Derbyshire and the Science of Man

From John Derbyshire's column of August 15:

Science insists that there is an external world beyond our emotions and wish-fulfillment fantasies. It claims that we can find out true facts about that world, including facts with no immediate technological application. The human sciences insist even more audaciously that we ourselves are part of that world and can be described as dispassionately as stars, rocks, and microbes. Perhaps one day it will be socially acceptable to believe this.

It is a continual source of amazement to me that people of Derbyshire's intelligence cannot see the profound difference between understanding a microbe scientifically and understanding a man scientifically, and how much more problematic the latter is than the former. For the simple fact is that in any scientific investigation of man, man is both the subject under investigation and the investigator; the enterprise is therefore necessarily "dialectical", a two-dollar word that just means that the nature of the investigation, and indeed its very possibility, is conditioned by the investigation's own conclusions.

The scientific investigation of microbes is not dialectical. A scientist may conclude whatever he wants about microbes without it saying anything about the possibility of the scientist's investigation. But if he investigates man and concludes, for example, that man's cognitive apparatus is such that what man knows is "models" his brain constructs out of raw and unformed sensory data, then the scientific investigation is itself undermined. The scientist, as a member of the human race, is a mental model-maker like everyone else, and so his scientific theories reach only to those mental models and never to the reality behind the models. The brain, eyes and nervous system that feature in the scientists' account are not directly known elements of reality (for this is impossible on the scientist's account of things); they are cognitive models constructed by the scientist's mind just as much as anything else. It may appear that the scientist is getting somewhere when he says that "the apparently persistent natures of things we perceive are not really out there but are our brain's construction on sense data", but he hasn't really gotten anywhere. For the brain on this account is just as much a construction as anything that is purportedly to be explained by the brain's constructive powers (which powers are, naturally, themselves constructions). The dialectic is not avoided simply because it is not always recognized.

I believe there is a small voice in the mind of even "stone-cold empiricists" (as Derbyshire calls himself) that hints at this truth. It is kept at bay by recourse to mythology, the mythology of science, which is easily recognized when science is reified as in "The human sciences insist..." Science as an abstraction is, of course, not subject to the dialectical difficulties a merely human scientist must suffer. If "Science" concludes that the brain is a model-maker, this is no more problematic for it than any conclusion Science may make about microbes, for Science is no more a brain than a microbe. For science that is conducted by actual scientists, however, the dialectical difficulties remain...

The Trivial Things We Share

Causing a minor stir on the internet is this Commonweal article by Joseph Bottum - "The Things We Share." Bottum, a former editor of First Things and an alleged conservative Catholic, has apparently decided for unconditional surrender on the issue of gay marriage.

As others have remarked, the article is a strangely rambling and lengthy piece. I'm not going to address any of the arguments Bottum makes for gay marriage here - others have done that better than I can (Ed Feser's take is here.) Instead I'd like to discuss the nature of the things that it is that Bottum shares.

For Bottum this is principally folk music and specifically bluegrass music. "The Things We Share" is framed by Bottum's relationship with Jim Watson, like Bottum a bluegrass musician, but with the difference that Watson happens to be gay. And in the end, this makes all the difference, at least when it is combined with Bottum's Catholicism:

A few years ago, his friendship began to cool, bit by bit. You understand how it is: a little here, a little there, and last time I was through New York he didn’t even bother to answer my note suggesting we put together one of our low-rent urban hootenannies. The problem, our conversations had made pretty clear along the way, was that I am a Catholic, and Jim is gay.

Well, actually, gay isn’t the word he would use. I have what might be the worst ability to recognize sexual orientation on the planet, but no one needed sensitivity to guess Jim’s views. Not that he was campy or anything when I knew him, but he was always vocal about his sexuality, naming himself loudly to anyone nearby with words that polite society allows only in ironic use by gay men themselves.

Anyway, Jim gradually started to take our difference personally, growing increasingly angry first at the Catholic Church for its opposition to state-sanctioned same-sex marriage and then at Catholics themselves for belonging to such a church. His transformation didn’t come from any personal desire to marry—or, at least, from any desire he ever articulated or I could see.

A few years ago, his friendship began to cool, bit by bit. You understand how it is: a little here, a little there, and last time I was through New York he didn’t even bother to answer my note suggesting we put together one of our low-rent urban hootenannies. The problem, our conversations had made pretty clear along the way, was that I am a Catholic, and Jim is gay.

Well, actually, gay isn’t the word he would use. I have what might be the worst ability to recognize sexual orientation on the planet, but no one needed sensitivity to guess Jim’s views. Not that he was campy or anything when I knew him, but he was always vocal about his sexuality, naming himself loudly to anyone nearby with words that polite society allows only in ironic use by gay men themselves.

Anyway, Jim gradually started to take our difference personally, growing increasingly angry first at the Catholic Church for its opposition to state-sanctioned same-sex marriage and then at Catholics themselves for belonging to such a church. His transformation didn’t come from any personal desire to marry—or, at least, from any desire he ever articulated or I could see.

Bottum clearly misses the friendship with Jim, but what is it that he misses? Like Bottum, I am a folk musician, but instead of bluegrass I play traditional Irish music, not too difficult to find here in the Boston area. There are  players I have known off and on for fifteen years, and others I have played with consistently over that time. There are very few, maybe one, that I could call a genuine friend, including players I have spent hundreds of hours playing with. I doubt any of them are aware of this blog, and some would be put off - just like Jim - if they read it. On the other hand, I started last year attending a lectio divina group on Mondays. Although I have spent far, far fewer hours in the lectio divina group than I have in Irish music sessions, people who have known me for only a few hours on Monday know me much better than anyone in the Irish music sessions who have played with me for years.

And the reason is that true friendship, as Aristotle teaches us, can only be based on the good, and therefore also on truth. The Irish music tradition was founded in poor farmers playing in the kitchen or pub after a long day's hard work; these farmers shared a Catholic faith and a dedication to family that found expression in their music. I once heard Martin Hayes recount stories of his boyhood watching tough, gruff men play music in his father's kitchen, music that was sweet and gentle and in contrast to the rough exterior of the men playing it. What joined these men was not the music so much as their shared sacrifice and vocation, their sense of tragedy, struggle, faith and joy, all of which came out in their music. Bluegrass music in this country has a similar origin.

You can lose the shared sacrifice and faith but keep the music, but when you do you have lost its substance and have hold of something essentially trivial. It is no longer an expression of a deep human friendship but a sort of lightweight end in itself. Fun, sure, but beware trying to attach anything meaningful to it:

At the same time, there’s been damage done in the course of this whole debate, some of it by me. And I’m not sure what can be done about it. I certainly lost my friend Jim along the way. Some come here to fiddle and dance, I remember he used to sing. Some come here to tarry. / Some come here to prattle and prance. / I come here to marry. You remember how it goes. “Shady Grove,” the song is called. A bit of old-timey Americana, the stuff we all still share.

Sorry, Joseph, what that song is singing we no longer share and haven't for some time now.

A few years ago, his friendship began to cool, bit by bit. You understand how it is: a little here, a little there, and last time I was through New York he didn’t even bother to answer my note suggesting we put together one of our low-rent urban hootenannies. The problem, our conversations had made pretty clear along the way, was that I am a Catholic, and Jim is gay.

Well, actually, gay isn’t the word he would use. I have what might be the worst ability to recognize sexual orientation on the planet, but no one needed sensitivity to guess Jim’s views. Not that he was campy or anything when I knew him, but he was always vocal about his sexuality, naming himself loudly to anyone nearby with words that polite society allows only in ironic use by gay men themselves.

Anyway, Jim gradually started to take our difference personally, growing increasingly angry first at the Catholic Church for its opposition to state-sanctioned same-sex marriage and then at Catholics themselves for belonging to such a church. His transformation didn’t come from any personal desire to marry—or, at least, from any desire he ever articulated or I could see.

On Browsing Bookstores and Libraries

Here I am thinking particularly of used bookstores and, at the library, the new arrivals shelf. Just this afternoon I was at the library to pick up a book on hold and, as is my custom, I browsed through the new arrivals shelf and came away with three books: Bad Religion by Ross Douthat, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism by A.C. Grayling, and World War Two: A Short History by Norman Stone.

I remember as a child browsing through the library with the excitement of a treasure hunt. I still get that excitement on entering a used bookstore or a library (not at the same intensity, naturally) and it is an experience that you can't get online. It is possible to browse through amazon.com but it is not quite the same thing; the physical element is essential, the feel and look of the book, its heft, and the experience of wandering through the shelves wondering when and if that one special work will catch your eye.

I've started on the Douthat book and I can tell already I'm going to like it, maybe because Douthat is so obviously influenced by G.K. Chesterton. Page 11 includes these Chestertonian paragraphs:

What defines this consensus, above all - what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta - is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.

Thus orthodox Christians insist that Jesus Christ was divine and human all at once, that the Absolute is somehow Three as well as One, that God is omnipotent and omniscient and yet nonetheless leaves us free to choose between good and evil. They propose that the world is corrupted by original sin and yet somehow also essentially good, with the stamp of its Creator visible on every star and sinew. They assert that the God of the Old Testament, jealous and punitive, is somehow identical tot he New Testament's God of love and mercy. They claim that this same God sets impossible moral standards and yet forgives every sin. They insist that faith alone will save us, yet faith without works is dead. And they propose a vision of holiness that finds room in God's kingdom for all the extremes of human life - fecund families and single-minded celibates, politicians and monastics, queens as well as beggars, soldiers and pacifists alike.

And, of course, as soon as I turn the page I see that Douthat has explicitly quoted GKC on page 12.

Incidentally, I think I would disagree with Douthat that what defines consensus in (American) Christian orthodoxy is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Missing here is the subject of mystery and paradox. Zen Buddhism certainly has a commitment to mystery and paradox but it has a different subject than orthodox Christianity. What constitutes orthodox Christianity is mystery and paradox with respect to a particular subject, who is Jesus of Nazareth. And for that union of subject and paradox you need authority, for the difference between a genuine paradox (which is also a merely apparent self-contradiction) and a genuine self-contradiction is a deeper truth that is not immediately intelligible to us. Our access to genuine Christian paradox, then, must be mediated by an authority that can distinguish for us between the genuinely paradoxical and the merely self-contradictory. For Protestants, this authority is the Bible and for Catholics it is the Magisterium; but for either, the commitment to authority is what makes the commitment to mystery and paradox possible. And it is the eclipse of authority, I believe, that is the ultimate cause of the "bad religion" in America.