Intellectual Liberation

Andrew Breitbart, in his Righteous Indignation, describes his intellectual liberation in these words:

I was taking ownership of my own education. Words cannot describe the emancipation I felt to discard those confusing works and philosophers that my gut instinct had told me to reject. Nihilism, after all, is never a comforting companion. I had known it was garbage, but I felt that I couldn't tell a Harvard PhD. that I thought it was garbage. Surely my professors had known something I didn't. Now I was realizing that just wasn't true.

I think his phrase "taking ownership of my own education" is apt. Only when this happens can true education begin. Up until that point, one is at best going through the motions. Taking ownership of education happens when we begin to understand the effects of ignorance, and dread them. We begin to see that ignorance is the worst possible affliction; for in our ignorance, we are not even aware that we are afflicted. Of course, the fact that we begin to understand the nature of our ignorance means that we are already on the road of true education, the only road, the one clearly marked once and for all time by Socrates. Socrates must be the foundation of education because the Socratic experience must be replicated in every soul that hopes to be truly educated.

Another interesting aspect of Breitbart's experience is his deference to the established educational authorities. Surely Harvard PhD's can't be shoveling manure? It is a part of wisdom to be deferential to educational authorities; for if we are ignorant, how shall we know where to learn the truth or even how to recognize it should we encounter it? It takes a wise man to distinguish the wise from the foolish, and since we are by hypothesis without education (prior to going to school), we defer to those reputed to be wise. The diabolical state of our educational system is such that the educational authorities use this very faith to abort true education in its infancy. They use their authority to teach that true education is not really possible (there is no truth) or, what amounts to the same thing, that the wise man is the one who understands that there is no "truth" out there for him to know. The soul awakening to its intellectual possibilities is strangled in its infancy by the very people who should be feeding it.

Fortunately, true education is always a possibility; it only awaits "the occasion" in Kierkegaard's terms. The occasion may be someone who simply does not accept the so-called educational/cultural/political authorities on their terms. He sees that the Emperor has no clothes and says so. Hearing this, we see that our own deference to such authorities is no more than a prejudice; a prejudice worthy in the general case when educational authorities deserve it, but unwarranted in the specific case when they don't, as is the case now. And deference is downright vicious when the authorities use it to maintain the populace in ignorance and slavery, as is also the case now. Breitbart's "occasion" happened when he began to listen to AM talk radio and encountered speakers who had limited academic credentials but simply spoke the obvious truth that the authorities spent their time avoiding.

For me, education didn't really begin until I read Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It was then that I began to see my true condition of ignorance, and the fact that I was in unconscious thrall to the "authority" of experts in all things. With Breitbart, I agree that "words cannot describe the emancipation I felt..."

Suffering

These posts (here and here) at the Secular Right blog, and recent family events, have led me to reflect on the meaning of suffering. What I write below is not particularly original, but having read similar things for many years, it is only now that I am truly beginning to understand what was meant.

The first thing we must understand about suffering is that it is unavoidable to some degree. The question then, is not whether we need to seek out suffering, but how we handle the suffering that life inevitably inflicts on us. Of course everyone agrees, secular and religious, that suffering should be minimized to the extent reasonably possible. The Catholic Church is the sponsor of hospitals and relief agencies throughout the world. I read somewhere that the Church is the single largest organized provider of such services; I don't know if this is true, but there is no doubt that the Church actively supports such activities in a big way. Clearly then, when the Church asks us to do things like "embrace suffering", she doesn't mean that we should needlessly endure suffering.

Despite our best efforts, however, some suffering in life is inevitable. In fact, quite a lot is inevitable. The basic metaphysical fact that our being includes a body that can be damaged means that suffering is a possibility in our existence; even if such physical suffering never becomes actual, its possibility causes anxiety which is itself a form of suffering. So as soon as we come into the world, we begin to suffer in one way or another. How shall we respond to the suffering that is unavoidable? This is the question of suffering that we all must face, religious or secular.

Furthermore, it is not obvious that avoiding suffering is the greatest good; there may be goods that we can obtain only through suffering, but that are worth obtaining even through suffering. In fact, it is obvious that there are such goods. Every child who endures vaccination shots has experienced this truth. And every parent who disciplines a child, even though such discipline causes suffering, knows that the suffering is worth it. (Both for the parent and the child. Remember "this hurts me more than it hurts you?") So the principle that "suffering should be minimized to the extent reasonably possible" takes a lot of unpacking, since it must involve a judgment with respect to goods obtainable only through suffering, and the degree of suffering that is reasonable in attempting to attain them.

My problem with the typical secular approach to suffering, as illustrated in the two posts linked to above, is that it never addresses this question, or even seems to be aware of it. In Andrew Stuttaford's post, he quotes a father grieving over the death of his daughter, a father who rages against what he takes to be the religious interpretation of suffering. I will not take issue with a grieving father, but I only note that Stuttaford offers no alternative interpretation of suffering. He simply agrees that the religious interpretation is unacceptable and moves on. In other words, he avoids addressing the question of suffering head on.

Is it merely accidental that Stuttaford quoted a grieving father in his post? If we begin to understand what Christ teaches us about suffering, we will see that it is not. For love is one of those great goods that is not obtainable without suffering. This is one of the meanings of the Cross. We live in a world where everything born must suffer and die; therefore, as soon as we love, we are presented with the fact that what we love will decline and disappear in one way or another. This knowledge in itself causes suffering, something every father or mother knows. As soon as a child is born, we are already anxious about all the things that can go wrong for him. And the more we love the child, the more anxious we become.

If we embrace love, then, we must also embrace the suffering that accompanies it. If we wish to avoid suffering, we must also avoid love. We see this happening in the fact that people no longer have love affairs, but "relationships." A relationship is understood to be an essentially temporary thing, makeable or breakable by either party at will, and so successfully avoids the deep entanglement  - and suffering - that a genuine love affair would involve. But if we wish to have real love affairs, and to love deeply, how can we deal with the suffering that we know must come our way?

This is what Faith and Hope are about, the two theological virtues supporting the supreme theological virtue of Love. Christ loved greatly and so suffered and died on the Cross; but that is not the end of the story. The Resurrection shows the far side of suffering when suffering is undergone in union with Christ. In Christ, there will be life and love when all appears hopeless, destroyed and finished. The key word is appears; for in this life, there is no "proof" that we will be experience a resurrection after suffering; all we see and know is the suffering and its apparent finality. But Christ reveals that suffering and death are not necessarily final; in Faith, we embrace the possibility through Him that it is not final, and through Hope, find the strength to face the suffering that will come our way through love. This is what Christians mean when they talk about "embracing suffering." It means not turning away from the suffering that love brings, but facing it and enduring it through the strength of Christ, for our own strength is not sufficient for the journey.

Absent a connection to Christ, how will we endure suffering? We all have greater or lesser natural gifts in this regard, but natural gifts are different in kind from the divine gifts flowing from Christ. Without Christ, we are simply unable to endure the suffering true love entails. So we find ways to avoid it: At the end of life by embracing suicide, or at the beginning of life by embracing abortion, and in the middle of life by avoiding the deep commitments true love involves.

The Social Animal

I'm reading David Brooks, The Social Animal. He has this to say about language:

Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?

Miller believes that humans learn the words so they can more effectively impress and sort out potential mates.

Or it could be that men use those extra words simply to express themselves more precisely. Naturally the greater part of our conversation is filled with general purpose words useful in a broad range of contexts. Then when we wish to narrow our meaning, we must employ words that are only occasionally useful. Since the world is composed of infinite variety, there is no limit to the precise but rarely used words we can learn, and the more we learn, the less frequently they are used.

I love the way Brooks writes about "humans" as though he is a space alien who just stumbled across a new life form on the previously undiscovered planet Earth. Why do those strange humans learn those fifty-six thousand words? Why not ask yourself? You've got a pretty large vocabulary and, being a writer, probably have a good idea why those extra words are useful.

Maverick Philosopher on Man

The Maverick Philosopher has a post on the nature of man, and in particular his destiny, here. He identifies man's nature as problematic because man can soar with the angels, but also grovel with the beasts. With respect to the riddle that is man's nature, he writes:

Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology.  Undiluted Christianity is his answer.  My answer:   live so as to deserve immortality.  Live as if you have a higher destiny.  It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized.  Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life.  Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.

You could be wrong, no doubt.  But if you are wrong, what have you lost?  Some baubles and trinkets.  If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe.  I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.

The argument bears a resemblance to Pascal's Wager, but I think it lacks some of the latter's virtues. For instance, what does it mean to "live so as to deserve immortality"? This implies a real distinction among ways of living; in other words, there is a truth with respect to life. But the Mav explicitly denies the value of truth in the last paragraph. He needs to do this because his argument starts with the premise that man's destiny is shrouded in darkness. (I won't ask if he insists that this premise is true.) But as soon as we've given up on whether we can know the truth about man's destiny, then we've lost any possible ground for offering advice on different ways to live. Thus the Mav can't give any substance to what it means to live so as to "deserve" immortality, and he leaves us with the empty exhortation to live a "higher destiny." Chesterton remarked that philosophers start talking about the "higher" life when they wish to talk about the better and worse, but have denied themselves the possibility of doing so.

The argument is similar to Pascal's insofar as Pascal also does not argue from the truth of Christianity to what man must do here on Earth. But Pascal does require that there is truth with respect to different ways of living. His clincher argument for the Wager is that, whatever happens in the next world, accepting the Wager results in a better life in this one:

Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing. (233)

Another aspect of the Mav's argument that is interesting is the notion of "deserving" immortality. Atheists sometimes argue against hell that no one can possibly do anything deserving of eternal punishment. The converse of the same point would be that no one can possibly do anything deserving of eternal reward. Indeed, the classical philosophers did not argue that man deserved immortality. Plato argued that man's soul is immortal by nature; his destiny varied according to its just desserts, but it was immortal either way. The Catholic Church also holds the immortality of the soul as a matter that can be philosophically established. But such immortality does not necessarily involve the fullness of life, for man is only fully alive in his body. "Eternal life" for the Catholic means eternal life in the glorified body that is assumed at the general resurrection, and this eternal life certainly cannot be deserved. It is gained only as a gift freely given through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

John Paul II, Youth and Hope

 An impression John Paul II always made on me, even in his last days, was that he was essentially a young man. I've not encountered anyone else who has made such an impression, and I've pondered off and on for years what could be the source of this impression.

The youthfulness of JPII is different than, say, the boyishness of Robert Redford or Brad Pitt. It expresses something deeper, as though JPII expressed throughout his life the essence of what it means to be young . Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that JPII expressed the virtue of youth, or the virtue that is best expressed through youth. The most apt comparison I can think of is the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf expresses the essence or virtue of what it means to be old; in Gandalf's case, that virtue is obviously wisdom. Wisdom is the prerogative of age, and the wise man is essentially old, as Socrates is already old when he appears in Plato's dialogs. And so when we imagine Gandalf, we imagine him as eternally old. We can't imagine Gandalf a young man.

The virtue of hope is essentially expressed through youth, and I think it is because JPII so thoroughly embodied hope that he struck me as essentially young. Hope expresses confidence with respect to the future (although not in the future; we hope in God for the future).  With respect to the future we are all young, so hope is the virtue of the young. If one has hope, even if he is 90 years old and physically decrepit, he is young.

I wonder if our culture's worship of youth is an expression of despair; we are without hope and so long for the one period of life when hope, or the appearance of hope, was a possibility. But as Kierkegaard pointed out, such "hope" is not genuine but an aesthetic suspension of the self in possibility. As long as we have the possibility of becoming many things, but have not yet become any, the illusion of hope is before us. But as soon as any possibility is actualized, it must be at the expense of other possibilities ("opportunity cost", although Kierkegaard didn't call it that) and the pseudo-hope of youth disappears. So the aesthetic self chooses to remain in the realm of possibility, not really becoming anything at all, and so retains for itself the illusion of hope; but it is only an illusion and nothing but a yet deeper expression of despair.

JPII appears youthful even in old age because he was the apostle of hope. True hope is not intoxicated with possibility, nor does it suspend itself in the possible without ever becoming actual. True hope is anticipation of what is to come on the far side of actuality; it is longing for the consummation of possibility in actuality. John Paul II was one of the most actual men who ever lived. I'm tempted to use the word commitment with respect to him, but commitment has a voluntaristic tint to it that reflects more our modern subjectivist orientation than what JPII was about. Submission may be a better word because it has an objective orientation; we submit to things that are outside of and greater than ourselves; we "commit" to "values" the significance of which is grounded in our own will. True marriage is a submission rather than a commitment. John Paul II's life was animated by a deep submission to God, and so was grounded in true hope for what will come on the far side of that submission.

The Secular Right and Knowledge

I've always been perplexed by the ignorance otherwise intelligent atheists show with respect to Christianity, given the time they spend bashing it. Here is the latest post by Heather MacDonald, a writer I don't miss at National Review or City Journal. In those contexts, she displays an obvious intelligence, attention to detail, and dedication to getting her facts straight. You get a different MacDonald on the Secular Right, however; here she seems intent on hitting Christianity with any stick she can find, and doesn't let history or elementary logic get in the way. Spot the black hole in this passage:

That the Catholic hierarchy could be embarrassed by relic veneration, when nearly every Catholic Church in Europe proudly displays its lavish, silver and gold jewel-encrusted reliquaries allegedly housing this bit of Jesus’ femur or that bit of a saint’s bladder, shows how the religious practices that once filled out a world still untamed and unexplained by science grow ineluctably more remote.

As Mark in Spokane gently points out in the comments, it doesn't make much sense for an orthodox Christian to venerate a relic of Jesus' femur, given that the central event of Christianity is the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. In fact, Christianity is to that extent empirically falsifiable: The discovery of Jesus's bones would decisively refute orthodox Christianity and put the Catholic Church out of business for good. This was understood even at the time of the Crucifixion (Matthew 27:64).

The perplexing part of this is that conservatives generally understand that it is necessary to understand one's enemy to defeat him. This is why conservatives often understand Marxism and socialism better than many socialists do. Yet when it comes to religion, the Secular Right seems to hold on to religious ignorance almost as a badge of honor. I wonder who should be more embarrassed: The third world peasant with a second grade education who venerates the relics of a saint (but who understands the meaning of the Resurrection), or the North American, college-educated, cosmopolitan atheist who, despite decades of higher education, hasn't yet gained an elementary understanding of the religion she bashes?

The Secular Right

The relationship of conservatism to religion has been on my mind lately, sparked by posts such as this over at the SecularRight blog. Heather MacDonald typifies one sort of modern atheist, the kind that sees religious belief as obviously absurd. For her, the difference between Harold Camping (the force behind the recently unfulfilled prophecy of the apocalypse) and mainstream believers is trivial: It is only because Camping has made an empirically falsifiable prediction that he is distinguishable from mainstream believers at all.

What interests me is the conclusion that seems to clearly follow if we accept that the mass of men are in the grip of irrationality. If belief in God is patently irrational, and most men believe in God, then most men are irrational. How then, can they be trusted with political authority in the form of the vote or, even, authority over their own lives? Is it not reasonable to place an authority over them for their own benefit? The individual freedom involved in limited government only works if men are capable of governing themselves. It doesn't seem an accident that the New Atheists tend to be of a left-wing political persuasion (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Dennett).  What is unusual and, perhaps, ultimately incoherent, is the notion of right-wing atheism.