oligarchs and unrepentant communists, its betrayal of the rule of law and a genuine market economy in the name of a misguided “market ideology”—as a new “Time of Troubles” for his beloved homeland. He has a balanced view of Russia today in no small part because he does not identify the 1990s as a period of true democratic reforms as so many people mistakenly do in the West. "
"Solzhenitsyn reiterated a claim that was central to his controversial commencement address at Harvard University in 1978: “if there are neither true or false judgments, man is no longer held [accountable] for anything. Without universal foundations, morality is not possible.” For this, as much as for his defense of a humane and self-limiting Russian patriotism, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the most powerful and sustained critique of totalitarianism ever written, was denounced as an enemy of liberty and the spiritual architect of a new authoritarianism."
[This seems to hit on a central point of struggle between the teleological and the anti-telos worldviews. The charge of authoritarianism and coercionism seem to be aimed at each other, from both sides. The liberal voluntarist position which emphasizes self-creation and freedom from moral limits cries “theocracy!” when the older tradition in politics is urged, one which included in its politics the aim of instilling in its citizens civic virtues necessary for self-government. This seems to me the temporary victory of the anti-telos, Nietzschean perspective.]
"As I argued in a 2004 article in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” these tendentious assaults helped shape a “new consensus” about Solzhenitsyn. Moreover, this consensus has been remarkably resistant to correction on the basis of a balanced critical analysis of what Solzhenitsyn actually says in his writings. …
Which makes it all the stranger that the review of the book in the March 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement could have appeared in Syntaxis thirty years ago.
Written by the émigré novelist Zinovy Zinik, the review recycles all the same tired charges of “stale traditionalism” in literature and politics, authoritarianism, and neo-Stalinist rhetoric—as if the old fights have to be re-fought one more bloody time. But this time they are presented without deep conviction and with plenty of internal evidence that contradicts the author’s claims.
Thus Zinik readily concedes that Solzhenitsyn a literary innovator, but somehow a “stale traditionalist” anyway. It would be “preposterous,” he says, to call Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite, though he goes on to insinuate it anyway. Solzhenitsyn has given support to the most “reactionary” elements in Russian politics and literature, Zinik insists—even while noting Solzhenitsyn’s continuing denunciations of the “maladies of Russian nationalism” and his unflagging opposition to the Red-Brown coalition of unrepentant communists and racialist nationalists.
In his only reference to the actual contents of the Reader, Zinik concedes the accuracy of the portrait of Solzhenitsyn’s views found in our “comprehensive preface” and “informative introductions to each part” of the volume. He admits that the Solzhenitsyn who emerges from the book is a “moderate conservative, a religious but tolerant old-fashioned thinker.”
But it turns out that none of this is of any importance. Instead of analyzing Solzhenitsyn as a writer, historian, and moral philosopher, Zinik issues a thunderous, if a rather passé, attack on a man whose views are disqualified by his moralizing, “theocratic” character.
Zinik can assert all this only by saying nothing, absolutely nothing, about the actual contents of the seven-hundred-page book. If he had to refer to real texts he would have to concede that Solzhenitsyn is a critic of “stale traditionalism” in both politics and literature. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his 1993 “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” the task of a “healthy conservatism” is to remain “equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without which no future can ever be born.” Zinik sees no need to consult texts since he believes Solzhenitsyn has been excommunicated from civil discussion by his unwillingness to confuse human freedom—an inestimable good—with the tenants of relativistic ideology.
Zinik ends his review by insinuating that Solzhenitsyn is a prisoner in an authoritarian Russia of his own making (although once again he concedes—quite rightly— that Solzhenitsyn’s “most cherished” political idea is that of “saving Russia by strengthening the independence of local government, Swiss-style”).
In truth, Solzhenitsyn remains—as he has been for decades now—a thoughtful and passionate advocate of “repentance and self-limitation,” a critic of the “lie” in all its forms, an advocate of what he calls a “clean, loving, constructive Patriotism” as opposed to a radically nationalist bent” that “elevates one’s nationality above a humble stance toward heaven.” In contrast to the consensus that increasingly dominates in both liberal and conservative circles in the West, Solzhenitsyn saw Russia in the 1990s—with its criminal corruption, unholy alliance of oligarchs and unrepentant communists, its betrayal of the rule of law and a genuine market economy in the name of a misguided “market ideology”—as a new “Time of Troubles” for his beloved homeland. He has a balanced view of Russia today in no small part because he does not identify the 1990s as a period of true democratic reforms as so many people mistakenly do in the West. "
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Michael Sandel on Situating Deliberate Local Community in the Context of Globalization
“ What is the prospect that a revitalized politics could actually alleviate the loss of mastery and the erosion of community that lie in the heart of democracy’s discontent?...In a world where capital goods, information and images, pollution and people, flow across national boundaries with unprecedented ease, politics must assume transnational, even global, forms, if only to keep up…We cannot hope to govern the global economy without transnational political institutions, and we cannot expect to sustain such institutions without cultivating more-expansive civic identities. Human-rights conventions, global environmental accords, and world bodies governing trade, finance and economic development are among the undertakings that will depend for public support on inspiring a greater sense of engagement in a shared global destiny.
But the cosmopolitan vision is wrong to suggest that we can restore self-government simply by pushing sovereignty and citizenship upward. The hope for self-government today lies not in relocating sovereignty to but in dispersing it. The most promising alternative to the sovereign state is not a cosmopolitan community based on the solidarity of humankind but a multiplicity of communities and political bodies- some more extensive than nations and some less- among which sovereignty is diffused. Only a politics that disperses sovereignty both upward and downward can combine the power required to rival global market forces with the differentiation required of a public life that hopes to inspire the allegiance of its citizens.
In some places dispersing sovereignty may entail according greater cultural and political autonomy to subnational communities- such as Catalans and Kurds, Scots and Quebecois- even while strengthening and democratizing the European Union and other transnational structures. Arrangements like these may avoid the strife that arises when state sovereignty is an all-or-nothing affair. In the United States which never was a nation-state in the European sense, proliferating sites of political engagement may take a different form. America was born of the conviction that sovereignty need not reside in a single place. From the start the Constitution divided power among branches and levels of government. Over time, however, we too have pushed sovereignty and citizenship upward in the direction of the nation.
The nationalizing of American political life occurred largely in response to industrial capitalism. The consolidation of economic power called forth the consolidation of political power. Present-day conservatives who rail against big government often ignore this fact. They wrongly assume that rolling back the power of the national government would liberate individuals to pursue their own ends, instead of leaving them at the mercy of economic forces…The American welfare state is politically vulnerable because it does not rest on a sense of national community adequate to its purpose….
…A more promising basis for a democratic politics that reaches beyond nations is a revitalized civic life nourished in the more particular communities we inhabit. In the age of NAFTA the politics of neighborhood matters more, not less. People will not pledge allegiance to vast and distant entities, whatever their importance, unless those institutions are somehow connected to political arrangements that reflect the identity of the participants.” –Michael Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, “America’s Search for a Public Philosophy”, p. 30-33.
But the cosmopolitan vision is wrong to suggest that we can restore self-government simply by pushing sovereignty and citizenship upward. The hope for self-government today lies not in relocating sovereignty to but in dispersing it. The most promising alternative to the sovereign state is not a cosmopolitan community based on the solidarity of humankind but a multiplicity of communities and political bodies- some more extensive than nations and some less- among which sovereignty is diffused. Only a politics that disperses sovereignty both upward and downward can combine the power required to rival global market forces with the differentiation required of a public life that hopes to inspire the allegiance of its citizens.
In some places dispersing sovereignty may entail according greater cultural and political autonomy to subnational communities- such as Catalans and Kurds, Scots and Quebecois- even while strengthening and democratizing the European Union and other transnational structures. Arrangements like these may avoid the strife that arises when state sovereignty is an all-or-nothing affair. In the United States which never was a nation-state in the European sense, proliferating sites of political engagement may take a different form. America was born of the conviction that sovereignty need not reside in a single place. From the start the Constitution divided power among branches and levels of government. Over time, however, we too have pushed sovereignty and citizenship upward in the direction of the nation.
The nationalizing of American political life occurred largely in response to industrial capitalism. The consolidation of economic power called forth the consolidation of political power. Present-day conservatives who rail against big government often ignore this fact. They wrongly assume that rolling back the power of the national government would liberate individuals to pursue their own ends, instead of leaving them at the mercy of economic forces…The American welfare state is politically vulnerable because it does not rest on a sense of national community adequate to its purpose….
…A more promising basis for a democratic politics that reaches beyond nations is a revitalized civic life nourished in the more particular communities we inhabit. In the age of NAFTA the politics of neighborhood matters more, not less. People will not pledge allegiance to vast and distant entities, whatever their importance, unless those institutions are somehow connected to political arrangements that reflect the identity of the participants.” –Michael Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, “America’s Search for a Public Philosophy”, p. 30-33.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Kierkegaard Subverts Kant As He Trails Behind Abraham to Mount Moriah
"Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior- yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. The position cannot be mediated for all mediation comes about precisely by virtue of the universal; it is and remains to all eternity a paradox, inacessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox, inacessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox- or else (these are the logical deductions which I would beg the reader to have in mente at every point, though it would be too prolix for me to reiterate them on every occasion) - or else there never has been faith...precisely because it always has been. In other words, Abraham is lost."
-Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Problem 1, (p. 66).
I found this passage very resonant but I am afraid it will be more difficult for others taken out of its context. What I understand him to be saying is along these lines: the universal, which includes apprehension of morals- universal ethics- is apprehendable to the non-Christian, is approachable through high-minded application of one's heart and soul to the universal. It is the realm of for instance Aristotle's ethics ( such as that a person should not be held responsible for something which is beyond their power to effect) and Kant's logical reformulation of the golden rule to "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
Kierkegaard perceives that faith is something beyond adherence to these universal rules. It seems to me he is hitting upon something utterly essential. The individual becomes elevated above the universal law in the faith of Abraham. The personal relationship of the particular to God subordinates the universal to the particular. From the logical apprehension of laws, which it may be said I think somewhat accurately that the Greeks to some extent explored and elaborated to a much greater extent than the Hebrews, there is a transition to something far greater in the Hebrews, in Abraham and his progeny.
But it is only by way of the universal laws. On the one side there is inarticulation of the natural laws, the blindness and opposition to what may be known from what is made. But there is also the apprehension of the natural laws that is possible, the nobility and human kindness and justice which are possible. It is our ability to apprehend these laws which makes us all culpable, I think. But these laws are not dependent on hearing what the Bible says regarding them. They are accessible to everyone. Aristotle sought to systematize these as have many others. The Golden Rule is found in many disparate religious texts of the world and in wise-men such as Confucius. As C.S. Lewis aptly says:
“Did Christian Ethics really enter the world as a novelty, a new peculiar set of commands, to which man could be in the strict sense converted ?... The convert accepted forgiveness of sins. But of sins against what Law? Some new law promulgated by the Christians? But that is nonsensical. It would be the mockery of a tyrant to forgive a man for doing what had never been forbidden until the very moment at which the forgiveness was announced. The idea (at least in its grossest and most popular form) that Christianity brought a new ethical code into the world is a grave error...It is far from my intention to deny that we find in Christian ethics a deepening, an internalization, a few changes of emphasis, in the moral code. But only a serious ignorance of Jewish and Pagan culture would lead anyone to the conclusion that it is a radically new thing. Essentially, Christianity is not the promulgation of a moral discovery. It is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law... A Christian who understands his own religion laughs when unbelievers expect to trouble him by the assertion that Jesus uttered no command which had not been anticipated by the Rabbis- few, indeed, which cannot be paralleled in classical, ancient Egyptian, Ninevite, Babylonian, or Chinese texts. We have long recognized that truth with rejoicing. Our faith is not pinned on a crank.”
But Abrahamic faith leaps beyond these universal laws into something greater which does not oppose these God made laws (but may oppose man made systems of apprehending these laws which are bound to be mere sketches and bound to be inaccurate) but is superior because it is personal, particular, scandalous. It is scandalous that Abraham goes to sacrifice his son at the bequest of God. It seems a subversion of these universal ethics. Political figures cannot resort to such a principle to mediate arguments and controversies because as Kierkegaard remarks mediation is only carried out through appeal to these universals. But in Abrahamic faith, God comes near.
This seems to me to apply to our discussion of religionless Christianity and the atonement. I think a lot of the way one goes on these topics hinges on what we make of good and evil and the universal ability to apprehend these. If it is true that all men have resort to the universal we should act as if they do and consider that Nietzsche and others who subvert the universal moral law are only clouds on that universal moral law which every man and woman in some way or another has apprehended enough that they knowif they reflect on themselves that they are guilty though in a much more genral sense, in one perhaps devoid of a Christian theology and context. Guilt and shame in this sense should not be understood as referring to something which does not exist outside of a religious context. Men know they're guilty.
Regarding atonement, it relates to the mysteries of mankind's heart. It illumines the grave of their hearts, piercing the psychology and explicating to them their relation to the world which God made and their warped-ness in relation too and the resolution to this disfigurement in the love of God.
-Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Problem 1, (p. 66).
I found this passage very resonant but I am afraid it will be more difficult for others taken out of its context. What I understand him to be saying is along these lines: the universal, which includes apprehension of morals- universal ethics- is apprehendable to the non-Christian, is approachable through high-minded application of one's heart and soul to the universal. It is the realm of for instance Aristotle's ethics ( such as that a person should not be held responsible for something which is beyond their power to effect) and Kant's logical reformulation of the golden rule to "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
Kierkegaard perceives that faith is something beyond adherence to these universal rules. It seems to me he is hitting upon something utterly essential. The individual becomes elevated above the universal law in the faith of Abraham. The personal relationship of the particular to God subordinates the universal to the particular. From the logical apprehension of laws, which it may be said I think somewhat accurately that the Greeks to some extent explored and elaborated to a much greater extent than the Hebrews, there is a transition to something far greater in the Hebrews, in Abraham and his progeny.
But it is only by way of the universal laws. On the one side there is inarticulation of the natural laws, the blindness and opposition to what may be known from what is made. But there is also the apprehension of the natural laws that is possible, the nobility and human kindness and justice which are possible. It is our ability to apprehend these laws which makes us all culpable, I think. But these laws are not dependent on hearing what the Bible says regarding them. They are accessible to everyone. Aristotle sought to systematize these as have many others. The Golden Rule is found in many disparate religious texts of the world and in wise-men such as Confucius. As C.S. Lewis aptly says:
“Did Christian Ethics really enter the world as a novelty, a new peculiar set of commands, to which man could be in the strict sense converted ?... The convert accepted forgiveness of sins. But of sins against what Law? Some new law promulgated by the Christians? But that is nonsensical. It would be the mockery of a tyrant to forgive a man for doing what had never been forbidden until the very moment at which the forgiveness was announced. The idea (at least in its grossest and most popular form) that Christianity brought a new ethical code into the world is a grave error...It is far from my intention to deny that we find in Christian ethics a deepening, an internalization, a few changes of emphasis, in the moral code. But only a serious ignorance of Jewish and Pagan culture would lead anyone to the conclusion that it is a radically new thing. Essentially, Christianity is not the promulgation of a moral discovery. It is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law... A Christian who understands his own religion laughs when unbelievers expect to trouble him by the assertion that Jesus uttered no command which had not been anticipated by the Rabbis- few, indeed, which cannot be paralleled in classical, ancient Egyptian, Ninevite, Babylonian, or Chinese texts. We have long recognized that truth with rejoicing. Our faith is not pinned on a crank.”
But Abrahamic faith leaps beyond these universal laws into something greater which does not oppose these God made laws (but may oppose man made systems of apprehending these laws which are bound to be mere sketches and bound to be inaccurate) but is superior because it is personal, particular, scandalous. It is scandalous that Abraham goes to sacrifice his son at the bequest of God. It seems a subversion of these universal ethics. Political figures cannot resort to such a principle to mediate arguments and controversies because as Kierkegaard remarks mediation is only carried out through appeal to these universals. But in Abrahamic faith, God comes near.
This seems to me to apply to our discussion of religionless Christianity and the atonement. I think a lot of the way one goes on these topics hinges on what we make of good and evil and the universal ability to apprehend these. If it is true that all men have resort to the universal we should act as if they do and consider that Nietzsche and others who subvert the universal moral law are only clouds on that universal moral law which every man and woman in some way or another has apprehended enough that they knowif they reflect on themselves that they are guilty though in a much more genral sense, in one perhaps devoid of a Christian theology and context. Guilt and shame in this sense should not be understood as referring to something which does not exist outside of a religious context. Men know they're guilty.
Regarding atonement, it relates to the mysteries of mankind's heart. It illumines the grave of their hearts, piercing the psychology and explicating to them their relation to the world which God made and their warped-ness in relation too and the resolution to this disfigurement in the love of God.
Friday, March 02, 2007
The Prevailing Narrative
Modern moral philosophy has in general been blind to the complementary character of narrative and theory both in moral enquiry and in the moral life itself...Is there any way in which one of these rivals might prevail over the others? One possible answer was supplied by Dante: that narrative prevails over its rival which is able to include its rivals within it, not only to retell their stories as episodes within its story, but to tell the story of the telling of their stories as such episodes...-Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition, pg. 80, 81.
This stuck with me long after I read it and then he returned to explain this at greater length later on. I think this explains with some progressive incision how the body of Christ is at least intellectually to proceed--- hmm, at least the church in the range that I have a working or recuperable to working awareness of.
I have heard references to biblical scholarship which argues that the Genesis account contains within it marks of awareness of other rival accounts and also a picture of victory over these accounts...Surely we must be careful but not shrunk to thoughtless timidity in dealing with such questions but there is something provocative in that and I wonder if there is not the same kind of struggle going on now. Really, I do more than wonder. I am quite aware of rival cosmological worldviews, rival all encompassing philosophies and belief systems. There is a struggle beyond questions of literal readings of the Genesis account and whether evolution accounts for the development of all biological life that goes back and forward to who is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Atheistic philosophical materialist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett seem to me often at times to simply be working out that narrative, in a kind of priestly role. They are explaining and synthesizing according to their accepted doctrine including what they take science to be. Richard Dawkins is also doing the same kind of thing, creating a philsophical and science based narrative...I say science based because I believe his science his generally good from what I can tell but the tale he weaves, "the anscestor's tale" I think is something all together different, is following cosmological doctrines with a lineage traceable to some extent back to the ancient philsophers and/or poets, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius. These later especially have an interesting history and influence in modern times but I don't mean to get into that. My only point in mentioning them is to say that they provided principles outlines for a worldview that persists and reoccurs today---that given inifinite time and the clashing of atoms every possible combination would occur including us and that the cosmos is all there was, all there is and all there ever will be, and that religion is the source of disturbance in the world and we should work toward a mental psychologlical state called ataraxia where we are untroubled and soothed by the cold meaninglessness of life and the annihilation that death brings (Epicurus provided psychological kinds of practical meditations to help his adherents embrace their imminent annihilation). There is a rival worldview. But it is not merely a story but the true story, one that God writes, and we can feel the pen on our hearts in Christ Jesus, so that the rival stories must be overcome, the true story must be illuminated. "Good philosophy must exist if for no other reason to answer bad philosophy."
Thursday, March 01, 2007
The Cult Grows Intolerant of Nonparticipants
“Choice” my foot: If the
new bill to legalize assisted suicide in California (A.B. 374) becomes law,
Catholic nursing homes will be legally required to permit assisted suicide to be
committed within their premises, even though doing so would be a profound
violation of Catholic moral teaching. In-patient hospice facilities would be
similarly coerced, despite assisted suicide being a direct affront to the
hospice philosophy and the medical standards under which programs operate. Other
California medical facilities and group homes could also be forced to comply.
Only acute-care hospitals escape the proposed tyrannical duty to cooperate in
ending patients’ lives.
It seems like in the end no dissent is brooked. You cannot stand on the sidelines of a sacrificial cult and merely refuse to participate and expect that you will remain unmolested in tolerance. The subversion of telos, of that view that things were made for ends given them by God, will leave no neutral ground for those who witness with the earth to that telos. The blood cries out. It is only silenced by repentance or more blood.
Perhaps you have heard of the Al-Qa'ida and other radical Muslims attacking Christian charities abroad, far away, in Africa. But look homeward, angel, the same principle, the same power in different forms, in different garbs, is at work, disbanding orphanages, requiring all doctors to give their moral assent to abortion, and now attacking faith-based hospitals in what could turn out to be a much more insidious way than the bombing of a charity administration building.
Am I being extreme in referring to a sacrificial cult? Am I being extremist to think in terms of there being a sacrificial cult which delivers up nascent human life and aged human life and sickly or handicapped human life to be slain for the benefit, for the well being, for the fortune casting anticipations of the healthiest, the coolest, the most in, even the most "counterculturally" in? Am I being nonsensical in speaking of a broadly secular world as conforming to form of a sacrificial cult? Let me reference the work of Rene Girard here on the scapegoaing mechanisms and sacrificial systems of the world.
7198 (b): No professional organization or association, or heath care provider,
may subject a person to censure, discipline, suspension, loss of license, loss
of privileges, loss of membership, or other penalty for participating or
refusing to participate in good faith compliance with this chapter. (My
emphasis.)
Here’s the sneaky part: Subsection (e) permits acute-care
hospitals to refuse to permit assisted suicide in the facility.
(e)
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a general acute care hospital, as
defined in subdivision (a) of Section 1250, may prohibit a licensed physician
from carrying out a patient’s request under this chapter on the premises of the
hospital if the hospital has notified the licensed physician of its policy
regarding this chapter.
Under 1250 (a), an acute-care hospital is defined as
“a health facility having a duly constituted governing body with overall
administrative and professional responsibility and an organized medical staff
that provides 24-hour inpatient care, including the following basic services:
medical, nursing, surgical, anesthesia, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, and
dietary services.” Thus, nursing homes, hospices, and other such facilities
would not qualify for the exemption provided acute-care hospitals under 7198
(e), since they do not have laboratories or pharmacies on-site, provide surgical
medical services, etc.
By explicitly identifying acute-care hospitals as the
only facilities where assisted suicides can be prevented from taking place
on-site, the legislation must be construed to require that all other health-care
facilities cooperate with assisted suicide—whether or not they have religious,
moral, or philosophical objections. Nor could these facilities sanction or
discipline staff doctors or other personnel who agree to participate in on-site
assisted suicides of patients.
If A.B. 374 becomes law, Catholic and other
religiously oriented nursing homes will be forced to choose between shutting
down, selling, or cooperating in assisted suicide. That this could cause untold
misery for thousands of helpless sick and elderly people matters to its authors
not a whit. The culture of death brooks no dissent.
(From:
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2007/02/values-of-doctors-and-nontreatment-of.html)
The media are making a pretty big splash about a New England Journal of Medicine
study, which measured doctors' willingness to refuse
desired services if it violated their personal moral codes. From the story:
"Based on the findings, the researchers estimate that more than 40 million
Americans may be seeing physicians who do not believe that they are obligated to
disclose information about legal treatments the doctor objects to, and 100
million have doctors who do not feel the need to refer patients to another
provider."The focus, of course, was on doctors who hold what are labeled
conservative beliefs, e.g., abortion, contraception, etc. And there is a pretty
strong move underway to compel medical professionals (including pharmacists) to
perform these services at the risk of losing their jobs or licenses to
practice.
[There are intelligent ways to address some of the issues and Wesley Smith gives some good practical decisions that might at least temporarily address differences in the rest of this post I quote from above. However, it seems to me that there is mixture in the making for violent confrontation but the side that truly values life will prefer to be the victim rather than sacrifice other human beings to affirm the perogative of their choice.]
See also regarding
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6293115.stm
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Phillip Johnson assesses current ID and Biology
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3914&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20History%20and%20Philosophy%20of%20Science
Misrepresentation by omission:
Free-thinking not allowed. Darwinist turn to authoritarian coercion despoiling the academy:
Misrepresentation by omission:
The claim that evolutionary science has discovered and verified a mechanism
which can account for the origin of biological information and complexity by
involving only natural (unintelligent) causes is supported by an immense
extrapolation from limited evidence of minor, cyclical variations in
fundamentally stable species. The current leading textbook example of the
standard neo-Darwinian mechanism involves a species of finch on an island in the
Galapagos chain. Two scientists named Grant published a famous study of
variations of the beaks of these birds, later popularized in a book titled The
Beak of the Finch, by journalist Jonathan Weiner.The Grants had been measuring
finch beaks over many years. In 1977 a drought killed most of the finches, and
the survivors had beaks slightly larger than before. The probable explanation
was that larger-beaked birds had an advantage in being able to eat the last
tough seeds that remained. A few years later the rains returned, and the average
beak size went back to normal. No new organs appeared and there was no
directional change of any kind, just a back-and-forth cycle from small beaks to
slightly larger beaks and back to small. Nonetheless, that is the most
impressive example of natural selection actually observed making changes that
Darwinists have been able to substantiate after nearly a century and a half of
searching for evidence that the mechanism of random variation with differential
survival has the transformative power that it would need to have to accomplish
everything that the textbooks ascribe to it. To make the story look better, the
National Academy of Sciences improved on some the facts in its 1998 booklet on
Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This version of the story
omits the beaks’ return to normal and encourages teachers to speculate that a
“new species of finch” might arise in 200 years if the initial trend towards
increased beak size continued indefinitely. When our leading scientists have to
resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in court, you
know they are having trouble fitting their evidence to the theory they want to
support.
Free-thinking not allowed. Darwinist turn to authoritarian coercion despoiling the academy:
Those who are not obedient in their thoughts to the doctrine of philosophiocal naturalism, those who have the courage to examine questions for themselves, may be rare but the truth is worth the solitariness if that is where it may lead:… Darwinists were so alarmed by the publication of Meyer’s article that they
mounted an angry campaign of protest against it. The governing Council of the
Society was so overwhelmed that it repudiated the article as inappropriate for
publication in its Proceedings, citing the AAAS policy, and reassuring critics
that “the topic of design will not be addressed in future issues.” Following
this disavowal, Darwinists mounted a furious campaign to discredit the editor
who had approved Meyer’s article for publication, accusing him of being a closet
“young earth” creationist.The near-hysterical brouhaha over Meyer’s article did
have some positive aspects. Darwinists have persistently criticized the
theorists of the Intelligent Design Movement for taking their arguments directly
to the public, implying that these theorists are trying to avoid the
professional scrutiny that accompanies publication in scientific journals. The
truth is otherwise. ID theorists have been eager to pursue any opportunities
they can find to publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The history of
the publication of the Meyer article and its aftermath demonstrates that such
publication would be a real possibility if it were not for the enforcement of
doctrinal polices barring publication of articles supporting intelligent design,
and the consequent professional and public intimidation of editors who might
allow such publication. The Darwinist case for opposing public consideration of
Intelligent Design amounts to saying that “You have to publish in the
professional journals before taking the theory to the public, and we have a rule
that doesn’t allow you to publish in the professional literature.” So there is
no way critics of evolutionary naturalism can get started. If journal
publication were allowed, there is reason to believe that scientists would be
highly interested in pursuing the subject. Over 60 scientists from around the
world requested copies of the Meyer article and an accompanying packet of
reference materials. Because a gag order is in force, ID is not discussed in the
scientific literature. This enforced silence tells us nothing about what would
be happening if individual scientists and editors were free to act on their own
judgment, without fear of punishment for addressing forbidden topics…
…One early sign of the way the world is headed came in December 2004, when there was much comment in newspapers and internet discussion groups about famedToken proofs and other mock-reasons are all that the exertions that the authoritarian in power generally bothers to perform and for the obedient they are content to not have their minds excercised on questions of foundation:
atheist philosopher Anthony Flew. Flew had just announced that he had converted
to philosophical theism (though not to Christianity or any other specific
religion, at least as yet), on the basis of scientific discoveries and related
reasoning, which had convinced him that there is an intelligent designer of the
natural universe. Flew seems to have investigated the phenomenon of design in
the natural world for reasons similar to my own. He wanted to decide for himself
whether evidence and logic point in the direction of a creating intelligence, or
whether God is nothing more than a subjective idea created by human imagination.
Perhaps these questions about the reality of god are religious in nature, but
they are important questions that deserve to be investigated dispassionately
instead of being barred from consideration because powerful groups define
“science” as committed a priori to naturalism. ....Those who insist that science
is by definition dedicated to seeking out and endorsing naturalistic
explanations for all phenomena dismiss any questioning of their basic premise as
“religiously” motivated and hence irrational--and even unconstitutional in the
USA (where a majority of the population is nevertheless inclined to question the
premise). But religious questions may be reasonable and important questions.
Here is an example: I’ve repeatedly posed the question, “Is God real, or
imaginary?”. Evolutionary naturalism classes god among the subjective products
of the human brain, and thus among the products of evolution itself. If God is
truly real, however, and really our creator, then to enforce a definition of
knowledge based upon the assumption that ONLY nature is real, and that God
exists only in the human imagination, would be to make a big mistake. Surely it
is rational for people who believe that God is or may be the creator to
challenge those who insist that we assume that a mindless nature did all the
creating. It is rational to argue instead that we should evaluate the evidence
impartially, with the goal of coming to the truth about whether it was necessary
that there be a creator in order to accomplish the creating of all the marvels
of the living world. If the Darwinian mechanism or some other combination of law
and chance isn’t able to create the necessary information, then we should
acknowledge the inadequacy and move on to consider alternatives. What we should
not do is to stick with an inadequate answer because we are afraid that
recognizing the inadequacy will tend to lead us back in the direction of
God.
… In the end, the only important question is not how numerous or powerful are
the people who hold a certain position now, but who is right about what is true
and what isn’t. If evolutionary naturalists are right that unintelligent causes
produced all the complex and diverse forms of life we know without the
assistance of intelligence, then surely our very determined and intelligent
scientists will find a more convincing demonstration of the process and
mechanism than cyclical variation in the beaks of a finch species . On the other
hand, if further investigation tends to confirm that life requires prodigious
amounts of complex specified genetic information, then eventually the unsolved
problem of where all that information comes from will take its place in the
forefront of scientific and philosophical discussion.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Less Blurry Roses
"Now give me your help in drawing the conclusion that emerges from what we have agreed. It is good to repeat and contemplate fine things two or three times, they say..." Gorgias, 499.
Socrates drops that piece of homespun knowledge and in his use of it it is hard to think he is wholely serious because it is a flattery of a hostile person who has resisted entering into dialogue with him and he is suggesting that what this Callicles has said is fine when in fact he is about to bring before Callicles mind his contradiction- so he is to some extent drawing him in and tripping him up by his pride, it seems to me. But nevertheless, I like the saying, which Socrates carries around like a proverb. It can smack of being pat and assume more significance than it ought but I take it as a wise enough formulation of how we ought to pause with the good things, the fine things- the good, the lovely, the pure, the noble, etc.- and after the initial recognition make something of a conscious point of adverting to it again, or stopping there and going over it, savoring it, letting it sink in, giving it its due, not blazing by it like we were on our way somewhere better, seeing the roses in a blurr but not smelling them.
Side note: It is very interesting to see how much the character Callicles resembles Nietzsche in his argument. This has been observed by many apparently.
Socrates drops that piece of homespun knowledge and in his use of it it is hard to think he is wholely serious because it is a flattery of a hostile person who has resisted entering into dialogue with him and he is suggesting that what this Callicles has said is fine when in fact he is about to bring before Callicles mind his contradiction- so he is to some extent drawing him in and tripping him up by his pride, it seems to me. But nevertheless, I like the saying, which Socrates carries around like a proverb. It can smack of being pat and assume more significance than it ought but I take it as a wise enough formulation of how we ought to pause with the good things, the fine things- the good, the lovely, the pure, the noble, etc.- and after the initial recognition make something of a conscious point of adverting to it again, or stopping there and going over it, savoring it, letting it sink in, giving it its due, not blazing by it like we were on our way somewhere better, seeing the roses in a blurr but not smelling them.
Side note: It is very interesting to see how much the character Callicles resembles Nietzsche in his argument. This has been observed by many apparently.
Socrates on not assuming you know what the other means out of love for the truth
"I won't say that I haven't a suspiscion of your meaning on both points, but that suspiscion won't prevent me from asking you what you believe to be the nature of the conviction produced by oratory and the subject of that conviction. You may wonder why, if I have this suspiscion, I ask you instead of answering the question myself. I am moved to do so not by any consideration personal to you but by consideration of the argument, which I wish to proceed in such a way as to place before us in the clearest possible light what we are talking about. I think that you will agree that my questions are fair if you look at the matter like this..." -Gorgias, 453
"...This is what I suspected you meant, Gorgias, but don't be surprised if later on I repeat this procedure and ask additional questions when the answer seems to be already clear. My motive, as I say, is not in the least personal; it is simply to help the discussion to progress towards its end in a logical sequence and to prevent us from getting into the habit of anticipating one another's statements because we have a vague suspiscion of what they are likely to be, instead of allowing you to develop your argument in your own way from the agreed premises."- Gorgias, 454.
"...This is what I suspected you meant, Gorgias, but don't be surprised if later on I repeat this procedure and ask additional questions when the answer seems to be already clear. My motive, as I say, is not in the least personal; it is simply to help the discussion to progress towards its end in a logical sequence and to prevent us from getting into the habit of anticipating one another's statements because we have a vague suspiscion of what they are likely to be, instead of allowing you to develop your argument in your own way from the agreed premises."- Gorgias, 454.
Monday, February 19, 2007
"We need another St. Benedict"- Alasdair MacIntyre
The following quote provides some context for MacIntyre's quote from his book After Virtue in the the preface to the Twelve Marks of the New Monasticism, in which he says what is needed in our day is another St. Benedict. He has deftly and with considerable knowledge of the Middle Ages explained how the way that pagan literature was used by the church fathers and most notably by St. Augustine, how he searched out and found uses for the literature but in the context of their subordination to the Scripture and how exegetical approaches to the Bible developed and the way that pagan literature was also read and incorporated. St. Augustine's uses of pagan literature and the reasoning and theology behind it is what is referred to when MacIntyre refers to his overaching epistemology. He is explaining how to contextualize a famous case in the Middle Ages dealing with an Augustinian thinker Abelard. He remarks that in modern times the story of Abelard is usually addressed in two ways, dry as dust or technicolor, but that it is properly understood in the overaching understanding of the primacy of legitimate authority when it comes to dialectical or dialogical exploration, something that both St. Bernard and Abelard viewed themselves as beholden to. He understands St. Benedict as having layed down practical rules of obedience and of humbling of the self that help bring about the right uses of the intellect. MacIntyre is showing how there is a contuinuity and development within that continuity that has drawn on and in some ways improved the dialogical forms that Socrates embodied. He is explaining how within this tradition of theology and philosophy intertwined there is learning and progress and that practical rules for carrying out that are needed in our day...I think I am not doing it justice at all...
"Bernard [of Clairvaux], as a Cistercian, followed the Rule of St. Benedict, whose practical theology presupposes what St. Augustine had affirmed, that it is only through transformation of the will from a state of pride to one of humility that the intelligence can rightly be directed. Will is more fundamental than intelligence and thinking undirected by a will informed by humility will always be apt to go astray. It is clearly the pride of will which Bernard discerned in Abelard and which Abelard acknowledged by his submission that he had discerned in himself. So it is the underlying epistemology of Augustinian enquiry which requires the condemnation of heresy, since heresy is always a sign of pride in choosing to elevate one's own judgment above that of genuine authority." -Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, p. 91.
"Bernard [of Clairvaux], as a Cistercian, followed the Rule of St. Benedict, whose practical theology presupposes what St. Augustine had affirmed, that it is only through transformation of the will from a state of pride to one of humility that the intelligence can rightly be directed. Will is more fundamental than intelligence and thinking undirected by a will informed by humility will always be apt to go astray. It is clearly the pride of will which Bernard discerned in Abelard and which Abelard acknowledged by his submission that he had discerned in himself. So it is the underlying epistemology of Augustinian enquiry which requires the condemnation of heresy, since heresy is always a sign of pride in choosing to elevate one's own judgment above that of genuine authority." -Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, p. 91.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (DVD)
The documentary Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire is excellent and certainly presents something valuable for reflection, a look into the life and reflection of Lt. Col. Romeo Dallaire after the Rwanbdan massacres that he was witness to and in which he tried in vain to get the UN to take heed and intervene rather than following the "live and let die" doctrine of the world. They opted for the later.
Something I noticed was his references several time to the inner sanctum of the Rwandans, for all their poverty and simplicity, and to the sacred. Like Raskolnikov, he was brought to a hieghtened awareness of the holy and the conscience through circumstances, though he was not a murderer like Raskolnikov. Now he looks in a sense from the outside at the Western poers and sees them with a critics eye. He accepts the blunt criticisms by Paul Kagame , leader of the Tutsi army that restored peace, of our countries, knowing very well that we did nothing for them and cared nothing for them and that he has no reason to be diplomatic to those who let his people die.
This partially draws on the book by the same name, but it also adds a lot of material and of course, footage.
Something I noticed was his references several time to the inner sanctum of the Rwandans, for all their poverty and simplicity, and to the sacred. Like Raskolnikov, he was brought to a hieghtened awareness of the holy and the conscience through circumstances, though he was not a murderer like Raskolnikov. Now he looks in a sense from the outside at the Western poers and sees them with a critics eye. He accepts the blunt criticisms by Paul Kagame , leader of the Tutsi army that restored peace, of our countries, knowing very well that we did nothing for them and cared nothing for them and that he has no reason to be diplomatic to those who let his people die.
This partially draws on the book by the same name, but it also adds a lot of material and of course, footage.
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