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Thursday, May 29, 2003
HAVE YOU STARTED A SMALL BUSINESS? Do you want to talk about it, and brainstorm ways to make the process easier? I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com. Thanks! COMING ATTRACTIONS: Sorry for the light blogging. Work and stuff got in the way (boo, hiss!). Tomorrow, I hope to post on: resolving the "confirmation wars" (judicial confirmations)--why it won't happen any time soon, and why Lawrence Solum is a bit less than half right; questions about assurance of salvation; tentative, possible answers to the Hayekian anti-war argument a.k.a. "If the government can pre-emptively strike in Iraq, why can't it provide universal health care?"; and "The Matrix: Reloaded," Foucault, and how radical feminism destroys language. Fun stuff! It's also possible that I will blog about the sacrament of confession, but don't count on it. YET MORE INTERESTING MATRIXBLOGGING FROM THE OLIGARCH. This movie is much more interesting to think about than to watch...! Spoilers aplenty, be forewarned. "There it is, the unicorn thought, feeling the first spidery touch of sorrow on the inside of her skin. That is how it will be to travel with a mortal, all the time. 'No,' she replied. 'I cannot turn you into something you are not, no more than the witch could. I cannot turn you into a true magician.' "'I didn't think so,' Schmendrick said. 'It's all right. Don't worry about it.' "'I'm not worrying about it,' the unicorn said." --The Last Unicorn Wednesday, May 28, 2003
"THE SAND GOES PIT-PAT IN THE GLASS": Your Spenserian stanza for Poetry Wednesday. I have twenty minutes to finish this before Thursday rolls around! It was initially inspired by the reports of looting at the Iraqi National Museum and the Library, but its point is, I think, broader. Each year the sea chews further up the beach; The tide that never ebbs, the years that seize, Draw things unreachable more out of reach: The way the Romans really said their V's, The songs the Vikings sang on Viking seas-- Our ignorance is sea-deep, old, and vast. We live conditioned; therefore, on our knees. Learn from the past detachment from the past. Time is regret; eternity alone will last. "UNBREAKABLE": Just saw this the other night. Good movie, not great-with-a-capital-G, but very fast-paced and engaging. I expect Maggie Gallagher would appreciate the statement about the lengths we're willing to go to in order to find our role, our place in the world. I was really glad I rented this. IN THE FLESH: "There's something very weird about a Christian simultaneously believing that his Lord fasted for 40 days in the wilderness and believing that self-mortification is a weird and alien thing imposed on Catholics by the Evil Church Hierarchy[TM]. Any stigma to beat a dogma, I guess." Excellent comments-box discussion, as well. I need to read Mark Shea more often, I think. VOLOKH VS. THE HARM PRINCIPLE, in re sex, and other stuff. A long way of giving the conventional wisdom; but might be very useful for people enamored of the h. p. For my part, I believe that the harm principle is harmful, thus it should be banned, or at least its use should be strictly regulated. Do it for the children. VAST "MATRIX RELOADED" POST FROM THE OLD OLIGARCH, with excellent discussion of the nature of freedom and will. I remain super-unsold on this movie but the post is definitely worth a read. Tuesday, May 27, 2003
MAN IS WOLF TO MAN: Horror shows in Saddam's Iraq, and in Uzbekistan. Don't read the first link, especially, if you are not sure you can handle graphic description of evil. As far as policy goes, I make zero claim to understand the reasons behind or possible justifications for US aid and friendly relations with the Uzbek dictator. It may, though I'm skeptical right now, be a necessary alliance (a la Stalin in WWII) and one in which we're doing what we can to pressure the regime. It may not. At any rate, the link above is a starting point. U.S. YOUTHS REBEL AT HARSH SCHOOL. Update to my "Casa by the Sea/subcontracting child abuse" post. Seriously, keep your eye on this stuff. Tracking the political ties in the US, especially, is something I'd love to assign a reporter to. Link via Matthew Yglesias. "But we must still consider a few other names and images for that perduring element that continues on after the act of sinning is over. For instance, the tradition speaks of a condition of bondage and imprisonment that the soul has brought upon itself by sinning--a view that seems especially convincing to raw experience. Once more we quote from the journals of Andre Gide, who knows this experience well: 'The Evil One kidnaps us for his cause and puts us in his service. Who dares to speak of liberation here? ...As if vice were not more tyrannical than duty!'" --Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin Monday, May 26, 2003
THREE WAYS TO REMEMBER ON MEMORIAL DAY. I haven't investigated any of these places, but the basic idea is great. I'll also pitch the Special Ops Foundation yet again. THE BEST OF CRAIG'S LIST. Some of this is hilarious. "to the beautiful woman whose dog i drop-kicked this morning"... Via Kesher Talk. LARGE AND LINKALICIOUS post from Kesher Talk in re prospects for a liberal-democratic Palestine. Worth your time. READING RORTY IN TEHRAN: Finished Azar Nafisi's new autobiography, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Highly recommended. Nafisi was a professor of English literature in Iran, who grew up before the Revolution; lived through the Ayatollah's rise to power, the Iran/Iraq War, and the aftermath; taught an underground literature class for women; and recently immigrated to the US. The book would be fascinating for her life story alone. Her eye for detail and her sense of pacing (especially noticeable in the first sections of the book) only add to the attraction. She occasionally overwrites, like many of her favorite novelists (paging Mr. Henry James, Mr. James, please meet your party at the information desk), but generally she keeps the ol' lush rhetoric and abstraction-mongering in check. My larger problem with the book was a philosophical one. Nafisi comes pretty close to endorsing the view of literature that Richard Rorty espoused in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Nafisi makes her case much better than Rorty did, in large part because she's a more careful reader (please don't get me started on CI&S's bizarre attempt to draft Philip Larkin into Rorty's sweetness-and-light-brigade). But the basic stance is the same, and while its attractions are obvious it's got several huge problems. The basic idea is that literature gains much of its value from the way it enlarges our sphere of sympathies. We learn to really listen to people who are very different from us; we learn to eschew cruelty by thinking, not of "how would it feel if Billy did it to you?", but of "how did it feel when they did it to your favorite character?" Reading fiction enlarges our imaginations; specifically, it makes us imagine the inner lives of other people, and so it makes us more reluctant to hurt them, more willing to allow them space in which to carve out their own lives. Nafisi often puts this in terms of dreams: The Islamic Republic imposed its own, utopian-totalitarian dream upon its subjects, just as Humbert Humbert imposes his dream of Lolita on Dolores Haze. Both, by imposing their dreams by force, act with great cruelty. Eventually the victims' own dreams are all but replaced by the dreams of the oppressors; there is some space for the victim to maintain some selfhood, but not much. Nafisi often talks about the way her students could barely imagine themselves outside the hated constraints of the Islamic Republic--the ayatollahs left their fingerprints all over her students' imaginations. It's obvious that this insight is true. My trouble is that it is only part of the truth. Here are four reasons to be wary of the Nafisi-, and especially of the Rorty-, view of literature's role in our lives: 1) Literature is a complex beast that can have all kinds of effects on its readers, some less savory and less gentle than the ones Rorty and Nafisi describe. For example, many people who love literature retreat into it for an escape from the world; such people have a very hard time forgiving the actual, everyday people around them for not being as deep and meaningful as the characters in books. Reading fiction can be a means of shutting oneself away from other people, retreating into dreams that destroy the possibility of full connection and sympathy with others. 2) If you turn to literature to enhance your empathy, you are very likely to find that your empathy is only enhanced toward the kind of people who are empathetic in literature! In other words, your empathy and your desire to provide help will be most fully engaged for articulate, insightful, writerly, or intriguing people--and none of those characteristics, I note, is a moral characteristic. The most articulate and interesting person in a dispute is not guaranteed to be right. Moreover, these people already have natural advantages--after all, they're articulate and interesting! Do they really need you to work hard at engaging your sympathy on their behalf? What about the unpleasant, the dull, the puritanical, the narrow-minded? Should the world really be organized to promote the comfort of the articulate at their expense? (Anyone who has known lots of avid readers can probably tell you that this is a real temptation--the temptation to favor Our Kind Of People and to reject charity and mercy toward anyone else.) 3) Rorty and Nafisi get around this difficulty in part due to the particular writers they champion. For example, by making Humbert Humbert an articulate and writerly type, Nabokov heads us off at the pass and makes us reconsider our instinctive readers' empathy for the eloquent artist type. But even at its best, when the sphere of empathy is most expanded, Rorty's position becomes a matter of reducing the suffering of all those vast hordes with whom we now empathize. Because there is no guiding standard of value, no overarching telos, our only empathetic response to others must be a desire to reduce their suffering. When two empathized-with beings conflict, again, we have no standard by which we could side with one over the other except which action will provoke the least suffering. But that is just utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is one of my recurring nemeses on this blog--here, you can read about it in the context of fighting terrorism with torture. Here it is w/r/t Peter Singer. We need some way of justifying the many honorable acts that can lead to suffering; and we need some way of knowing what it means to do right by someone, not merely to do what will be least painful to him, or what he wants. 4) That brings me to the final problem--the idea of the individual dream. Nafisi, yet again, is careful here--check out her section on The Great Gatsby for a nuanced treatment. You can feel her desire to affirm the sanctity of the dream and the romantic individualist, as well as her deep concerns and uneasiness with that affirmation. But in the end, the frequent references to dreams in the memoir make me pretty sure that she does end up affirming individuals' self-contained (i.e. not imposed on others) dreams and acts of self-creation. And that's hugely problematic, since so many of our dreams are self-destructive or self-deluding. It's not enough to just refrain from cruelly imposing our visions on someone else; what if someone we love is trapped in a self-destructive or self-deluding dream? Is there any standard by which we can say which dreams are genuinely self-destructive? Is seeking to free him from a self-destructive or self-deluding dream an imposition on his individuality? If so, is that acceptable? If it is not acceptable, then I don't really see how love--or even friendship--can be acceptable, since lovers and close friends seek to do what's best for one another, not merely whatever the other person wants. Lovers and close friends necessarily leave their fingerprints all over each other's imaginations, and interfere with each other's dreams, though they do so for motives far removed from the motives of the ayatollahs. Acting with love toward another person requires a standard that goes beyond individual perversities of desire and dream. So. Philosophically, Nafisi's book is flawed. But as a memoir of a literary life, and as a memoir of life in revolutionary Iran, it is hard to imagine how it could be better. IF MY TEMPLATE IS ALL WEIRD AND FREAKY (or at least weirder and freakier than usual), blame Blogspot. Sigh. CALIFORNIA DREAMING: A ramble through my thoughts on American lit. Please don't expect coherence--I'm all about the random shards of commentary today. For a while I've thought that the best and most American literature arose in opposition to the Enlightenment currents in American life and thought--the innocence/naivete, the exaltation of the powerful and good individual, the optimism and the rationalism. I'm trying to work out whether American literature is unusually obsessed with the Crucifixion (i.e. more obsessed than other national literatures--French, English and so on)--please feel free to email me about this. Certainly the movie critics will tell you that "redemption through violence" is an American cliche; and I think you see that, in less cliched forms, in the great literature as well, from Dickinson through As I Lay Dying. Not to mention the unique grimth of Philip Roth. And I've written before about the tragic conflicts inherent in a nation of immigrants, which you also see throughout our fiction. California is possibly the most archetypically American destination, more so even than Henry Roth's (or Sidney Falco's) New York. For me the distilled California story is Irwin Shaw's "Where All Things Wise and Fair Descend" (I got this from the Rat, a California almost-native) and the song, of course, is "California Dreaming"--almost, but not quite, a caricature of longing. "America" is the name of a dream; and the collision of the dream-America and the real one necessarily produces bitterness. It turns out that we can't reshape ourselves, escape our pasts, make ourselves at home. Which is one main reason American literature is so full of passionate reaction against the dream: Disillusioned idealists are ferocious critics, and America breeds idealists as if you could make money off it. THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY: I just started Josef Pieper's Concept of Sin, and was reminded of this novella. The basic plot is, a young hothead gets mixed up with Aaron Burr and ends up on trial for treason. In the heat of the moment he exclaims, "D--n the United States!" (dashes in the original), incensing the judge, who sentences him to an unusual punishment: He must spend the rest of his life in a kind of floating house arrest, transferred from ship to ship, never allowed to return to the USA or even hear news from his own country. So he spends the rest of his life repentant and yearning for home. It's a 19th-c. tearjerker, and I first read it when I was maybe nine? or thereabouts, so I can't read it now without crying. The book stuck with me for years--I remembered most of the plot, and how powerfully it had affected me, long after I'd forgotten the title. So I was thrilled to rediscover it a couple years ago. I think the book hit home for me for a number of reasons, all centering on the issue of alienation or exile. Philip Nolan's situation mirrors the situation of the damned--his exile is his punishment, there's no need to add extra torment, just as the sufferings of Hell are the result of our being cut off from God more completely than we can ever be in this life. And Nolan's suffering also mirrors our daily situation, our basic, deep-seated alienation, our sense that something has gone wrong and we are not at home. The book is unsparing in its portrayal of justice, the fact that his exile was deserved; and that too very much rang true to me. My sense of exile was always intimately tied to a sense of guilt. The sense of something wrong in the world was intrinsically connected to the sense of something wrong within the self--an anti-heliotropism, a straining toward sin. Heroism came from recognizing and accepting justice, acknowledging one's own wrongdoing, and seeking to make amends. More of me on alienation: here and here. More on what I learned from my early reading here. A NOIR CAROL: "Plenty of guys barge into my office without knocking. This guy was different: he came in without opening the door. I always heard Marley had no guts, and now I believed it--you could see right through him." Hee! Via Cacciaguida. EXCELLENT DEAL ON CRISIS MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS: Ten bucks--66% of cover price--gets you eleven issues--EDITED TO ADD open to the first 500 people to apply. Sweet. Via Relapsed Catholic. And I'm in the June issue, BTW, reviewing Ian Buruma's Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing. Main Crisis site "One day, after a really exhausting argument, I told him, Mr. Nahvi [a student], I want to remind you of something: I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure--you are as different as man and mouse. But remember how she is obsessed with Darcy, constantly trying to find fault with him, almost cross-examining every new acquaintance to confirm that he is as bad as she thinks? Remember her relations with Wickham? How the basis for her sympathy is not so much her feelings for him as his antipathy for Darcy? Look at how you speak about what you call the West. You can never talk about it without giving it an adjective or an attribute--decadent, vile, corrupt, imperial. Beware of what happened to Elizabeth!" --Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran Wednesday, May 21, 2003
I caught my blogwatch kissing a replica Oh God--she looked just like me!... Note: For all Blogspot sites, I've just directed you to the main page rather than the individual post, since the sites are wigging even more than usual. Oh well, it's better than learning HTML! Ninomania: Comments on Balkin/Solum boxing match. I have some questions about Solum's really strong reliance on stare decisis but I'm not sure I can formulate them without further study. Oxblog offers the most substantive "best of the web" roundup I've ever seen. Unqualified Offerings: Uber-creepy quotes from California state official: "'You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest),' said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. 'You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.'" More. If this guy was quoted properly (the article is not exactly evenhanded, but then the quotes are pretty wild), he should be out prontissimo. I can certainly understand that cops need information about protests that might turn violent*, but this guy seems so clearly biased against protesters that I can't imagine his information would even be accurate. Over-frightening bad information is just as much a problem for cops trying to assess threats as under-frightening. * A note: I wish the article had taken the time to tell us what some of the "direct action" protest groups, like the Ruckus Society, think "nonviolent" means. If I recall correctly, many of these groups view property damage as "nonviolent protest." That puts a very different spin on their claims to be Joe First Amendment. But it doesn't change my problems with the California justice dept. guy. DON'T. YOU. TRY. TO. FAKE. ME. OUT.... "[New York], like Daisy, has in it a promise, a mirage that when reached becomes debased and corrupted. The city is the link between Gatsby's dream [i.e. the fantasy self he seeks to become] and the American dream. The dream is not about money but what he imagines he can become. It is not a comment on America as a materialistic country but as an idealistic one, one that has turned money into a means of retrieving a dream. There is nothing crass here, or the crassness is so mingled with the dream that it becomes very difficult to differentiate between the two." --Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran Tuesday, May 20, 2003
"MANKIND VERSION 2.0?": Good column from Charles Murtaugh--corrective to rampant technophobia and technotopianism. MORE OF ME ON FAITH AND REASON: Response to an Objectivist. I would post my notes from reading Fides et Ratio but they've been blogspotted, grrr. EDITED TO ADD: Here they are. CORROSION OF CONFORMITY: Note to artists and such: If you call your own work "edgy," that's a pretty good guarantee that it isn't. EXCHANGE ON FAITH AND REASON: Between me and reader Eric Enlow. He's in bold, I'm in plain text. Sorry it's so long and my last reply is so disorganized--I think I said some worthwhile stuff but it's not exactly crisp and tightly-structured. Him: I enjoyed your remarks on God and Reason. But you misquote the First Epistle of Peter in a telling way. Peter admonished us to give an account of the HOPE, not the faith within us. If he had said faith (with its connotations of doctrine in some camps), perhaps we could read him as urging philosophical apologetics. But a better reading is that Peter calls us, specifically in the context of times of persecution, not to provide a logical proof of the contents of our faith, but to explain ("in meekness and fear" which are not the usual adjectives for rational argument) why we do not despair. The emphasis is not on the rational exegesis of the grounds of our belief, but on individual's personal testimony of Christ as a source of Hope even in the teeth of martyrdom. Our confidence in Christ's love for us is the reason we have hope, not some set of philosophical proofs in an unmoved mover. Additionally, to put it bluntly, I cannot find any content in your proposed distinction between the suprarational and the irrational that would save you from calling faith irraitonal. All things are either rational or irrational, just like all things are either triangular or not triangular. The suprarational may be a subset of the irrational but it is still irrational. Nor do I understand how the postulated unity between being, goodness, unity and beauty will help you reconcile faith and human reason. To the contrary, the great chain of being proposed by Plato (and in one form or another by all humanistic thinkers) opposes itself to the contents of Christian revelation, where divine being stands opposed to created being -- where the whole drama of Incarnation derives from the surmounting of the insurmountable barriers between divine and created. Similarly, the eternal universe of Aristole stands completely opposed to the created universe of Genesis. The lesson of being that we derive from humanistic philosophy is, not surpisingly, that we are linked to divinity, that we are fundamentally one with Being, that we are a part of what has always been and always will be. The lesson of being that we derive from revelation is that we are cut off from Being and can only be rejoined to it because of the grace of God, that what is now, was not, and will not be soon when the Judge and Savior comes to lead us to a new creation. Me: I'm trying not to engage in much theological dispute/discussion during Lent, in order to discipline myself and help me avoid some of the attendant temptations. Here are a few brief thoughts: a) I knew I should have checked the wording of the passage I quoted! But I am not sure I understand the distinction you are making between doctrine and reason for hope. Surely "don't despair" is both a doctrine (despair being sinful and all) and based on doctrine (Christ's Resurrection and the salvation He brought), no? I think we may be getting tangled in vocabulary here, using the same words for different things. [...] b) I'm not surprised you didn't find any basis for my irrational/suprarational distinction, since I didn't give any. Didn't (and don't) have time to flesh it out as it deserves. Suffice it for the moment to say that there are things which either are not, or cannot be, known by reason, that are nonetheless not contrary to the things that are or can be known by reason. I suspect this is another vocabulary issue, though probably not a Protestant/Catholic divergence. c) I'm unclear on what you're saying about rationality and revelation. Maybe an example will help: Was St. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo both anchored in revelation and produced using reason? If so, which bits were which (if they can even be separated)? Is revelation antithetical to reason? Can it spur and guide reason, or is reason just kind of sitting off to one side getting everything wrong? As I have probably mentioned to you before, I think some of our differences MAY spring from the fact that I was brought to Christ through a) poetry (most prominently Eliot's "Preludes"); b) the belief that things in the world have inherent meaning, that the physical world is intrinsically important and good; c) a strong belief in original sin (once it was explained to me), and d) trying to work my way through the philosophical consequences of b) and c). In other words, the goodness and the Fallenness of this world were equally important to me, and the use (or attempted use, anyway!) of reason played a pretty enormous role. Him: Midst trials, I have lost track of whether I responded to you or not while waiting the lifting of your theological fast.[...] Anselm is an interesting case. His "Faith seeking understanding" is (1) aspirational, i.e. seeking not having found, and clearly subordinates reason to faith in the Christian life, not only in the methodological but also the chronological sense (1st you get faith then you seek understanding). Anselm believes in order that he might understand whereas the path that you describe suggests, though I don't think you intend, reasoning oneself into faith. Like you, Anselm is quite bold in what he thinks that reason might show. For example, in Cur Deus Homo, as I recall, he argues that reason can show that the incarnation of God is a prerequisite to the salvation of man. Actually, again as I recall, the premises of his argument are not exactly "self-evident," i.e. appealing to a strict rationalist. Rather than proving that belief in the incarnation is rationally necessary, to my mind, he proves that if you accept a large number of related proposition of Judeo/Christian doctrine (eg related to the infinite offensiveness of sin), then incarnation is entailed. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo is powerful soteriology but the argument's dependence on fairly involved premises drawn from Chistian theology bars it from being considered seriously as an argument "from reason" for the necessity of the incarnation. In any case, the tension between faith and reason that I am talking about is less occasioned by the difficulty of proving elements of Christian doctrine, than it is the irrelevance of such proofs to faith. Our faith in God, like the faith of a child in his father, cannot be proven into being nor even justified on anything like ideal grounds. It is personal -- two minds, two faces, two spirits, two loves intertwined and mutually reflective. I can prove that God exists or does not exist, that he is simple or complex, that he is X or Y. None of it ever can generate or constitute faith. Are faith and reason actually opposed though? Well, look at the paradigmatic examples in Hebrews 11. Faith overcomes what seems to be true to the rational mind, i.e. the mind judging on the basis of what can be known, in each example: (1) by trusting God that the unseen made the seen; (2) by trusting that a mortal man will not see his death; (3) by trusting God that things never yet seen would occur; (4) by leaving the comforts of home for an unknown destination; (5) by trusting God that a child can be born by a woman past her age etc etc. The person faithful to God makes judgments that the rational but unfaithful person would never make. Paul teaches us in Romans that the Greeks' pursuit of wisdom, i.e. the life dedicated to rational reflection, is as opposed to true trust in God as the Jews search for miraculous signs. Trust in God begins in silences, imponderables, action without foundation. We must like Gideon fight without soldiers to see that the Lord fights. We must like Abraham leave our homes to seek a home in an unknown land in order to know that God provides the home. We must like Sarah wait for a child whom we know can never come. We must like Noah build a boat far from water for a storm that defies all rational conception. Only then do we trust God, not signs, not rational reflection. Our certainty, whether grounded in reason or miraculous signs, affords no occasion to trust. On the last issue, I do not think that the misunderstanding of words is responsible for the misunderstanding between Christians. I think that they reflect mostly real theological differences. Roman Catholics and evangelicals, for example, speak differently about salvation because most of them have very different ideas about what salvation is. They talk about Jesus differently because they know Jesus differently. It is true that the language can mask agreement, but I do not think that is the primary reason for the differences. Me: OK, a bunch of different issues or approaches here, let's take them one at a time. 1) "Reasoning oneself into faith": Eh? Not totally sure what this means. I wasn't raised Christian. I was pretty hostile to Christianity. Therefore, I had a lot of misconceptions about what Christianity actually entailed, a lot of anti-Christian beliefs that I needed to realize were wrong, and a great reluctance to consider Christianity worthy of my attention. Once I had figured out that Christianity explained a lot of the world around me--more than any other belief system I'd found--I still didn't have faith. I prayed, trying to be responsible (not assume I'd received an answer because I was seeking one), and eventually got what I needed to trust God and know He existed. But even that answer to prayer was enmeshed in and depended for its interpretation on the conclusions I'd already come to: In other words, I was at the point where I was convinced through philosophy that if objects in the world were in fact meaningful and good, the only valid explanation for that fact would be Christianity. And so when my prayers (essentially a kind of cross between "Lord, help my unbelief" and "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") were answered, they were answered not in specifically Christian terms but rather with the faith in God as Creator. I was able to trust that the world was God's creation. Because of prior conclusions I'd reached, that was enough for me to trust Christ. Later--especially the week I was Confirmed, the summer after my Confirmation, and the fall term of my senior year (fall 1999)--I really wrestled with my faith. I had a lot of doubts, a good amount of prideful rebellion, and a hint of despair. I can think of non-philosophical ways for people to struggle with faith and doubt (Chesterton has a tart little line about, I think, a man who says he cannot accept the Trinity when he means that he is sleeping with his neighbor's wife). But for me, not only were these struggles raised by (among other things) philosophical concerns, they were also allayed through philosophical seeking. In other words, I prayed so that I might think more clearly, and as I came to understand better I also was more able to trust. I don't think either of those situations (how I initially came to Christianity, or how I dealt with doubts) is "reasoning myself into faith" in the sense of a) treating the faith as impersonal intellectual propositions to receive my "sic" or "non," or b) thinking that I'm doing the work here while God is standing off to one side waiting for me to pull myself up by the bootstraps. Obviously, God made me such that I could come to know Him; He gave me opportunities to find Him; He answered my prayers when I finally was able to seek Him honestly. He's the Hound of Heaven, yo, and not lightly put off the chase! But I also had a responsibility to use the opportunities He gave me, to seek Him, to respond to His call, to open my heart. 2) Self-evidence, reason, and rationalism. As I understand it, Enlow's objection to considering Cur Deus Homo as an argument for the Incarnation "from reason" is that it relies on premises that only Christians would accept in the first place, rather than relying on premises that, say, Spinoza, or Hume could accept. I have a few objections to that view. First, it seems to conflate reason and rationalism, which seems to me to be forfeiting a game we can win. The Cartesian "I'll only allow premises I can't possibly doubt!" project is not only not the only possible understanding of reason--it's an incoherent understanding of reason. (Argh, I don't esp. have time to get into that--you could either read the section on Descartes in The Will to Power, or, better yet, you could just read Meditations on First Philosophy and watch the [unintentional] sleight of hand.) Other attempts to ground an account of reason on solely "rational" or "natural" or "in no way, shape, or form theological" premises fail too--here's a quickie argument along those lines. Therefore, I really, really want Christians to keep away from rationalist accounts of what reason is. They aren't necessary and don't work. All reasoning works with premises. I believe that any account of reason will ultimately become either an account of selfishness or an account of God. I do not think reason, by itself, can prompt a person to choose one of those two accounts--reason can't push you to choose love over pride or vice versa. But reason can do a lot of things. Reason can show you what the choice really looks like. It can force you beyond your premises and it can change your premises (for example, by showing you that two beliefs you hold are coherent in themselves but incompatible with one another, and you've got to decide which one you're more sure of). It can show you the consequences of unexamined beliefs you already hold--showing you how some of your "premises" drive you toward pride and some toward love. That's what Cur Deus Homo did for me. It was so striking to me precisely because I wasn't Christian, yet I found the view of sin, justice, and mercy Anselm presented really made sense to me in light of my own beliefs and experience. Anselm's account of sin rests in part on a definition of wrongdoing as a violation of the given order--not a social construct, not bad because it's self-destructive, etc. Anselm's account of justice, similarly, involves punishment as redress for wrong, giving each man what he deserves, and, therefore, Hamlet's realization, "Use each man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" I realized, reading and discussing and prodding at CDH, that, based on my experience, I believed these things but had not understood them before. I then had to work out the relationship of my beliefs about wrongdoing and justice to Anselm's beliefs about God and Christ. Notice that it's possible to cash out the aspects of Anselm's thought that immediately struck me without using the word "God." (OK, so I equivocate a little by saying "the given order"; suffice it to say that I had no idea how much my own sense of personal sin relied on a sense of Creation, and a loving Creator, and it's hard for me to work my way back into the way I thought when I was first realizing the consequences of my beliefs.) So, much of my intellectual quest has involved figuring out the stuff I just said in this paragraph; figuring out that premises which I thought did not logically require belief in God in fact did require such belief; and then choosing these necessarily theist premises over the many atheist beliefs I also held (beliefs I eventually realized were incoherent, untrue, and damaging). 3) Trust without reasons. I totally agree that God requires trust in things that go against our ordinary experience of the world ("Therefore Sarah laughed"). I would not characterize that as "going against reason." Let me see if I can make clear why. Think of a Mormon, or a Nietzschean, or a Raelian. Despite their varying levels of weirdosity, each of these evangelizing folks could say the same thing to me that Enlow is saying: Reason won't get you to the truth, you have to just trust without asking for a reason to trust. "'Trust in God begins in silences, imponderables, action without foundation'--that's why you should be a Mormon. I know it looks like it makes no sense, but that's the beauty of it! Credo quia absurdum and all that..." I have stuff to say to these people, because I do think that reason can illuminate the truth of Christianity and the falsehood of the Mormon or Nietzschean (or, presumably, Raelian, not that I've spent a lot of time on this one...) worldview. Reason can't force them to leave aside their wrong beliefs; you can always choose conformity or comfort over truth, self over God, Hell over Heaven. But you can show them reasons they should be more interested in what you believe than you are in what they believe. There are all kinds of situations in which reason illuminates the truth of Christianity. There are non-Christians--Avery Dulles reading his books and worrying that he might have to come back to Christ. There are Christians struggling with doubts--is "original sin" just nonsense used to induce a feeling of shame? If you said to me, when I was in these situations, "Trust God and don't worry about your questions," I really don't see how that would have helped, since the whole point was that I needed to know why I should trust God, or trust Christ over the vapory Deist god, or trust Christianity over Judaism. Take two examples of people who say, "Trust me." Let's say my best friend, Gloria, is generally a totally stand-up chick, really loyal and awesome, but lately when I call her she's never in, I caught her whispering darkly in a corner with a guy I'm interested in, she stops talking when I enter a room, and she seems to be avoiding me. I ask her what's going on and she says, "I can't tell you yet! Trust me." Meanwhile, my friend Patty is having some trouble with her husband Tom. He comes home too late, he gives fishy excuses, a strange woman called the other night and hung up when Patty picked up the extension. Tom has had scores of affairs in the past, and Patty is in agony wondering if it's starting all over again. She breaks down and asks Tom whether he's seeing someone else. "Trust me," he says tensely, not looking her in the eye. It's pretty obvious that Gloria (who's planning a surprise party for my birthday) and Tom (who's sleeping with his co-worker Betty) are at different levels of trustworthiness. It makes sense for me to trust Gloria, even though she's asking me to deal with a situation that makes me tense and uncertain. If I were Patty, I don't think I'd trust Tom as far as I could throw him. Similarly. I have reason to trust God... to trust Christ... and to trust the Catholic Church. Therefore, when I don't understand something, I have reason to believe that God's right and I'm just confused. But in order to get to that place of trust, of belief even though I have not put my hand in Christ's wounds, I had to figure out why I should trust. And that is where reason can shine its light. Don't you know I got the blogwatch boys out Changing someone's facial design.... BuzzMachine: Interview with Salam Pax. Camassia and Noli Irritare Leones: How do you know that your Redeemer lives? There's some good stuff in these posts. I have nothing in particular to add except that Anselm's getting a bad rap here w/r/t atonement. I really don't have time to get into this, but my understanding of his position (which I find super-convincing, and, as I've said many times before, was a big part of my decision to seriously investigate Christianity) is heavily influenced by thinking about the relationship between original sin and the Crucifixion, esp. in light of I Cor. 15:22 ("For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive"). KausFiles (no permalinks): Possibly excellent news re concentration of poverty. I haven't read the articles yet--haven't had time--but if true this is a big deal. Oxblog: Letter from Dearborn, Mich. Regions of Mind: The gulags were everywhere. The Mission: A new priestblog! By a priest in the Dominican Republic. Via Dappled Things, who is back from his moving-induced blog hiatus. TOTALLY FASCINATING LEGAL-THEORY DEBATE between Lawrence Solum and Jack Balkin. They're operating well above my level of competence, so I won't comment much, just point you to the two sites. Should offer food for thought no matter what your jurisprudential theory. My only comment so far is that Balkin's posts also stand as an oblique answer to my long series on jurisprudence, though he doesn't address two of the points I thought were pretty important (philosopher-kings, and limits of judicial power i.e. are there any good policy outcomes judges shouldn't impose?). READER ERIC ENLOW WRITES that my admittedly highly unsympathetic description of "blessed assurance," below, was unfair and uninformed. That may well be true--I was basing my understanding of the idea on what a very sweet, very devout, but not very theologically-inclined woman told me about it. I may have misunderstood her words, or she may have been misunderstanding it herself. I stand by the claim that lots of people do in fact hold the belief I described, and that it can provoke real despair once the initial glow of the altar call has worn off and people return to sinful habits; but there may very well be a much better way to understand the concepts of "blessed assurance" or assurance of salvation. I don't really understand the explanation that Enlow gave in his email, so I think what I'll do is reread it, work out what my questions are, and post more on this later in the week. For the moment, I'll just note his sharp disagreement. "These students, like the rest of their generation, were different from my generation in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had." --Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran Monday, May 19, 2003
"ELECTION": Saw this over the weekend. Highly recommended. Very funny. Themes of moral weakness, difference between our self-images and who we really are. Be forewarned though, it earned its R rating. "Is this how it all started? Was it the day we were sitting at his dining room table, greedily biting into our forbidden ham-and-cheese sandwich and calling it a croque monsieur? At some point we must have caught the same expression of ravenous, unadulterated pleasure in each other's eyes, because we started to laugh simultaneously. I raised my glass of water to him and said, Who would have thought that such a simple meal would appear to us like a kingly feast? and he said, We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran. "...Was not life exciting when every simple act acquired the complexity of a dangerous secret mission?" --Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran Friday, May 16, 2003
POETRY WEDNESDAY/FRIDAY: As part of my warming-up exercises for writing fiction, I sometimes write Spenserian stanzas about the characters I'll be dealing with. The tight form of the stanza forces me to carve out phrases I wouldn't come to without the formal constraints, and imposes a precision and compression on my language that is generally alien to novelists (esp. in the age of 500-plus page blockbusters). Here's one for a piece that may or may not eventually be titled "Mexican Honeymoon." It's about a newlywed couple and the way that each spouse uses the other to reinforce his or her own self-image. This desire to use does not completely crowd out genuine love, but it is opposed to such love. And I think it's pretty common. "I love you when you're less like me!" she cried-- Displacing all her anger on his gun. He holstered her; he cradled her; he lied, Protected her from knowing what he'd done; And let her feel superior. It's good fun: She got to be the good girl, have her strong And silent man; he got to be the one Who got the good girl. Is it really wrong? They're not too kind, but they're determined to last long. "EYEBALL IN MY MARTINI" UPDATE! Long-term fans know that although I am adept at teasing out the theological subtexts of the Cramps' "Eyeball in My Martini," I did not quite catch all the lyrics. I can now fill in the gaps. I went to the Institute And asked the doctor there In the department of eyeballs What's this burden that I bear? Emphasis added. Bikini girls with blogwatch guns, oh Bikini girls with blogwatch guns-- This stuff'll kill ya, it's loaded with fun, Bikini girls with blogwatch guns.... Body and Soul: Forgot to mention that Jeanne gets the last word w/r/t left-right divisions or emphases on human rights. Cacciaguida: Neat chart comparing Tridentine and Novus Ordo rites. Charles Murtaugh: "Apatheism." Those interested in more of Jonathan Rauch on this topic can check out my Crisis piece on "Christianity from the Outside" (which also features The Rat). I will say that there are places where some of the theological divisions Murtaugh considers abstruse really do matter--before I started working at the pregnancy center where I volunteer, I had to sign a statement of faith that was so weird (w/r/t faith v. works) from a Catholic perspective that I got a couple theologian friends to advise me on whether I could honestly sign it! (I could.) And I do think that some of the problems we see at the preg. ctr. are theological in nature--everything from "providence is when God does what I want Him to do" to "What do you do with 'blessed assurance' when you've already screwed up several times in your post-altar-call life?" (I personally think "blessed assurance," a.k.a. pray the sinner's prayer and now everything is OK, is one of the least pastorally accurate, and therefore least helpful, theological concepts out there. Especially if you're dealing with women who Made A Decision For Christ, and then, you know, had sex out of wedlock and are trying to figure out if they're pregnant and what they should do if they are. Anyway, that's very much MY view and not the view of the center....) EDITED TO ADD: Oops, forgot very interesting E-Pression comments-box discussion of natural family planning and contraception. The Old Oligarch: The only convincing positive review I've seen of "The Matrix Reloaded" so far. Excellent editorial from the National Catholic Register, comparing the recent CT court decision ruling that a fetus is a part of a woman's body to medieval marital law. "Of course, all murderers and all oppressors have a long list of grievances against their victims, only most are not as eloquent as Humbert Humbert." --Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran Thursday, May 15, 2003
ASK CLINT BOLICK YOUR SCHOOL VOUCHER QUESTIONS! Neat feature, via TheAgitator. (I haven't forgotten the "madrassa vouchers" thing, and will return to it next week--sorry for delay...) DESERT OF THE REAL: Ehhh, I was all gearing up to write a response to the half-cocked paranoia of some of the recent slams on Salam Pax, but I see Jesse Walker and Needlenose have done it for me. (And, more ambivalently still, BuzzMachine.) I'll just say a couple things: a) Now is a good time to re-post my "how you guys heard about Salam Pax in the first place" story. Tell me if this sounds like the Mukhabarat, my fine feathered friends. b) I tend to think the more baroque speculations here (Salam is a Baathist agent... Salam only meets ordinary Iraqis when he's interrogating them... Salam never criticizes Saddam Hussein except when he criticizes Saddam Hussein in order to win credibility with his foreign readers... Salam is really heterosexual [yes!]...the Mukhabarat are the Agent Smiths of the Eastern world and can do 'most anything...) are a result of the human tendency to want the world to be more rational and more novelistic than it is. In novels, every gesture has a meaning, every word and every detail are full of discernable intent. We prefer evil to randomness, malevolence to incompetence, when we're trying to figure out how to explain the world. On the broad metaphysical level I think this tendency of ours is accurate--things in the world do have meaning; reason is not merely the will to power seeking to smooth out the rough edges of an utterly random world; novels are distillations of real life, not utter falsifications or mere "beautiful lies." But in particular cases, hello, sometimes people are just weird. Sometimes people are conflicted, risk-averse in geopolitics but risk-taking in their personal lives, irrational, intermittently insightful and wilfully blind, and a bit random. Welcome to the world of the unreliable narrator. If nothing else, you'd think you could learn that from blogs. Strange... how you stopped watching blogs How you stopped needing blogs When she came along... oh, how strange... Amptoons: How to handle domestic violence charges against cops? Amy Welborn (no permalinks): Pertinent Flannery O'Connor quotes about the Christian artist's responsibilities. My favorite: The average Catholic writer (and reader, we can assume)..."has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him." Church of the Masses: The Joan of Arc Show--on CBS; and more pithy O'Connor quotes. RANDOM MAILBAG: Here's a bunch of stuff that requires little or no reply from me. Stuff requiring reply will come later. As is traditional, I am in plain text and my readers are in bold. If nothing else, this should give you some idea of the wiggy variety of topics addressed on this blog--this is the unorganized flotsam skimmed off the first three screens of my overstuffed inbox. An anonyreader, on "National Outdoor Intercourse Day": Some more information on "National Outdoor Intercourse Day," which really sounds like a prolonged exercise in self-parody: (my comments set off by *'s) link link "Hooray, hooray the eighth of May--outdoor intercourse starts today," Sanchez quietly sings. This year the center, along with Primary Prevention Wellness Center, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Alliance and the Women's Center, will introduce "Condom Inquisition," Bekki Brown-Winkels, Resource and Outreach Programs Director, said. "(During the "Condom Inquisition") one thousand condom packets will be distributed," Brown-Winkels said. **Is "inquisition" really the best name for a voluntary event?** The Sexual Awareness Center will also present Pornfest on Friday. The center encourages students to view a variety of porn to decide for themselves how they feel about the images, she said. "The display will offer thought-provoking questions," Lombardi said. "We are not trying to pollute people's minds with pornography." **Have they never heard of Catherine McKinnon? Don't they know that they are reinforcing the patriarchal culture of rape? The only person they could find on the campus to suggest that there might be a connection between porn and sexual violence, or that they might want to consider educating about the latter, was a Campus Crusade for Christ member.** Tim Sandefur has started a series of responses to my Questions for Objectivists--the first few ones are here. A different anonyreader, on "blind spots of the Left" w/r/t human rights: I think the worst of these is the left's apparently unthinking support for environmentalism, especially its support for that variety of environmentalism known as "deep ecology". It is this that leads a certain class of left-wing thinkers to support the crasser forms of population control; to assume that "traditional" agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies must be preserved intact and unchanged, regardless of the human costs to that society's members; and to support land reforms that "give the people back their land", no matter whether such efforts may lead to mass starvation because the land is too exhausted or too heavily populated to support traditional forms of agriculture. I strongly suspect that nowadays the left in rich countries draws many supporters who simply do not like human beings very much, and would welcome a mass catastrophe that stripped the Earth of most of its human population. (I have seen speculation by "deep ecologists" suggesting that the ideal human population of the earth would be about 10 million people or so. But don't ask me where; I can't remember.) It is very strange, in that the left was not, historically, associated with conservation and preservation movements. Or at least the Marxist left was not. Marx's theory of history was intended as an _answer_ to those "iron law" theorists like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, who believed that increases in population and the desperation of the poor would inevitably keep food supplies low and prices depressed. (Of course, Adam Smith |