Do it Yourself Philosophy

David Brooks wrote an excellent column on what amounts to "do it yourself" philosophy. The money quote is:

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview. 

It probably wasn't even a good idea for Nietzsche, who ended up in the madhouse. And I would go further than Brooks: No one has the genius to come up with a worldview purely of his own invention. In fact, it could be argued that philosophy truly began when one man - Socrates - gave up trying to construct his own worldview and decided to adopt one from someone wiser than himself.  So he went around to all those "supposed to be wise", searching for the true man of wisdom from whom he could learn. It turned out, of course, that none could withstand Socrates' cross-examination, and he came to the conclusion that no one was wise, but he at least had the advantage of not thinking himself wise when he was not. Thus did Socrates establish the communal, cultural and traditional nature of philosophy: The wise man doesn't attempt to master wisdom from scratch; he inserts himself into the ongoing cultural project of philosophy. Philosophy is a dialog, not a monologue.

Steyn, Chesterton and Monsters

Mark Steyn may be my favorite contemporary pundit, not least because I find him so "Chestertonian." Like Chesterton, he writes in an original, humorous style (not in the style of Chesterton, of course, because then he would not be original!) that clearly comes naturally to him. Also like Chesterton, he never makes a joke (or in Chesterton's case, proposes a paradox) merely for the sake of effect. And, most significantly, the lightness of his style conceals a depth of philosophical insight that is easily overlooked. Chesterton and Steyn both believe that it is culture that is most significant, and are penetrating in tracing economic or political problems back to their cultural roots. Get the culture right, and the politics and economics will take care of themselves; get the culture wrong, and the politics and economics will eventually degenerate whatever policy decisions are made. (Chesterton and Steyn are joined by JPII in this assessment)

I don't know if Steyn has ever read Chesterton; he's never referenced him to my knowledge and GKC does not appear on Steyn's list of influences. Yet occasionally Steyn seems more than merely Chestertonian; he makes a point that was earlier explicitly made by Chesterton. This happened at least once on the in-depth BookTV interview that was aired on CSPAN2 this past weekend. Steyn mentioned in passing Sesame Street and the "de-monsterization" of early childhood. Sesame Street is full of monsters but the monsters turn out to be funny and friendly or, at worst, grouchy. There are no monsters that give any hint of terror. But the world actually is replete with monsters, if by monsters we mean dangerous realities that we must respect and of which we should be "afraid, very afraid" in the old movie cliche. Presenting the appearance of danger, then undermining that appearance by revealing the monster to always be in the end harmless, is to teach a very unfortunate lesson. It is to teach that there are no genuine evils out there in the world, and that evil is always superficial.

GKC somewhere (I have not been able to dig up the quote) makes a similar point. There is no point to removing monsters from childhood stories, GKC says, because children are already aware of monsters - and that is a good thing. They are afraid of the undefined presence in the closet or under the bed before they have been told any stories. What the stories do is put a name and a shape to the menace, and show that even though the monster is genuinely evil, terrifying and apparently unstoppable, there are yet forces in the world that are good, strong, brave and dedicated to protecting the child. The stories only achieve their cathartic effect if they answer to the genuine terror the child feels; the terror in the story must be as real as the terror the child feels when he is alone in the dark, for only then can he say, yes that is the monster I dread. The child wants to see that terror faced; and a good story will leave him with both the healthy fear of the monstrous and the hope that comes from knowing that there are forces of good just as powerful, and that are on his side.

I'm not sure GKC ever anticipated the modern trend of not merely avoiding the monstrous, but of positively undermining the symbolic meaning of the monstrous. The modern idea is not to educate the young child to face the reality of the dangerous and evil, but to numb his sensibility to it by consistently undermining its symbolic manifestations. I hope GKC would be as appalled as I am by things like the Shrek series of films, which takes the ogre, a traditional symbol of dumb, brute evil, and turns him into a misunderstood outcast suffering from low self-esteem. My unrequited hope watching that film was that some real ogres from the traditional tales would show up and kick Shrek's ass on general principles.

Our natural reaction to the monstrous is to be repelled by it; as much as contemporary sensibilities don't like this, it is a healthy reaction. The monstrous is, in the strict sense, that which exists in defiance of the natural order; Frankenstein's monster is a monster because he was generated in an artificial rather than natural means, by cobbling together pieces of bodies followed by reanimation through electric shock. Now the contemporary view is correct in the sense that not everything that appears monstrous is in fact a monster (that is, evil and dangerous).  Some things that appear monstrous (e.g. the Elephant Man) are actually things that are good and deserve our kindness and compassion. And it is also true that some monsters do not appear monstrous at all, as in the apparently normal family man who is actually a serial killer (e.g. the Green River Killer). But these points may be called "advanced lessons" that can be learned only once the basic reality of the monstrous is learned; and by learned I mean conditioned into one's being so that it becomes a natural reaction. The fundamental lesson of the monster is that there are realities that are evil and dangerous and about which one must be constantly on guard; the great mistake with respect to a monster is not recognizing him before it is too late. This truth is told in devastating manner in the original Boris Karloff Frankenstein film, when a little girl befriends the monster and picks flowers with him; she meets her end in a manner not shown on camera and all the more horrifying for that.

Steyn, like Chesterton, prefers the old, robust traditional tales to modern fluff. Steyn, in fact, mentioned on BookTV that he is planning to publish an anthology of his favorite traditional tales. I look forward to it, and I hope GKC sleeps a little easier knowing someone is carrying the torch.

Coyne and the nature of philosophy

I've been trying to get around to commenting on the this Jerry Coyne article on free will from USA Today. Rather than one large blogpost - which I don't seem to be able to get the time to do - maybe I can attack it with a series of smaller ones. For this one, I'll comment on Coyne's passing remark about the significance of the question of free will:

"The issue of whether we have of[sic] free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons."

What's interesting about this passage is what it says about Coyne's view of the nature of philosophy, which is a view of it that started in the Enlightenment and is still common. Philosophy, for Coyne, includes "arcane academic debates" that aren't about anything that "affects" us. When we do begin talking about things that affect us, like how we assign moral responsibility or how we punish criminals, we've moved beyond philosophy or, at least, the arcane debates that comprise academic philosophy.

Now the classical philosopher would say that Coyne has it exactly backwards. To the extent that philosophy discusses anything that won't "affect" us, it isn't really philosophy at all. The philosopher is a lover of wisdom, which means living an "examined life." Everything the philosopher discusses, from the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to the ethics of Aristotle, must be in service to the primary goal of living an examined life - or the philosopher isn't really a philosopher at all. To use my favorite example, Socrates in the Crito is offered the chance to escape from his death sentence in Athens so he may continue pursuing philosophy in a different city. Socrates refuses the opportunity because he does not, after philosophical reflection, think there would be justice in an attempt to escape his sentence. To escape his sentence would then be to betray his philosophical vocation, which isn't about merely discussing "philosophy", but leading a life examined by reason and faithful to it. Such a life is what philosophy is; it is not a series of academic debates, arcane or otherwise.

The degeneration of philosophy from the Socratic ideal to a series of academic debates about nothing that "affects" us started in the Enlightenment. We can point to Descartes idea in his Discourse on Method that he would accept nothing until it had survived the most critical form of doubt. What then of his ongoing daily life and the myriad decisions life requires, including mundane ethical decisions? Daily life demands regular decisions from us whether we have prepared those decisions through a Method or not. Descartes solved this problem by living according to a "provisional morality", pending the development of a truly rational,  real morality that would be worked out in due course through the Method. While under development this true morality, of course, had nothing to do with how Descartes was actually living (which was the province of the provisional morality); it wasn't about anything that "affected" him. In truth, whatever ethics might be developed through the Method isn't really an ethics at all, since the subject of ethics is precisely the existing man facing the problems of life as they come, problems for which he can't take a "timeout" pending the development of a truly rational ethics. Socrates facing the problem of escaping from Athens is a subject of ethics; man considered in timeless abstraction through something like the Method is not.

What is interesting about the "provisional morality" is that it isn't open to rational criticism. True reason is only available through the method; since the provisional morality is just that which we live by while the method works out the true morality, the provisional morality is by definition not open to reason. And, in truth, the true morality never does get worked out. This was Kierkegaard's point in emphasizing that abstract reason cannot put an end to itself; in other words, abstract reason cannot of itself issue in a decision, because decisions are demanded by the concrete circumstances of life that are just what reason abstracts from. Socrates did not refrain from escaping from the Athenian prison because he had worked out a logical ethics to completion; he refrained because, as his philosophical reflection told him at the moment, there was no justice in an attempt at escape.

The thing about allegedly arcane philosophical debates, like the one over Descartes and his method, is that they eventually trickle down and spread through the common culture. Descartes' "provisional morality" is, it seems to me, the de facto ethical view of the average American. The average person may believe that you can think about ethical questions, but he doesn't think such thought counts as "real thought" in the sense of abstract methods like math or physics. It's all kind of "iffy." And it certainly doesn't apply to what he himself will do in the moment. That is a matter of "personal choice"; and by that we mean not only that it is up to us as individuals to make a decision, but that the process by which we come to that concrete decision isn't finally open to rational scrutiny. Descartes "provisional morality" has become our permanent morality.

When we do bring what we think is "true reason" to bear on subjects like ethics, then it means approaching them through science in the manner of Coyne. But Coyne's approach isn't, in the end, any more sound that Descartes'. Any system of thought, philosophical or otherwise, that doesn't start with man in his subjective, concrete existence, and stay there, can't have ethics in the true sense as its subject; it can't ever be about the things that "affect" us. Thus the "free will" discussed by Coyne isn't the subjectively experienced free will you are aware of every moment you make a decision. It is "free will" as a scientific abstraction, which isn't really free will at all and is, in fact, incoherent in terms of scientific abstraction.

Rosenberg on Intentionality

Edward Feser has been reviewing Alex Rosenberg's book The Atheist's Guide to Reality in parts over on his blog. I checked the book out from the library and have been reading it as well. Rosenberg's Ch. 8, "The Brain Does Everything Without Thinking About Anything At All", is Rosenberg's defense of eliminative materialism with respect to intentionality. (Intentionality, as a philosopher's term, refers to the way in which something can be "about" something else, like a finger pointing at the moon is about the moon.) Hardcore materialists, of which Rosenberg certainly is one, hold that intentionality is an illusion. Nothing is really "about" anything else, since the only thing things that are truly real are the elements of physics, and an electron or gravitational field isn't about anything at all. It just is.

What interests me here is the analogy Rosenberg uses to get across his view of how the brain might produce the illusion of intentionality without there really being any intentionality at all. I think Rosenberg's analogy is actually a good way to show why intentionality can't be completely an illusion. Here is the analogy:

A single still photograph doesn't convey movement the way a motion picture does. Watching a sequence of slightly different photos one photo per hour, or per minute, or even one every 6 seconds won't do it either. But looking at the right sequence of still pictures succeeding each other every one-twentieth of a second produces the illusion that the images in each still photo are moving. Increasing the rate enhances the illusion, though beyond a certain rate the illusion gets no better for creatures like us. But it's still an illusion. There is noting to it but the succession of still pictures. That's how movies perpetrate their illusion. The large set of still pictures is organized together in a way that produces in creatures like us the illusion that the images are moving. In creatures with different brains and eyes, ones that work faster, the trick might not work. In ones that work slower, changing the still pictures at the rate of one every hour (as in time-lapse photography) could work. But there is no movement of any of the images in any of the pictures, nor does anything move from one photo onto the next. Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving, and the actors were moving. But all the movement that the movie watcher detects is in the eye of the beholder. That is why the movement is illusory.

The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory in roughly the same way. Think of each input/output neural circuit as a single still photo. Now, put together a huge number of input/output circuits in the right way. None of them is about anything; each is just an input/output circuit firing or not. But when they act together, they "project" the illusion that there are thoughts about stuff. They do that through the behavior and the conscious experience (if any) that they produce.

The sentence "Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving..." is written in passing put it points out a consideration fatal to the analogy. Without the actual motion of the projector and the photons, there wouldn't be any illusory motion through the film. The projector stops, the illusion stops. So the illusory motion in the film, far from providing evidence that there is no actual motion, is conclusive proof that there is actual motion in the world. Yes, the viewer may be mistaken as to the actual nature of the motion, but Rosenberg's point with the analogy is that there is no intentionality at all in the world. For the analogy to support such a conclusion, it must support the analogous conclusion that all motion is an illusion. It does just the opposite.

The standard fallback here is to say that all analogies are limited. True, they are, but in a good analogy, those limitations arise only when the analogy is pushed beyond the limited point it is designed to make. The fact that in Rosenberg's analogy the illusory motion of a film proves rather than refutes the actual reality of motion is not an irrelevant point, but is the point. And it is not an accident. There is no way to design an analogy showing the illusion of motion without also establishing the actuality of motion.

The deeper point is that we can't be mistaken about fundamental categories like motion (or change). 
This is Aristotle's answer to Parmenides.  Change is an undeniable metaphysical reality, for if there were no such thing as motion, then we couldn't possibly know it, since thought itself is a kind of motion. (And if you say that thought is an illusion, and the underlying matter is unchanging, then you need to explain how a non-moving projector can produce the illusion of movement in a film). We may be mistaken about the content of change, but the fact of change is literally self-evident.

Neither can we be mistaken about the fact of intentionality. It is really as simple as saying that if there were no intentionality in the world, there wouldn't be any intentionality, and we wouldn't experience any. For the illusory intentionality must have a source in some real intentionality, just as illusory motion must have a source in real motion. If there weren't some real intentionality somewhere, neither would there be any illusory intentionality anywhere. "Intentionality" would be something that simply didn't exist in the world even as an idea. The discovery of counterfeit money is not proof that there is no real money, but that there must be real money, for there is no sense in counterfeiting something that doesn't exist. Are you in any danger of falling for a counterfeit Martian dollar?


From the subjective side, we are only subject to the illusion of motion in the film because it mimics actual motion in the world. If there were no actual motion in the world, just what would illusory motion in the film mean to us? We are receptive to the illusion of motion in the film because it appeals to a part of our nature that is receptive to actual motion. Animals who live for generations in the darkness of a cave or the depths of the sea gradually lose their sight as it is of no use to them. Eventually they are unable to detect light at all. It disappears for them. At this point, they are in no danger of falling for "fake light" (whatever that might be) because they can't detect any light at all. The creature loses his ability to fall for the illusion as he loses his ability to detect the reality. The fact that we experience intentionality at all is proof enough that there is something "intentional-like" in reality.

On the Commercialization of Christmas

This is about the time of year we begin to hear laments about the "commercialization of Christmas." Christmas, it seems, has become nothing more than a materialistic bacchanalia celebrating the worst aspects of our greed, all for the purposes of corporate exploitation. It has always struck me as odd that a holiday dedicated to buying things for other people should be denounced in these terms. The guy who otherwise spends his money on a new BMW and fancy clothes for himself, instead spends it on gifts for his relatives and friends. This is a bad thing? Money represents buying power and nothing else. The question is ultimately not whether it should be spent, but on what it will be spent. An annual celebration that involves a cultural tradition of spending your money on others seems like it should be far down our list of social sins.

Perhaps it is the whiff of excess that fuels the scolds. Christmas isn't just about buying a gift or two, but about buying a lot of stuff for a lot of people. But it is this element of excess that distinctively reflects its Christian origins. A distinguishing principle of Christianity is the notion of unmerited reward. Christ becomes Incarnate to save sinners who don't deserve to be saved. And not only that; Christ offers the greatest of all possible rewards, friendship and union with God Himself. I remember as child anticipating the cornucopia that would greet me Christmas morning. It wasn't just one or two things that would be under the tree for me, but a whole bunch of stuff. And although Santa supposedly knew who was naughty and nice, it didn't seem to make any difference as far as the amount of booty inevitably found under the tree. This is strictly in line with Christian principles: Christ grants the greatest of rewards to saints and sinners alike, so long as they simply believe in his willingness to do so. As I have remarked in the past, it doesn't really matter that you ultimately discover that the Santa in the red suit who lives at the North Pole is a myth, for someone was providing that unmerited reward, and the mere fact of its provision proves that a will capable of doing so exists in the world. This is part of what G.K. Chesterton describes as the education of the imagination that occurs when we are very young. In the innocence of youth, we are open to the association of seemingly contradictory ideas that we not only accept, but that form our perception of the world to the extent that they seem perfectly natural.  Anyone who grew up with the story of the the Nativity, for example,will forever have the association of infinite power with perfect vulnerability in his imagination. Our early experience with Santa stamps us with the idea of an infinite reward that is unmerited - a distinctively Christian fusion of seemingly contradictory ideas (isn't a reward a reward for something?)

What about those businessmen who cynically exploit Christmas for commercial gain? In this fallen world, there will always be people looking for a way to make a buck. The question is how that energy is channeled. The sort of guy who is looking to make the quick buck could be spending his time in far more destructive activities than trying to dream up the toy that every kid will beg his parents for next Christmas. This is one example of the famous compliment that vice pays to virtue. Because Christmas is about gift-giving, the businessman can't appeal to the consumer's own temptations or selfish desires; he's got to convince him that what he is selling is what someone else might like. In other words, the businessman, in order to make a profit, has got to get the consumer thinking about other people than himself.

What's really behind the complaints of the commercialization of Christmas has something to do with the psychology of a Judas, I think. Not Judas insofar as he was a betrayer, but insofar as he objected to expensive perfume being used to anoint Christ (John 12:4-6). Judas's pride prevented him from sharing in the mystery of Christ's redemptive act as did Mary. What follows is envy and the will to destroy the good of another. So he objects that the oil could better have been used for the poor. Similarly, some see the joy of Christmas expressed in others and are unable or unwilling to share it themselves. So they must find a reason to poison the fruit, and the method at hand is the condemnation of Christmas as too commercial.

St. Thomas, the Irrational Man and Kierkegaard.

I've finally gotten around to reading a book that has been on my list for several years, Irrational Man by William Barrett. Barrett has long been a favorite of mine; he is one of those philosophers who combines deep insight with plain writing and is always worth reading.

Irrational Man is an introduction to existentialism written in 1958. In Ch. 5, Barrett discusses the Christian sources of existentialism, including the relationship of St. Thomas Aquinas to existentialism. Certain Thomists, Etienne Gilson for example, had claimed to find existentialist themes in the Angelic Doctor. Barrett does not find much merit in this position:

A good deal of the Thomistic existentialism current nowadays looks indeed like a case of special pleading after the fact. A book like Gilson's, for example, shows so strongly the influence of Kierkegaard (albeit at work on a mind that is granitically Thomist) that it is safe to say the book could not have been written if Kierkegaard had not lived. Without Kierkegaard, indeed, Gilson would not have found in St. Thomas what he does manage to dig out, and the fact is that a good many other Thomists found quite different things before the influence of Kierkegaard made itself felt. And, to go one step further, what Gilson finds is not enough. The historicity of truth is inescapable, however perennial the problems of philosophy may be, and we should be suspicious in advance of any claim that the answer to modern problems is to be found in the thirteenth century. Granting St. Thomas' thesis of the primacy of existence and of the real distinction between existence and essence, we are still very far from an answer to those questions which have led modern thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre to a reopening of the whole subject of Being.

This passage is worth reading, by the way, for the use of the neologism "granitically" alone.  But I think Barrett misses the value of reading St. Thomas with respect to existentialism. It is true that the existentialist question as we know it today is a modern problem that was not really known to St. Thomas; this is somewhat like noting that the modern problem of sin was not known to Adam and Eve before the Fall. Even if true, it doesn't follow that the primordial state has nothing to teach us now.

The philosophical "state of innocence" analogous to the Edenic primordial state is the philosophical state prior to the modern disruption between thought and existence. Prior to the modern era, thought and existence were united in the being of the philosopher. All this means is that the philosopher lived his thought and lived in his thought; or, rather, the unity of life and thought was something taken for granted.

The difference can be seen in the lives of Socrates and St. Thomas vs. the modern academic professor of philosophy. The biography of St. Thomas is inseparable from the philosophy of St. Thomas; if you knew nothing about St. Thomas's philosophy but knew the story of his life, you would be able to guess a good deal of the philosophy. Compare that with the modern professor of philosophy. If you knew the biographical facts of a particular professor, would you necessarily know whether the professor was even an atheist or a theist? Kant was perhaps the first and greatest example of the modern academic philosopher. His thought was revolutionary in the deepest senses of the word; he was deliberately embarked on a "Copernican revolution" in thought that was intended to change man forever. Yet his day to day life was the epitome of conventional respectability and regularity. It was said that he was so predictable in his habits that the housewives of Konigsberg could set their clocks by the time of his daily walks. The "form" of Kant's life did not reflect the revolutionary content of his thought. St. Thomas was something of an intellectual revolutionary in his own day, given that his philosophical master Aristotle was, at the time, viewed as a dangerous innovation (having recently been rediscovered) in a world dominated by Platonism. And St. Thomas was no tidily respectable university professor; he scandalized his noble family by committing himself to joining an order of mendicant friars - the Dominicans - who at the time were at least as disreputable among polite society as hippies or Jesus freaks are now. As Chesterton so pithily puts it - "St. Thomas would not rest until he was duly and regularly appointed a beggar." (I paraphrase from memory from his biography of St. Thomas). The "form" of St. Thomas's life followed its revolutionary content.

This isn't to say that every modern philosophy professor lives abstracted from his thought. It is only to say that we no longer take such integration for granted, and this is a real difference. Humpty Dumpty can be put back together, but our default philosophical state is that of Humpty Dumpty in pieces on the ground. Surely a thorough appreciation of the integrated existence that philosophers once possessed is worthy of study, just as Humpty Dumpty might gaze on his fellows who never fell off the wall. Suppose Humpty Dumpty wakes up from his fall and forgets what it was like to be on the wall or, worse, thinks that his broken state is his natural condition? This is the state of modern man and it was the genius of Kierkegaard to recognize the condition; and his further genius to find a way to communicate that the modern and existentially fragmented philosophical condition is not natural, but a self-inflicted fall induced by modern philosophy; and to point us back and reveal to us the true nature of the philosophers who were classical and whole.

The Occupy Movement, Sin and the Monastery

This article from The Nation about the Occupy movement got me to thinking. Why do attempts at creating progressive utopias always fail? I don't mean merely the grand disasters like Bolshevism, but also the micro attempts like hippie communes and, recently, the Occupy encampments. It occurs to me that the utopian communities of the progressive dream do actually exist and have survived for centuries: They are the monasteries; communities where everyone is equal, goods are shared in common, and there is no "income inequality".

Why does the monastery work but the progressive commune fail? Because the monks have self-consciously embraced the cross. That is, rather than grasping after justice, they have embraced injustice. Not injustice for others, but injustice for themselves. Every monk understands that life in the monastery will not be "fair." Rather than fairness, the monastery demands obedience, piety, chastity and humility. The modern world, of course, sees in this nothing but the purest form of oppression. It pursues fairness through the assertion of rights and demands, the louder and more uncompromising the better. The active embrace of meekness and submission can only be understood by it as an invitation to slavery.

And yet the monastery produces in fact the ideal society the progressive movement has repeatedly tried and failed to create. At least, it produces a society as close to ideal as we are likely to get in this broken world. The irony of the monastic movement is that it has produced just communities through the embrace of injustice, when the progressive movement has only produced tyrannies through the pursuit of justice.

The reason is that monasteries are based on a true understanding of the reality of sin, and progressive movements aren't. One of the manifestations of sin is that we overestimate the injustice done to ourselves, and underestimate the injustice we do to others. The monastery corrects for this by demanding that justice for oneself be forgotten, and only justice for others pursued. It is the practical application of the Commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, which performs a jiu-jitsu move on sin: it demands that we apply to others the justice that we, in our sinful state, demand for ourselves.

Life in the monastery is not perfect, of course, because sin always remains despite the discipline of the Rule of St. Benedict. But the monasteries have survived for millennia, when utopian communes unfailingly collapse after a few years, because the monastery is founded on the only true basis such a community could have.

The sin that the progressive movement recognizes is not located in the human heart, but in external forces and systems - "sinful structures." Every falsehood is based on some truth, a truth that leads to error when it eclipses other truths. In the case of progressivism, it is true that there are systems and structures that are inherently oppressive and cruel; but it is also true that any system may become oppressive and cruel because people, of any station and at any time and under any system, may become oppressive and cruel. This is the reason for the monastic emphasis on a routine of prayer and confession. Only by keeping the specter of sin - one's own sin - ever present before our eyes, and petitioning God for the grace to avoid it, does such a community have any hope of survival.

The progressive conceit is that by getting the processes right, and without any concomitant change in the human heart (for it is the system that is sinful, not human nature, thinks progressivism), the ideal world can be brought  into being. Or if not the ideal world, then one far more just and equitable than the one we experience now. Thus the fascination with, and near fetishization of, process in the Nation article. They are sincerely and logically consistent: Since it is process that makes the world, creating a novel process should bring a new world into being. The Nation writers approach the Occupy movement like shepherds approaching the Manger, looking for the signs and portents of the new world aborning in the various Working Groups and General Assemblies. Alas, the Occupy movement, built as it must be from the "crooked timber" of humanity, is already accelerating to it's predictable end. The Oakland chapter has turned violent, rapes and various sexual assaults are occurring at many chapters (even as the organizers try to hide them from police), the garbage starts to pile up as the Trash Pickup Squad proves to be, not surprisingly, less popular than the film-making crew or the drum group. It's the speed with which the camps have degenerated that is surprising, as it is the persistence of monasteries that is amazing.