Wisdom 7:7-11 and Philosophy

 "Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. 

I preferred her to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. 

Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem, because all gold is but a little sand in her sight, and silver will be accounted as clay before her. 

I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases. 

All good things came to me along with her, and in her hands uncounted wealth."

Our modern understanding of morality sees it as a matter of figuring out abstract rules of behavior. A philosophy class in ethics might devote its time to pondering artificial circumstances as a way to tease out such rules: What should one do, for example, if you happen to be standing next to a railway switch with a train bearing down which will run over 5 people, and you could switch it onto a side track where it will only run over 1 person? Do you do nothing and allow the five to die? Or do you switch the track and condemn to death the one, who would have survived without your intervention?

This approach is quite foreign to the ancient approach to morality. The ancient approach did not concern itself with rules so much, as with describing and creating the character of a man who would show good judgment in any circumstance. Good judgment was known as the virtue of phronesis to the Greeks and we understand it under the name of prudence or wisdom, although our understanding of prudence is a more timid version of what the Greeks meant by phronesis. Our prudent man is the sort of man who avoids taking chances, whereas the Greek wiseman was fully prepared to take chances if the situation truly called for it.

The quote from Wisdom that starts this post summarizes the ancient view of wisdom nicely. Wisdom is more valuable than gold, silver, scepters or thrones, because the man who is not wise (i.e. the fool) will not use such wealth in a manner that is truly to his advantage. On the other hand, the wise man who is not rich will nonetheless possess the character virtues that will allow him to become rich; or, better yet, acquire those things that truly make a fulfilled life (which might be other than thrones or riches). So wisdom is a far more valuable thing to have than any earthly possession or title.

The author of the Book of Wisdom would not be surprised by modern studies that show that the lives of winners of large lottery prizes are, after a few years, indistinguishable from what they were before they got lucky. They may now have a rusting snowmobile in their backyard and drive a 10 year old Mercedes, and have travelled to Vegas a few times, but as the years go by they end up pretty much where they would have otherwise. The reason, according to ancient wisdom, is that their original circumstances had more to do with their character than luck; and without a change of character, a little luck will not make a lasting difference. Instead of saving and investing the money they've won, they buy a boat and a trip to the Caymans. Instead of spending the money on more education, they spend it on buying Cristal for their friends at the bar. In a few years, the money is gone and they are back where they were.

There is an assumption lurking behind the modern understanding of morality that is not always acknowledged. The assumption is that the difficult part of morality is finding out exactly what the moral rules are; once they are known, it is assumed, following them is not such a difficult thing. The ancients had the opposite view: The basics of morality are not difficult to know - don't lie, cheat or steal, kill your neighbor or covet his wife. The hard part was following morality once it was known. 

Even more difficult from the ancient view was how, beyond merely avoiding doing evil, to construct your life so that it is as fulfilling as possible. This is something that requires much more than just rule following. It means discovering what human life is really about, and acquiring the virtues necessary to attain it.

Modern morality has nothing to say about this. It views "freedom" as the greatest good, and is indifferent to what one does with that freedom, as long those abstract moral rules are followed. The great modern moral crusades, then, concern themselves with defending the rights of individuals to be or to do what they want with their freedom- change from a boy to a girl, for instance, or call themselves a girl when they look exactly like a boy.

For the average person, who is basically of good character and is wondering what to do with his life, the modern answer of "whatever you want" is disappointingly empty. For those so disappointed, the ancients stand ready to listen and answer.

Living in the Present

The present is the point at which the past is recollected and the future anticipated.

It is often urged on us to live in the now. That is, to live in the present. It is thought that this involves forgetting the past and avoiding paying attention to the future, for both the past and the future make us anxious. Instead, it is advised that one exist in the moment, what is happening right now.

This is a misunderstanding. For someone who does not recollect himself in the moment, or anticipate the future in the moment, is living nowhere rather than in the moment. It is true that he may be free of anxiety because he is not remembering the past or anticipating the future, but then animals live this sort of anxiety-free life. But to live as a human being means to live in relation to the past and the future.

And even when, for a time, he has this sort of anxiety-free existence (as, for instance, when he loses himself in a hobby in his basement, or becomes lost in the excitement of a championship game) he is not really experiencing the anxiety-free life of the animal; for, at any moment, the spell might be broken and his distinctively human recollection of the past and anticipation of the future will come rushing back in. He will suddenly find himself existing somewhere rather than nowhere, with all the anxiety that entails.

Truly living in the present is the most difficult of art forms. It means recollecting the past and anticipating the future in such a way that it has immediate decisive significance. Man acts in the now, but only as a bridge uniting his recollection of the past with his anticipation of the future. It is an art form because no science of living in such a manner is possible; for science of its nature abstracts from the decisive significance of the present in relation to the past and future.

Kierkegaard, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, takes monks to task for their distinctive dress.  The mistake, according to Kierkegaard, is that it is a false attempt to represent the inner determination of the spirit via an outward material sign. But the "knight of the spirit" is not so easily recognized; in fact, he is not immediately recognizable at all, for the inner determination of spirit may be married to any outward material circumstance.

SK is wrong, I think, in his understanding of the meaning of the monk's simple robe. For us, the robe is simply a witness to the vow the monk has made to a life of simplicity in the following of Christ. The inner state of his spirit is something else entirely; it may wax and wane in its dedication to that vow. It is similar to the ring of the married man, which symbolizes a vow the man has made, not the state of his success in living up to it.

More to the point of this post, for the monk the robe is a continual reminder of his vow, and his uniting of the past with the future in his vow of the simple life for Christ. It is an aid to the art of living in the moment, of giving every moment its due not by forgetting the past and the future, but by a unification of the past with the future in a blossoming of immediate decisive action.

For most of us, such immediately decisive action occurs only rarely. We make a decision on which college to attend, or to propose to our girlfriend, or to move to another city. In such moments we feel truly alive, as we see our past come together in a decisive determination of our future. And we are right, for in such moments we are truly living as distinctively human beings.

The task for our lives is to make more of the unfolding present alive with such decisiveness. This does not mean continually making the decision to move to another city; for that would only rob any particular decision of its decisiveness for the future. No, like the monk, we must find a way to unite all our actions, even the small ones, in the present and in light of the past and in anticipation of the future.

Suicide of the West: Ideas Are Not Enough

This is also posted at Ricochet.com

Jonah Goldberg summarizes the argument of his recent book this way:

It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e. principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling... Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude - and the effort that gratitude demands -- all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. (p. 277)

Jonah wants to stay away from arguments about God -- the very first sentence of the book is "There is no God in this book." But he doesspend considerable time acknowledging the extent to which Christianity is responsible for putting the circumstances in place that allowed the Miracle to occur. ("The Miracle" for Jonah is our modern systems of constitutional democracy and capitalism that have unleashed prosperity since the 18th century.) He even allows that Christianity was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the Miracle to happen:

Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely. (p. 109)

For Jonah, it is far more important thatthe Miracle happened than whyit happened. But this inclination to avoid drawing conclusions concerning the causal origins of the Miracle has implications for his prescription for sustaining the Miracle. For then the only thing we can do is maintain those circumstances as best we can, as we have no way of knowing what other circumstances might also support the Miracle. That is the price of an ignorance of causal origins. (There is irony here insofar as the hallmark of Western civilization, and perhaps necessary to the Miracle itself, is the Western determination to not remain satisfied with material circumstance but seek and find the causal origins of those circumstances.)
Jonah's solution for what ails us is:

Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment. (p. 344)

The problem is that, unlike our forebears, Jonah is a fideist with respect to liberal principles:

We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof -- the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don't tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far more people believe we should act as ifthey are God-given or in some other way "real." (p. 83)

and

The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. (p. 142)

The Founders did not hold the existence of rights as a matter of faith. They either offered arguments for their existence (that's the whole point of Locke's exploration of the state of nature), or took those rights to be self-evidently true (as in the Declaration of Independence). To hold something self-evidently is not to hold it on faith; quite the opposite. It is to hold it as so obviously true that it is in no need of argumentation.
Jonah misunderstands the role of dogma. The object of dogma is not ideasbutfacts. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..." are not proposed as useful ideas to support a liberal dispensation, but as significant facts about the world that must be respected - and from which various ideas about the proper relationship of man to his government may be drawn, among other ideas.
The point is that Jonah's prescription does not recreate the circumstances under which the Miracle was born: Those circumstances involved holding things like natural rights as facts, not as the useful fictions Jonah proposes. Since Jonah denies knowledge of the causal origins of the Miracle, he owes us an explanation of why the circumstances he proposes will support the Miracle as well as did the original circumstances under which it occurred.
This question extends to the cultural background of the Miracle. Jonah lists many of the cultural legacies of Christianity that contributed to the Miracle:

I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can't be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn't materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story. (p. 331)
Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality (p. 332)
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. (p. 332)

But Christians do not hold natural equality and the division of the sacred from the secular on the grounds that they are really good ideas. They hold them because God Himself walked this Earth and showed that He is no respecter of persons, and this same God ordered us to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. How will those ideas be sustained absent the convictions that made them historically relevant? Jonah recounts the famous account of Henry IV and his penitential trek to Canossa, but would Henry have submitted if he thought the secular/sacred division merely an historically useful fiction rather than the command of the living God? Jonah calls on us to close our eyes, grit our teeth, and simply believe really hard in liberal principles. It's unlikely such a will to believe can successfully replace historic Christian faith (or the Deistic faith of the Founders).
There is evidence of this in Suicide of the Westitself. Jonah recognizes the benefits of the traditional family:

Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude - and the effort that gratitude demands - all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually hatethe traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in. (p. 277)

But of what use is Jonah's gratitude for the traditional nuclear family? His support for gay marriage -- "marriage equality" -- is well known. But if two mommies are as good as a mommy and a daddy, then fathers are dispensable to the family. And if they are, indifference to the traditional family structure seems entirely appropriate. Jonah's gratitude for the traditional family offers no resistance to the most basic attacks on that family. How different it is for those who hold that the family, composed of a mother, father, and children, is an institution ordained by God, one that is prior to the state and that does not depend on the fickle will to believe of man for its existence.
Jonah ends the book with a declaration of the choice before us:

Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore. p. 351

I prefer: Principles die when no one believes anymore in the God who sustains them.

Random Notes on Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now

I'm reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. Herewith are some random notes:

p. 234 - Pinker is discussing knowledge and sociology:

Do better-educated countries get richer, or can richer countries afford more education? One way to cut the knot is to take advantage of the fact that a cause must precede its effect. (emphasis mine)

It's clear from earlier in the book that Pinker has no brief for metaphysics as classically conceived.  The thing about classical metaphysics is that it is necessary whether you like it or not. The consequence is that metaphysics-haters cannot avoid metaphysics no matter how much they try, and must eventually let metaphysical concepts slip in, consciously or not. A cause must precede its effect is a 100 proof metaphysical concept. And as Pinker's example inadvertently admits, it is more surely known than any scientific conclusions because it is part of the intellectual framework that makes science possible in the first place.

A metaphysical analysis might reflect on a cause must precede its effect and note that it is not precisely articulated. Causes and effects are actually simultaneous. The effect of education is an educated person and it happens at the moment of education. Later on, an educated person may be the cause of riches, so we may loosely talk about education causing riches.

-----------

p. 235 - "Better educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men."

The thrust of Pinker's book is that Enlightenment values and methods have contributed to unprecedented progress over the last few hundred years. And that is certainly true. But, as Chesterton has pointed out, the only way to measure "progress" is to have a stable measure of progress over time. In Chesterton's example, if we decided the world would be better if it was painted green, and we all began to splash green paint everywhere, what would happen if we then decided the world would be better if it were blue? Then all our work painting it green was wasted and we had really made no progress at all.

Up to the time of the Enlightenment (and actually, until very recently) , there was universal agreement that children were a blessing, and  indeed among the greatest of blessings. God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous of the stars, and Abraham didn't think it a burden. One of the great achievements of the modern era (one that Pinker emphasizes) is the massive reduction in child mortality over the past 200 years.

And yet, if you had told an Enlightenment philosopher in the year 1770 that one of the great achievements of Western society in the year 2018 would be that many people desired few or no descendants, he'd be puzzled. How is that progress? And if you further told him that mothers would regularly kill their unborn children in order to avoid having a child, he'd be even further puzzled. And he would be positively flabbergasted if you told him the replacement rate of France, Spain and Italy was such that in a few generations Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians would disappear altogether.

The thing is, the notion of progress is a philosophical one, and those who refuse to reason philosophically end up in places they never dreamed of.

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Sam Harris Free Will Thought Experiment

Tooling around youtube I came along this video of a an exercise Sam Harris offered as a practical refutation of free will.

The exercise Harris advocates is essentially this: He asks you to think of a city, any city, in the world, without any constraints. Once you have done so, Harris claims that this choice, if anything, would be an example of the exercise of free will. He then proceeds to debunk the choice as free by arguing that it wasn't really free. I won't rehearse all the reasons he provides (the video is only about 6 minutes), but his arguments all boil down to showing that the choice must have had a cause, even if we are unaware of the cause. For instance, you may have chosen Paris as your city because it happened to bubble up out of your subconscious, and that bubbling was a function of the fact that you once travelled to Paris and have fond memories. The point is that we mistakenly think the choice was "free" because we think we chose it arbitrarily, when in actuality the cause was driven by psychological factors of which we were simply unaware.

Harris's exercise involves a typical misunderstanding of what is meant by "free will", or rather, what the classical philosophers meant by calling man free. They did not mean that human will is an uncaused caused, which is what Harris seems to think it must mean. That would simply be to mistake man for God, Who is the only possible uncaused cause.

Man's will is classically understood to be free not because it is uncaused, but because it can have rational causes rather than irrational ones. Specifically, man can rationally judge means and the relationship of means to ends, and choose a course of action based on that judgement. (This is what Plato meant by saying "the truth shall make you free.") It is in the exercise of rationally considered action that man's freedom is manifest, not in the allegedly arbitrary choice of a meaningless selection as in Harris's exercise. A classical philosopher would not dispute that the choice made by a person in Harris's exercise is not free - in that sense, Harris is not showing anything new. But they would point out that they never thought such a choice was free in a significant sense in any case.

To flesh these points out, consider the difference between a beaver building a dam and a man building a dam. The beaver builds a dam by instinct. When it hears the sound of running water, it attempts to stop the sound by piling sticks and mud on it - even in cases where it makes no sense to do so. (For example, playing the sound of running water beneath a concrete floor will cause beavers to pile mud and sticks over the sound on the dry concrete). The beaver builds the dam the same way every time, by piling up sticks and mud, and will keep building them the same way.

The beaver is not free in its dam building. It's not free when it builds the dam (the end), because it simply starts building a dam at the sound of running water, nor is it free in how it builds (the means), for it does it the same way every time by piling up mud and sticks.

Now consider man building a dam, for example Hoover Dam. Man did not build this dam because he happened to hear the sound of running water once and automatically started piling sticks on it. The dam was built after a long, rational consideration of ends that might be achieved with the dam - hydroelectricity and the recreational possibilities of Lake Mead among others. Once the end was selected, the means were then considered. The dam could be build out of a variety of materials and in a variety of places. Concrete for the material was selected and a particular spot on the Colorado river was chosen - and not because an engineer picked the location "freely" by just letting a location pop into his head, but as the result of a detailed investigation of hydrology and the anticipated consequences of various locations.

Eventually the construction began and the Hoover Dam was built and it stands as a monument to the freedom of man, which means the freedom to know the truth and to act according to it. It doesn't mean to act in some purely arbitrary manner. That is the degenerate freedom that has unfortunately become the vision of freedom of that has captured the imagination of modern man.

Know the truth and it shall make you free.

Daniel Dennett's Latest

Thomas Nagel reviews Daniel Dennett's latest book here in the New York Review of Books. I've read most of what Dennett has written and this book doesn't seem to break much new ground, so I don't think I'll plunk down the $15 for it.

Dennett references Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image", which correspond to the everyday view of the world and the scientific view of the world. Nagel quotes Dennett describing the manifest image as:

full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things” that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It’s the world according to us.

while the scientific image is:

is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).

According to Dennett, the scientific image describes what the world is really like, while the manifest image is just how the world appears to us, a set of "user illusions" evolution has equipped us with to get on with the world. Nagel doesn't mention him but Kant is lurking behind here, as he always is with Dennett.

As is typical with Dennett, what is most important is not what he says but what he leaves out. In his description of the manifest image, in particular, we can include not just homeruns and haircuts, but also telescopes, microscopes, voltmeters, scientific conferences and the scientific method. In other words, it's only through the manifest image that the scientific image is even possible or has meaning. The relationship between them is not that of equals, but of priority: The manifest image is prior to the scientific image both logically and temporally. Thinking you can undermine the manifest image with the scientific image is like thinking you can observe real bacteria with a fake microscope.

Harari on Polytheism vs Monotheism

I've been reading Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It's a "hot" book: #434 on Amazon overall and #3 in general anthropology. It's also a laughably tendentious treatment of human history from a secular perspective. Christianity and monotheism in general is bad, bad, bad and polytheism good, good, good. The author even has a problem with civilization itself, the early chapters arguing that the transition from a simple hunter gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one was a disaster for all concerned. It's very much Rousseau in spirit although the venerable Swiss is given no credit for originating this line of thought.

In this post I'd like to focus on what Harari has to say concerning polytheism. He first notes (correctly) that polytheists, although they believe in many gods, nonetheless generally believe in a single, unified power behind the gods. It is the nature of this supreme power that is the essence of polytheism:

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interest and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses, whether a particular city prospers or withers, whether a particular person recuperates or dies. The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and the Hindus built no temples to Atman.

The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good - to embrace even defeat, poverty, sickness and death. Thus some Hindus, known as Sadhus or Sannyasis, devote their lives to uniting with Atman, thereby achieving enlightenment. They strive to see the world from the viewpoint of this fundamental principle, to realize that from its eternal perspective all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena. 

Most Hindus, however, are not Sadhus. They are sunk deep in the morass of mundane concerns, where Atman is not much help. For assistance in such matters, Hindus approach the gods with their partial powers. Precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win wars and recuperate from illness. There are necessarily many of these smaller powers, since once you start dividing up  the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle, you'll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality of gods. 

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.

The first thing to say about this treatment is that it is entirely reasonable; in fact, we might go so far as to say that what has been described is the 'natural' religion of mankind - the way man would almost inevitably think about religion if left to his own devices. And, indeed, as Harari points out, it is the way most men have thought about religion in most times and places, from the ancient Egyptians to the Chinese, to the Indians, to the Aztecs and the Romans.

Jews and Christians do not disagree with the logic of polytheism, and probably would have followed the natural inclinations and reasoning of everyone else - except that the polytheist position contains a small hole in it: "The supreme power governing the world is devoid of interest and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans." Suppose that the supreme power, although devoid of interests and biases, nonetheless takes an interest in men? An interest men never asked for, expected, or even wanted, but that nonetheless occurs? Suppose this supreme power keeps pestering man even though we'd rather be left alone? That story, the story of the supreme power pestering an obscure ancient people into a relationship with Him, for reasons mysterious to us, is the real story of the Old Testament.

Suppose further that the supreme power not only pesters man from afar, but does the unthinkable and takes on the form of man and appears among us as a man among men - not because of any interest or biases He might have, but because He loves us. In other words, the supreme power pestered the ancient Jews and appeared in the form of Christ for our sakes, not His own.

This is an idea "unnatural" to man, and its unnaturalness is one reason I believe it. The fact that the supreme power, Atman or Jehovah or Fate, would act purely in our interest rather than His own is a thought that simply doesn't occur to us. That He would appear among us, voluntarily suffer, die and be buried by us, is also another idea that wouldn't occur to us. The only way the idea entered into human history is because it happened.

Harari doesn't get this in his explanation for the origin of Christianity:

The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. However, one of the sect's first leaders, Paul of Tarsus, reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interest and biases, and if He had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and to die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just the Jews. It was thus necessary to spread the good word - the gospel - about Jesus throughout the world.

But we've already learned that the supreme power of the universe doesn't have interests and biases. At least this is what people always and everywhere naturally think. And why would Paul believe that this supreme power would, even if he did have interests and biases, humiliate himself by becoming a man and suffering and dying at our hands? That conditional is the crux of history - but Harari glides over it and onto the unexceptional point that if in fact one believes this happened, it's something the rest of humanity should hear about. There is a glimmer of insight at the end of the quoted text that Christianity is not fundamentally a view of the world, or a deduction based on the nature of the supreme power or the possibility that lesser deities might be open to influence, but news, i.e. an unexpected irruption of the supreme power into history. This news spreads within decades across the Roman Empire and within a few centuries captures the hearts and minds of Western Civilization, a massive upending of history that Harari can only remark is one of the "strangest twists" in history. It is indeed the strangest twist in history; perhaps because in it there was more going on than mere history?

Finally, Harari seems to embrace the contemporary conviction that tolerance is the highest virtue, and  prefers polytheists like the Aztecs or Hindus to intolerant monotheists like Jews and Christians. Tolerance seems admirable in the abstract, but perhaps not so much up close when we examine what polytheistic tolerance actually involves. As Harari notes, "In the Aztec Empire, subject peoples were obliged to build a temple for Huitzilopochtli, but these temples were built alongside those of local gods, rather than in their stead." He leaves unsaid that the subject peoples were also obliged to regularly send to the Aztec capital not only food and other goods, but also captives destined to suffer ritual human sacrifice. One reason Cortez was able to conquer the mighty Aztec Empire with a few hundred conquistadors is that the subject peoples were more than happy to join him in overthrowing the Aztecs, their "tolerance" notwithstanding. And in India, polytheists tolerated suttee (the burning of widows on the pyre of their husbands) for centuries until it was finally outlawed by the intolerant British.

The tolerant polytheist tolerates everything, the good and the bad. And nothing ever really changes, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. The intolerant monotheist, in the name of the supreme power, decisively intervenes in history in response to the supreme power's own decisive intervention in history: The result is the uniquely dynamic history of Western Civilization since the time of Christ.

Universalism

By Universalism I mean the position that all are eventually saved; in other words, that the population of Hell will be zero.

Edward Feser has had several back and forths with David Bentley Hart on the issue. My point here is not to enter the debate between Feser and Hart but to consider Universalism from a different perspective.

Let us suppose that Universalism is true, and that we know it is true. Then we know that everyone will eventually enjoy eternal bliss; in particular, I will eventually enjoy eternal bliss no matter what I do on this Earth. For me, at least, this is a very dangerous thing to believe, for I am always looking for reasons to remain in my sins, which I find quite comfortable even if I know intellectually that they are essentially bad for me.

I almost wrote "ultimately" bad for me, but that isn't quite right if universalism is true, for in that case no sin is ultimately bad for me, since I will ultimately enjoy eternal bliss. But even if that is ultimately true, it is nonetheless true that I know I would be objectively happier if I were not sinning rather than sinning.

There is no hurry, though, is there, if universalism is true? I might be more perfectly happy if I shed some of my sins, but I am not unhappy and in fact I'm quite comfortable as I am. So why stress out about confronting and conquering sin? Christ in the New Testament exhorts us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. That's nice advice for someone with ambitions to be a saint, but I have no such ambitions. If I'm ultimately destined for eternal bliss, why go through all the hassle? As the Five Man Electrical Band sang - "Thank you Lord for thinkin' bout me, I'm alive and doin fine."

Sure, I might have to go through some pain in the next life before experiencing that eternal bliss, but that's all a little vague compared to the very real suffering and inconvenience involved with confronting sin in this life. I've never been one to seek out the hard road when the easy road is available - especially when I'm assured they both end up in the same place.

These points are not meant to be rhetorical or flip. I abandoned the Catholic faith after high school because I found it entirely irrelevant to my life. The upshot of my 70's Catholic education was that sin wasn't really a big deal, Jesus wanted to be my friend, and he was always willing to forgive anything - which, I presumed, would include ignoring him. So why not get on with the business of this world and then get back to Jesus sometime later?

It was only later when I began to understand that my Catholic "education" was no education at all that I began to rethink things. For me, the reality of sin and its eternal implications is the only reason to take Christianity seriously in the first place. If universalism is true, then sin is not (in Kierkegaard's terms) "eternally decisive."  Neither is our relationship to Christ in this life decisive. Follow him, reject him, ignore him, twice-a-year Catholic him, what does it matter? Ultimately, it won't.

I wonder if there is a mode of existence in hell that is universalist (this is NOT to claim that anyone believing in universalism is going to hell). But if universalism implies that there are no decisive eternal implications for a lack of a relationship with Christ in this life, why not in the next? Perhaps there are individuals in hell who recognize their sins but are comfortable in them, and tell themselves they will repent tomorrow, with tomorrow (naturally) never arriving. Maybe C.S. Lewis treated this idea in The Great Divorce. It's been a long time since I read that book.

I'm in danger of being one of those eternally procrastinating guys - which is why I find the idea of universalism a temptation to be rejected.

Dalrymple on "Spiritual But Not Religious"

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Berlin, Theodore Dalrymple has an interesting take at City Journal.

The money quote:

The reason (I surmise) that so many people claim to be spiritual rather than religious is that being spiritual imposes no discipline upon them, at least none that they do not choose themselves. Being religious, on the other hand, implies an obligation to observe rules and rituals that may interfere awkwardly with daily life. Being spiritual-but-not-religious gives you that warm, inner feeling, a bit like whiskey on a cold day, and reassures you that there is more to life—or, at least, to your life—than meets the eye, without actually having to interrupt the flux of everyday existence. It is the gratification of religion without the inconvenience of religion. Unfortunately, like many highly diluted solutions, it has no taste.

Pierre Manent on Western Civilization

From an interview quoted at First Things:

"We do not know when the trumpet will sound. I cannot answer you in the name of some “expertise”; I can only answer “by hope.” Christian hope is based on faith. I believe that, amid the crumbling of Western civilization, which has begun, the supernatural character of the Church will become, paradoxically, more and more visible. The hatred of the world will turn against it more and more clearly. More clearly than ever the fate of all will depend on the “little flock” of Christians."

On the Need for Socrates

That's what I do. I drink and I know things.
- Tyrion Lannister

There is always a need for Socrates. But at some times he is needed more than others.

Now is one of those times.

How can you tell? Because there is very little of a true philosophical spirit about.

The philosopher is a lover of wisdom. As Socrates teaches us, this doesn't mean the philosopher is a wise man. The philosopher is a pursuer of wisdom, and you don't pursue what you already have. So the philosopher is a man not wise who is driven in the attempt to become wise.

The man who is already wise is not a philosopher because he is not driven to pursue wisdom - he's got it already. The man not interested in wisdom is also not a philosopher - he is not wise but doesn't care to become so, and so he does not pursue it.

Both of these latter types are prevalent today. And both hate the philosopher, whom they (ironically) condemn as arrogant and useless.

It is part of received "wisdom" today that the great philosophical questions cannot be definitively answered. Does God exist? If so, what is His nature? What is the nature and content of true morality? What is justice? Is there life after death? Is man really free or just a slave of nature and its laws? What is the best way to organize society? And many others. The futility of philosophy.

The philosopher, allegedly, is the man who thinks he has answers to some or all of these questions. And if he has those answers, then those who disagree with him are wrong. And that is the substance of the charge of arrogance. How can he be so sure he's right and everyone else is wrong? What makes him so special? Shouldn't he be a little more humble? The arrogance of the philosopher.

And while he is out pretending to know what others don't, he could be doing something useful to actually contribute to society. Instead he whiles away his time contemplating questions that can never be really answered, and never producing anything of value. The uselessness of philosophy.

Anyone concerned that these charges might be leveled at him may be consoled that they were the same charges leveled at Socrates. They are the perennial charges against philosophers, and will always be leveled against him as long as man persists. And yet philosophers persist.

The philosophical spirit never quite dies out. For there is always someone, when the received wisdom  concerning the futility of philosophy is proclaimed, who asks the question - how do you know that? How do you know that the great questions cannot be answered? Isn't the dogma that they cannot be answered itself a Great Answer, an arrogant assertion that unjustifiably claims to know that every great thinker throughout history failed? Isn't it possible that someone, somewhere along the way, found at least some answers? How can I dismiss a great philosopher, a Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas, without ever understanding anything of what he thought?

It's rather the philosopher who is humble, isn't it? For he proclaims himself to be ignorant, but doesn't have the gall to assert that everyone else - including everyone throughout history - must have been ignorant as well. How can one possibly come to this latter conclusion?

The one feeble argument made on its behalf is that philosophers still argue about the same questions they always have, and haven't produced any "results" the way science has, or any definitive answers settled once and for all. This is often thought to be a distinctively modern argument, but of course it was made in Socrates's day against him as well. One might call it the Argument from Disagreement, and it has a peculiar nature.

For one thing, it is self-fulfilling. Merely by disagreeing with a philosophical result, for whatever reason good or bad, I create disagreement and therefore evidence against the result. That certain philosophical results are still debated may only mean that some people are incapable of understanding them or be unwilling to accept them. And that incapacity and/or unwillingness surely can't prove itself merely by existing. It's not enough merely to note disagreement; it is necessary to show that any particular disagreement has a reasonable basis, and that means doing the work of actually understanding the arguments.  But then the whole point of the Argument from Disagreement is to dismiss philosophers without having to go through the work of actually understanding them.

For another thing, there hasn't always been disagreement among philosophers, and there are answers that have received general and enduring agreement. For instance, that harm to another may only be done in self-defense or through civil processes (i.e. a trial) is not something seriously questioned anymore (whereas one of the questions Socrates debated was whether morality consists in doing good to ones friends and evil to ones enemies, a live question at the time. It doesn't, Socrates answered, and his answers form the basis of much of what we take for granted with respect to morality, whether we know it or not).

Instead of the manifestly unsupportable conclusion that everyone in history must have been ignorant concerning the great questions, the philosopher only knows that he himself is ignorant. Whether others are ignorant as well is an open question, and he eagerly learns all he can from the greatest thinkers in the hope that maybe they actually did know something. (Spoiler: They did.)

Something Aristotle taught is that the truth is generally found between two extreme and opposing errors. And when the truth is lost, both the opposing errors become manifest. One of the errors, it seems, is thinking that the truth cannot ever really be found (and if we think about it, we could never reasonably believe this, because then it would constitute the truth we said we couldn't find.) The other extreme is thinking that the truth is found easily and without effort.

These extremes seem opposed, and they are, but they circle around and meet each other. For if we think the truth can never really be found, then all particular attempts to do so are necessarily futile, and we arrive at modern cultural relativism. I don't need to understand Confucius or Lao Tzu, Avicenna or the Bhagavad Vita because they must ultimately be as futile as Socrates and Aristotle. Justice and peace result from an acknowledgement of the relativity of culture, which masquerades as respect for all cultures, but is really a universal disrespect. If everyone would acknowledge that they can't know the truth, and that their way of knowing it is not and cannot be any more successful or legitimate than others, then the source of conflict would disappear. This degenerate form of humanitarian universalism is now culturally dominant, and it's easy to see it's appeal: It's a ready excuse to get out of the hard work of learning. The old Socratic way offered nothing but a lifetime of learning with no promise of result; the new degenerate universalism lets you do what you want without a guilty conscience.

But not really. Ultimately, that guilty conscience is why the philosopher is hated and why he is necessary. For man is a rational animal, meaning his nature is to know. The philosopher, merely by existing, reminds man of that basic fact of his nature and embarrasses him. The philosopher would not embarrass men if they did not already know, in a deep and hidden place, that they are meant to know yet they do not know. And he is hated because he exposes the easy answers that men have constructed to console themselves rather than face the truly terrifying fact that they don't have any idea who they are or what they are doing.

The modern existential philosopher might leave it at that, but he's a degenerate form. The best philosophers - starting with Socrates - offer hope that you might come to know what you are doing.

Let us, then, in the first place, he [Socrates] said, be careful of admitting
into our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness
in any arguments at all; but let us rather say that there is as yet
no health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our
best to gain health-you and all other men with a view to the whole
of your future life, and I myself with a view to death.

 - Plato, Phaedo

Aristotle on Christmas

Wonderful use of Aristotle to understand the meaning of Christmas. Through Front Porch Republic:

Aristotle on Christmas.

On Twice A Year Catholics

"Judge not, that ye be not judged."

But does that mean I cannot think? I find it impossible not to think of twice a year Catholics when I am at Christmas Mass, and it is obvious that many of the congregants are unfamiliar with the Mass; and that many of them obviously have no respect for the Mass. Standing with their hands in their pockets, surreptitiously checking their iPhones, chatting with each other like they are at a pub. And of  course everyone goes to Communion, during which it is best to keep one's head down in prayer so as at least to avoid seeing how they take Communion.

Do not judge. I think that does not mean I must pretend I do not approve of such behavior. It means that it is not my place to condemn anyone for their behavior. That is the prerogative of God.

We are all sinners. Discovering the reality and nature of our own particular sins is a necessary process on the way to becoming closer to God. Although we are not to condemn others for their sins, it is generally easier to see sins in others rather than ourselves. But in seeing those sins, perhaps we can recognize the same sins in ourselves.

Consider a man, a father, who is divorced and sees his daughter at Christmas. At that time he gives her gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her. He tells her how much he loves her. But after Christmas and into the New Year, the daughter calls and emails her father but gets no response. In fact this continues throughout the rest of the year; she regularly calls, leaves messages and gets no answer. Then at Christmastime the next year, her father again shows up with gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her and tells her he loves her. He says he is sorry he didn't return her messages but he was very busy. But he is here now. Surely she understands. And this goes on year after year.

What is the daughter to make of this? Might she think her father is simply a liar and is using and cheating her, showing up once a year to get good feelings about pretending to be the father he is not? Might she not demand that he at least show her enough respect to be honest about their relationship? Instead he forces her to be complicit in the lies he tells himself. This is worse than indifference, for were he indifferent they would at least understand each other in their lack of a relationship. Her dignity would not suffer annual humiliation at his contrived intimacy.

What is Communion but a particular and deep form of intimacy that God has granted us? To take Communion indifferently or by rote or merely as just another part of the Christmas season, is to hug your daughter once a year at Christmas. Traditionally the Church has demanded of us that we make ourselves worthy of the Sacrament of the Mass through prayer and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Like all the Church's rules, this is for our own benefit so we don't find ourselves taking hugs from God without the prior respect for God that makes such intimacy true rather than a lie.

So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. (1 Cor. 11:27)

It is not for me to condemn once or twice a year Catholics. But I can learn from them the danger of taking Communion lightly, and renew my resolve to prepare myself properly for Mass.

Chesterton, the Internet and Community

What would G.K. Chesterton have thought of the Internet?

We can get an idea from his essay On Certain Modern Writers originally published in Heretics and recently republished in the excellent collection In Defense of Sanity. Chesterton discusses Christianity, the family and community in this essay, and makes the point that small communities like the family force different types of people to know and get along with each other. Ironically, it is the small community that is truly more broad than the large one:

In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy; and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colors than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. 

That last sentence contains a typical Chesterton surprise. We might tend to think of "spiritual coherence and contentment" as something good, or at least not positively bad;  and Chesterton plays on that conceit, leading us along in the sentence until shocking us at the end with his view that it is actually hellacious. What is hell like? It is a place where everyone has the same kind of soul, and far from being a place of discord and conflict, in fact there is "coherence" and "contentment." It is place where everyone is content in his sins. It is not a happy place, however, and so we can conclude that Chesterton sees a distinction between contentment and happiness. I am picturing Chesterton's hell as one of drabness and dullness, where everyone is "content" with his situation only because he doesn't have the energy to do anything about it. All the souls are the same because they are all worn down to the nub. Heaven, then, must be a place of glorious diversity (in the real sense, not the PC sense, of that word) where the souls are very different, and express the energy of their difference yet in the unity of God.

Back to the theme of this post, it seems clear Chesterton would have some problems with the Internet - the chief being that it is an ideal clique-forming ground, beyond anything Chesterton might have imagined. Now one doesn't need to be in physical proximity to spend all his time with the like-minded. A few clicks of the mouse and you can find somewhere online where everyone thinks exactly like you do. The everyday encounters that bring us into contact with a variety of people - like shopping, taking the bus, going to the library - may also be minimized via online shopping. "Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations" Chesterton tells us. On the internet, as soon as you experience any discomfort or any degree of renunciation, there is always another more comfortable page to repair to.

There is no neighbor on the Internet in any real sense, and thus no place for the second great commandment. "We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour." God commands us to love the man who is given to us in our circumstances; but what if our circumstances (e.g. online existence) are such that no one is given to us?

We have, in Chesterton's words, "a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge."

Of course I can't leave off here without discussing the irony of making this point on the Internet itself.  The Internet itself is neither good nor evil - Chesterton would certainly agree with that - it is our use of it that makes it turn for good or ill. And so it is when internet "communities" begin to displace real communities that we begin to have a problem, and especially when people begin to think of online "communities" as real communities.

Original Sin, Paradise and Irish Music

In a comment to my recent post concerning Chesterton and Original Sin, M asked the pertinent question: If this is our true home but we don't know how to live here, how do we learn?

The short answer is we can't, at least on our own. That's the problem with the Fall - we fell in our entire nature right down to our core, so there is no place we can fall back on from which to pull ourselves up. Any attempt we make is doomed to fail because the attempt can only come from fallen nature, and so is already affected by the problem it is trying to cure. That's why our attempts to find a way to live always have a ring of artificiality to them. They must, because we are trying to construct a way to live from degraded blueprints and with degraded carpenters.

The only answer is for someone to save us - which, of course, God has accomplished in the Incarnation. Christ shows us what it really means to live naturally, in our home, and gives us the grace to do it, if we will but accept it. Just how far we have fallen is indicated by the shock with which we apprehend the crucifix:

Christ is the perfectly natural man, but the way He lives is not something that comes naturally to us (anymore).  And it never quite will, as long as redemption is not complete. The best we can do is imitate him, ask for His grace, and hope we can through Him learn to live again in a truly natural manner. In the meantime, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that the strangeness we feel, the feeling of never quite fitting in or knowing quite what to do, is a consequence of the Fall, and will be with us to some degree for the rest of this life - but it is not the end of the story, and we can look forward to truly being home when history is finished.

And we can even in this life get a taste of what paradise - another word for living in our true home - is like. We know that in paradise we will live in the presence of God and no longer feel the longing that we do in this life, that something isn't there that should be but we can't quite say what. God will fill us and we will rest satisfied in Him. It's difficult for us to imagine how this would be possible, how we could rest in God without becoming bored (another indication of our fallen nature). For me, I imagine paradise as a "dynamic restfulness",  active yet not going anywhere or feeling the need to go anywhere. One way I get an idea for this is playing Irish music; when you get the rhythm right in a reel, it feels effortless and as though you could ride the rhythm all day without trying but without getting bored. It's that "dynamic restfulness" I strive for in my playing and when I approach it, I feel I am getting a little taste of heaven. This is the Irish reel Lucky In Love:

On Living Together

I am old-fashioned enough to still be surprised at the matter-of-fact way couples allow it to be known that they are living together without benefit of clergy. It now seems to be the conventional wisdom that couples live together for months or even years before getting married, if they ever do. A young man at work has been living with his girlfriend for four years. He has even gone on cruises with his parents and her; apparently the parents see nothing amiss in this relationship. This is all related matter of factly over the lunch table.

The idea seems to be that you should get to know each other in a living-together arrangement before getting married. That way, the thinking goes, there won't be surprises when (if) you eventually do get married. Supposedly this will put the marriage on a firmer basis. The statistics say otherwise.

So does common sense and, frankly, simple decency. I thank God that I had the sense not to go down this path when I was 23 and foolish in many ways - but not that way. Instead I married the woman I loved - without ever having lived with her - and have stayed married for 29 years.

Jan. 3, 1987

I instinctively sensed at the time that to ask her to live with me would be disrespectful. It was to ask her to upset the basic arrangements of her life - where she lived and how, the independence of her own apartment - and restructure her life according to mine, presumably for some extended period of time. It meant a raft of simple things like letting everyone know the new telephone number at which you can be reached, and changing your mailing address. There was an "overhead" investment that would act to discourage her from ending the arrangements should she so desire; not to mention the embarrassment of admitting failure after, say, two years of living with someone.

Yet with no commitment from me that this fundamental restructuring would lead anywhere. This is to put the woman you supposedly love at a disadvantage. It is to take her out for a test drive like she is a used car.  To really love someone is to wish the best for her, and to presume to take several of the best years of someone's life, years when she is young and single and looking for the right man, as exclusively your own yet with the explicit proviso that you may discard her at any time - how can a man do this to the woman he loves?

It doesn't matter if she "agrees" with it. Simply because someone shows no respect for himself or herself does not give one license to disrespect him or her as well. At bottom, such a relationship is one that mimics the appearance of genuine self-giving marriage, but is at heart really a relationship of two people using each other rather than giving themselves to each other. That is the whole point of avoiding marriage, isn't it? I'll see how you work for me for a time and decide then if it's been worth it.

And then, if such a couple finally does get married, the character of their relationship has already been formed. They have been living together for all appearances as man and wife. Now that they really are man and wife, will their relationship suddenly change from the one of mutual use it has been, to the mutual self-giving of genuine marriage? I doubt it very much. In fact, I suspect they would have difficulty even conceiving the self-giving involved in genuine marriage. Instead, while the formality of marriage would add more "overhead" to the relationship in the sense of making it more difficult to break up, it wouldn't change the fundamental possibility of that breakup, which has been foundational in their relationship since the beginning.

Consider also that everyone shows the best sides of themselves when getting to know someone. From the first instance of meeting, we try to put our best face forward and hide our less attractive aspects. As we get to know someone, we gradually reveal more of ourselves, including those less attractive elements, doing so to the degree that we believe we can trust the one to whom we are revealing it.  Now the whole point of living with someone without marriage is to hold open the option of leaving them at any time; in other words, it puts a lack of trust at the center of the relationship. In such circumstances, people will hide those unattractive elements. And I'm sure they can do so for years at a time.

In other words, you can live with someone for a long time without truly knowing her should she choose not to reveal herself. The point of the living together arrangements, however, is a sort of truth in advertising: I insist on knowing exactly what I'm buying before I do so in marriage. Imagine a man's perplexity after five years of living with someone, that after a year of marriage he's discovering sides of his wife's personality he never dreamed were there. She thinks, of course, that now that they are married she has the level of trust necessary to finally reveal herself completely. For his part, he may feel he's been taken advantage of: I was supposed to find out all this beforehand, and she held it back from me, so she's gone back on our arrangement.

Of course, demanding that someone reveal her deepest self to you in an arrangement constructed so that you can examine that self and decide if you like it or not, and then decide whether or not to discard her, is deeply disrespectful. Again, it doesn't matter if both parties are doing it to each other. Mutual disrespect is a very poor form of equality and certainly no basis for marriage.

The fact is that genuine marriage involves tremendous risk; that is one of the things that makes it so exciting. Real marriage is an adventure that involves much deeper risk than rock climbing or skydiving. You don't really know your marriage partner until you have been married for a time and they have fully revealed themselves. And both of you know this going in; to some degree, you are marrying a stranger.

What sense, then, does the marriage vow make? How can you promise yourself to a person you don't really know, and won't really know perhaps for years? The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel addressed this question in his book Creative Fidelity. The title neatly summarizes his answer: In marriage, the partners create the conditions under which they remain faithful. What they are vowing themselves to is not just a person, but a mutual journey of discovery and self-creation, where the partners discover each other and themselves, changing and growing in the process. I am not the man I was when I married at age 23; and I am not the man I would have been had I not married or even married someone other than Tricia. She has been a dynamic element of my self-creation over the last 29 years, and I of hers.

That sounds very abstract, but it is extremely concrete in practice. It means being able to confront and discuss aspects of your partner's personality that you find difficult and, perhaps, even impossible to live with over the long term. Will they do what is necessary to develop that aspect of themselves for the sake of the marriage? And of course it runs the other way as well: I discover things about myself through her that I had not noticed, but are unpleasant for her. Am I willing to work on those things for the sake of her happiness, or will I demand that she take me as I am? Not all things can be changed. The ongoing negotiation and development, in the context of love, is the substance of marriage.

This dynamic process of growth is stunted if the partners have gone into marriage after a trial period of living together; for they have already sent each other the message that they reserve the right to bail out if they find they don't like what they see, instead of sending the message that they are committed to the process of change and growth no matter what.

The result is not a more secure marriage, but a marriage in which the trust necessary for the deepest communication will be difficult to find.

Chesterton and Original Sin

From the introduction to The Defendant in the collection of essays In Defense of Sanity:

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall.

The rest of the animal kingdom has an advantage on us: They are what they are and can be nothing else. A bear cannot fail to be bearlike, or a worm wormlike. But man can fail to be human. Chesterton's wonderful description of Original Sin, imagining what it might be like should an animal suffer it, illuminates what it means for us. Imagine a fish that forgets the sea; meaning, I think, a fish who forgets how to live in the sea as a fish. Such a fish is never home, for the only home it could possibly know, the sea, is foreign to it. It must live its entire existence as a stranger in its own home.

Even better is the ox who forgets the meadow. Unlike the fish, for whom the entire sea is all home to it, or should be, the meadow is peculiarly the home for an ox. An ox in the city or on a mountain is not home. But the ox who forgets the meadow is still not home in the city or on the mountain; like the unfallen ox that finds itself in the city, it would search for home. But while the unfallen ox would recognize the meadow as home should it find it, the fallen ox may find the meadow but would, tragically, not recognize it as home... it would wander right through home and continue to pine for the home it already found.

The great fall for man means that he has lost the knowledge of how to live as man in the world; he feels that he is not at home, or that he should be home but somehow isn't. So what does he do? What can he do? A man at home lives naturally; he doesn't have to figure out how to live. Since we are not at home - or at least we have forgotten how to live at home - we must construct ways of living. And these ways are at some level false simply because they are constructed - they can never replace the natural way of living of unfallen man.

Rousseau noticed this artificiality but rejected Original Sin; for him, the social constructions of man are the fall rather than a consequence of the fall. This has the convenient consequence that the fall lies outside us rather than in us, and in dealing with it we don't have to change.

But the truth is that there is no state of nature that is our true home, and in which we would be at peace could we find it. We are already in our true home. We just don't know how to live here.

Matthew 11:28-30

Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

What is it to be "heavy laden"? For me, it has been the effort to make my life meaningful by filling it up. You get one shot at life, I thought, and I didn't want to waste it. So I've got to be something and do things, and I've got to start right now, because life is passing by even as I speak. This was how I thought as a young man.

But be what and do what? That's not so easy a question to answer. For there is the problem of opportunity cost. To do something or to be something is implicitly to choose not to do or be all the other things you could have done or been. To become an engineer is not to become an English teacher, an historian, or a philosopher. Suppose you choose the wrong thing? You will have invested long time and effort to become something you should never have been. And there is no "do-over." You can't get those years back that you invested in becoming something you were not.

I always envied the nerds who knew who and what they were: engineers. No anxious struggle about life's direction for them. I, on the other hand, could be interested in just about anything but not overwhelming passionate about anything. So I would flit from thing to thing, hoping to land on one that I would somehow know was "me", like finding the girl you "just knew" was the one for you.

In his Either:Or, Kierkegaard discusses something he calls the "rotation method": This is a way someone bored with life keeps himself from going crazy. What he does is pursue an interest for a while until it becomes fatigued and he is bored with it. He then moves onto another interest, going from one to another until he eventually, after enough time, comes back to the first which has become interesting again through neglect. This was essentially what I did. My best friend used to ask me what "kick" I was currently on.

There is an alternative. And that is, instead of trying to fill up your life with either things you are becoming or things you are doing, to recognize the futility of that approach, and instead empty your life. But isn't that just giving up on life itself? Yes, it is and would be, and is why the great philosophers like Aristotle did not recommend it. But the fact of Christ changes everything.

For by emptying yourself and taking on the burden offered by Christ, you open yourself to the possibility that Christ Himself will fill you, and satisfy you in a way not possible for anything on Earth. As Kierkegaard would say, it is the difference between filling yourself with the eternal versus the merely temporary.

That sounds all well and good, but how do I know such satisfaction is an actual reality rather than, say, merely a pious hope? For if it is merely a pious hope, then the apparent death that would happen if I empty myself is an actual death. The rotation method may be unsatisfying and ultimately lead to despair, but at least it is something, and I get at least the satisfaction that I am trying.

This is where the matter of faith comes in. Faith in this context does not mean a blind belief in something you know to be false or have no reason to believe is true. It means to act take a chance and act on trust. Is the Gospel true? Did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead and show that a life of self-emptying is really a life of true fulfillment rather than a living death? I cannot prove that in any absolute sense. But then I don't think that is necessary. At least it wasn't for me.

It was enough for me to establish that the Gospel was at least plausible. Furthermore, I was and am firmly convinced that something highly unusual happened in Palestine in the first century. For the events that launched the Christian religion form a hinge point in history, one that turned the world from an eternal cycle of civilizational births and deaths, with one epoch not so different from any prior one, to a world launched in history, one condemned to development and change, and charging through time to some denouement to happen when no one knows. (See Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for the classic development of this theme.)

The conviction that something transcendent happened at the origin of the Christian religion, and my own recognition of the futility of trying to make life significant by filling it up, was enough to allow me to make the act of faith in renouncing the life I had been following and instead attempt to empty it and follow Christ. Yes, there was a bit of Pascal's Wager going on here.

What does it mean to embrace a self-emptying life in the name of Christ? It means to sacrifice all things you might have become or done for the sake of following Christ, and that means living for others rather than yourself. For me, it meant that instead of pursuing various hobbies obsessively I would spend that time coaching youth soccer or playing games with my children. It meant accepting a professional career that I might not have been passionate about, but was competent enough at to be successful enough to support a family. And it is to accept that as the years go on, working at a job that is just a job, and getting older and slower, missing the experiences I might have had, that in fact I was not slowly dying but rather accumulating treasure in Heaven, which is Christ Himself.

There are consolations. The vanity of earthly pursuits becomes more obvious as one grows older. And  we find that there are earthly rewards as well: Matthew 6:33. But these rewards also constitute a temptation, for they renew the possibility of life as self-fulfillment: I have filled my life with family rather than experiences or personal development. If we are following Christ, we devote ourselves to our family for His sake, not our own. If we give in to the temptation to the latter, then we are open to grasping after our family (e.g. helicopter parenting, or forcing our children to take their freedom when they are older rather than giving it to them as free equals.)

And it's not like flipping a switch. More like a slow process where one gradually weans oneself from the temptation to grasp at life rather than renounce it for Christ. And I am constantly tempted to grasp, especially in retrospect. The last few years I have taken up long distance running as a way to avoid getting old faster than necessary. Running a weekly 5k fun run here in town, I find myself envying the younger men (in their 30's and 40's) who did not wait until they were 50 to take the sport seriously. I wonder what I could have done had I taken running more seriously back then. But at that time I was changing diapers, or coaching youth soccer teams, or going to little league games, or playing board games with my daughter. I imagine an alternative history in which I have filled my life with such things and am happy, a history that I know is a lie, and thank God that he gave me the grace to see the futility of that life before I had misspent it.

Brute Facts

A typical argument for atheism goes like this (in simplified form): Both the atheist and the theist start with a "brute fact", i.e. something that "just is." The theist argues from the existence of the universe ("What caused the universe?") to God (something that "just is.") The atheist responds that if we must accept something that "just is", why not say it is the universe rather than hypothesizing something beyond it like God? That merely, ala Ockham, multiplies hypothetical entities unnecessarily. The universe "just is" and there is no need for God.

It isn't true that the cosmological arguments for God put forward by the great classical philosophers like Aquinas considered God as something that "just is." Indeed, the whole point of the arguments are to establish the existence of something that is much more than something that "just is."

But that is beside the point of the present post, which is to explore the notion of brute facts or things that "just are." My conclusion is that brute facts are intellectually dangerous things, and destroy far more than their deployers suppose. They want to aim the cannon of brute facts at God, but the consequent explosion blows up not just God but our understanding of the universe itself.

Consider what it is to be a "brute" fact. Something that is "brute" is something unintelligible; that is why animals are called "brutes", because they do not possess reason. A "brute" fact is a fact that is unintelligible beyond the bare fact that it is. Clearly, if a fact is brute, there is no point in asking anything more about it, since there is nothing more about it that we can know.

Here is the rub. How do we know a brute fact for what it is when we encounter it? What distinguishes brute facts from intelligible facts? Intelligible facts are facts for which we can find an explanation, you say. But there is nothing to say that brute facts can't appear to have an explanation when they really don't.  That, in fact, is the whole point of the atheist's brute fact argument against the theist: His argument is not that God doesn't really explain the universe should He exist, but that the universe in fact does not stand in need of an explanation in the first place because it is brute.

Newton's theory of gravitation appears to explain why the moon orbits the earth and planets orbit the sun. Perhaps, however, those celestial movements are really only brute facts; then Newton's theory only appears to explain the solar system. You scoff because it is clear that Newton's theory does in fact explain the solar system; it is ridiculous to suppose that it is just by chance that all the planets and their moons happen to orbit in accordance with Newton's theory.

And I would agree, but only because I do not accept the notion of brute facts. For smuggled in your reply is the assumption that you have some idea of the nature of brute facts: Brute facts wouldn't appear to happen in such a way that they conform with some intelligible law. In doing so, however, you have implicitly denied the notion of brute facts, for brute facts are facts about which you can say nothing at all further than the fact that they are (or might be). We can't say what they are like or what they are unlike or how they might appear or how it is impossible for them to appear. Any supposition along any of these lines is to contradict the brute nature of the supposed brute fact: It is to concede that the fact is in some measure intelligible; if we can say how brute facts cannot appear to us, then we have conceded that brute facts are in some measure knowable beyond the fact that they are, and therefore are not brute.

One of the virtues of David Hume was that he took the notion of brute facts seriously. And he saw that if we allow the notion of brute facts through the door, then we have destroyed the intelligibility of causality altogether and not just for the universe or God. For we never see causality itself, says Hume, only one event following another. And if we don't presuppose that the universe is intelligible, that is, if we take it that brute facts might be lurking around every corner, then the fact that one type of event tends to follow another might just be one of those brute facts waiting to temp us into false conclusions about causality. We might mistake our becoming accustomed to breaking glass following the flight of a brick for insight into a casual relationship between flying bricks and broken glass, when in fact their relationship might just be a brute fact.

Kant, of course, noticed that Hume's position not only undermined the traditional arguments for God but also any possibility of an actual understanding of the universe, including that of modern science. Kant furthered the Humean project by offering an explanation as to why we tend to (falsely) infer causality into the universe. Kant reflects on the fact of experience, and claims that the only way we can have connected experience is for our cognitive faculties to organize it out of the blooming, buzzing confusion around us. In other words, our minds are constructed so as to read into nature notions like causality and substance so that we can deal with it. A very clever advance on Hume, which saved science from Hume's skepticism, but at the price of recasting the subject of science from being nature itself to merely how nature appears to us given our cognitive apparatus.

The point here is to be wary when an atheist deploys the brute fact artillery. For those who start firing with brute facts typically do not understand that their shells will land on them as much as anyone else. In particular, they don't realize that the brute facts they deploy to destroy God will destroy the science they love so much as well.

Dalrymple on Original Sin

Theodore Dalrymple is always worth reading. Besides the grace of his prose style, he is remarkably Chestertonian in his ability to throw off phrases that capture succinctly profound insights. For instance, in his recent work Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality he writes this:

... for Man is not so much a problem-solving animal as a problem-creating one.

(Another reason for loving Dalrymple and his style is his refusal to bow to politically correct grammar. Thank God he didn't write "... for human beings are not so much problem-solving animals...")

What a wonderful encapsulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin! Dalrymple does not call it that and is not talking specifically about sin, but that doesn't matter. For what is Original Sin but the creation of problems where none needed to be created - in the Garden of Eden for instance? And how many of our problems - political, economic, cultural and personal - are not problems that descended upon us but instead are self-created?

It is an essentially conservative insight. If we are problem-creating animals, then we must constantly be on guard that in attempting to solve problems we merely create more.