Not Even Modern

Broken vessels and bloody bridegrooms. Special Valentine's Day post.

2009-02-14T17:48:00.000-08:00

”You see, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh in the weave of the human universe. And only the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the barriers of Einsteinian space/time.
To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of the poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.
To be a true poet is to become God.”
Martin Silenus in Dan Simmons' Hyperion

Thus says Martin Silenus, my favourite character of Dan Simmons' novel series. Lecherous, habitually drunk and foul-mouthed, he is the unlikely chronicler of the seven pilgrims who visit the far-off planet Hyperion, as the epic that has become his life's work curiously foretells the events in the series. The relationship between literature and reality is a recurrent theme in Dan Simmons' work: in his Ilium/Olympus novels, the characters of Homer and Shakespeare literally come to life in a distant post-human future.

In Hyperion, a novel which describes the reverberations of an ultimate fight between two Gods – one an artificial, machine-created Ultimate Intelligence, the other a Teilhardian Omega Point emerging from biological life – backwards in time to the present (a few centuries from now) it is ultimately Love that is found to be the force underlying all of reality, and self-sacrificial Love that is proclaimed by the prophet Aenea in both word and deed in the last two of the series.

More of that in a little bit. The first of the four books describes the travels of seven pilgrims, Silenus among them, to a planet called Hyperion, to petition a mysterious creature known as the Shrike and worshipped by its cultists as the Pain Lord. Each of the seven pilgrims has been affected in some way by the Shrike. And each of them is moved by love in one way or another. The warrior, Kassad, has recoiled in horror from the eroticized bloodlust and visions of cosmic destruction and war to which he was seduced by his dreamlike lover, a woman called Moneta or Mnemosyne, consort of the Shrike (whose nature is revealed later on), and is determined to kill them. The scholar, Weintraub, goes through Abraham's agonies as he is called to sacrifice his daughter to the Shrike (who has caused her to age backwards in time). Silenus himself has come to understand that the Shrike, the Pain Lord, is his Muse, and will sacrifice himself to him (at the cost of his epic remaining forever unfinished) in order for his patron, King William XXIII of Windsor-in-exile otherwise known as 'Sad King Billy' to be released from the Shrike's grasp. All of the pilgrims' fates are somehow tied to an 'other', and all of them involve sacrifice: ultimately of themselves in favour of that 'other'.

There are a few reasons why my thoughts are turned to that novel again. The first is Silenus' remarks on the nature of poetry. I believe they are right on the mark, quite literally. All poetry is divinely inspired. All real poetry at any rate. The Muse is not a metaphor for something wholly within ourselves, but a metaphor for the logos of the universe with which the poet and artist communicate directly. Robert Graves speaks of the White Goddess. I do not think the names or masks we provide her with matter.

But Silenus mentions something else – namely, that to meet the Muse is to ' to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity'. Later on, when he is taken by the Shrike and impaled, with thousands of others, on the thorns of a gigantic, obscene steel tree, he discovers something about the nature of pain:

”Then, in the exhausted times between shouting or pure spasms of pain, Silenus allows himself thought. At first it is merely an effort to sequence, to recite the time tables in his mind, anything to separate the agony of ten seconds ago from the agony yet to come. Silenus discovers that in the effort of concentrating, the agony is lessened slightly – still unbearable, still driving all true thought like wisps before a wind, but lessened some indefinable amount.
So Silenus concentrates. He screams and rails and writhes, but he concentrates. Since there is nothing else to concentrate on, he concentrates on the pain.
Pain, he discovers, has a structure. It has a floor plan. It has designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral. Even as he screams, Martin Silenus studies the structure of his pain. He realizes that it is a poem.”

But more on that in a little bit. I said above that I believe all poetry (if it is to be poetry) and probably by extension all art is divinely inspired. There is an immanence of God in our universe, which manifests itself as beauty: it is the rhythms, the cadence of it, the harmony of the spheres if you will, that the poet listens to. The difference between a poetic metaphor and a bad attempt at metaphor; or between a metre and structure that sets fire to the language and one that falls flat on its face, is that the former is a thought of God.

This means that it is rather easy to concede for me that the Bible is divinely inspired. Just not very uniquely so. I am increasingly uncomfortable with holding Scripture to be God's word in any other sense. God's word, to me, is the self-revelation of God in the universe in general, and throughout human history, culminating in his self-revelation in Christ, the incarnate Word. It is actions, events, that literally happen and are yet symbolical in nature: pointing beyond themselves to God. Scripture, to me, is a witness to that Word, but not more.

I should hasten to add that I also dislike regarding some parts of Scripture as ”more” divinely inspired than others. To accept the parts where God is merciful and loving and disregard the parts where God commands the slaughter of this or that tribe, for example. In doing so, we turn Scripture into a mirror of our own sensibilities. To an extent, this is unavoidable: we always read Scripture with some preconceived ideas about God, with some theological framework; yet I do believe that we should allow Scripture to modify that framework as well. Besides, I always especially liked the more brutal and gory parts.

So, on the one hand, I think inerrant or literalist readings of Scripture risk ultimately substituting Scripture for the subject of Scripture; not to speak of the fact that I think wondering on whether a literal reading of, say, Noah's flood is compatible with our scientific picture of our world is useless. I'm not even saying no or yes to such readings: I think they're utterly beside the point. On the other hand, I'm extremely uncomfortable with regarding Scripture as an imperfect testimony to a historical Jesus, or a historical Jewish people, and that the real object of our quest must be that historical event. I find higher criticism, and the history of the Bible, relentlessly fascinating: but I do not read the Bible as a philologist. I'm almost (yet not quite) at the point of agreeing with Barth and Bultmann that the historical Jesus is irrelevant; that the 'Jesus-mythers' could be right and it would not matter; for it is precisely the myth that counts.

So the Bible should stand by itself, should be allowed to create a reality in which we may immerse ourselves; without either regarding it as a recipe-book for salvation or being distracted to the fascinating but messy details of its creation. Much like art, or poetry, in fact.

I have been reading Harold Blooms ”Jesus and Yahweh” and am interested by Harold Bloom's treatment of the two main protagonists of the Bible (or, of Mark and the J parts of the Old Testament on which Bloom focuses) as literary personae. I disagree in many ways with Bloom, mind you – Bloom is a Gnostic, and while I'm not exactly free of Gnostic tendencies myself, it does seem to me that Bloom has a tin ear for the meaning of the crucifixion and the resurrection (which many historical Gnostics have denied). But Blooms approach, specifically taking into account the wholes of the texts rather than just parts, allows God and Jesus to emerge as coherent personalities. And as I do hold the Bible to be in some fashion revelatory of God, I think this approach is interesting from a religious perspective as well.

Bloom regards Yahweh as a temperamental, rash God, quick to anger and in many ways ”more human than human”, and endowed with an unpleasant sense of humor. Purely on the basis of the text, I do not think Bloom's view is ill-founded. Consider, for example, Exodus 4:24. Yahweh has just patiently gotten a very reluctant Moses to travel to Egypt and demand the freedom of his people. While Moses is on his way, however, something very odd happens:

”At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met {Moses} and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son's foreskin and touched {Moses'} feet with it. "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. 26 So the LORD let him alone. (At that time she said "bridegroom of blood," referring to circumcision.)”

Note here that first, there appears to be significant uncertaintly as to who is getting (nearly) killed: Moses or his little son, Gershom. The NIV allows for both possibilities; Bloom actually believes that Moses is to be killed. This after Yahweh spent a lot of time and effort to finally get Moses moving. Second, Yahweh is up close and personal here: he meets Moses (personally) and attempts to (personally) kill him. Third, Yahweh allows for enough opportunity for Moses' wife Zipporah to intervene, circumcise their son and thereby call of the killing.

Those are just some odd things about an exceedingly odd passage. It does not do, for me at least, to argue that the passage may be a remnant from another and clearer story: while this may be the case, it should not matter for reading the Bible, as it is. It also does not do at all to argue that by neglecting Gershom's (or his own?) circumcision, Moses had sinned and therefore he (or Gershom?) had to die. It does not make sense in the larger context: in all the negotiations with Moses about him going to Egypt, surely Yahweh could have mentioned the whole circumcision issue in passing?

My own reading, which is admittedly very ad hoc, is that Yahweh is very literally going to kill Gershom to make a point to Moses; probably, to teach him what exactly it means to lose your firstborn son, as Moses is (as is made clear in the previous verse) ordered to tell the Pharaoh. However, Yahweh is somehow mollified by Zipporah's intervention, and decides to let Gershom live.

In any way, the picture is not very pretty – at least if we like to think of God in terms of omniscient, omnibenevolent, etc. And the God of the Old Testament does seem to have a habit to make a point by killing children: where the son of faithful Abraham was spared; the daughter of Jephtah (who wanted to bind God with a deal and thought his part was going to be easy) was most decidedly not. And then there is the child of David and Bathsheba, killed for the sins of his father. One of the most problematic actions of God in the Old Testament is, of course, God's actions towards Job: I still do not quite comprehend God's answer from the whirlwind. On the face of it, it seems God is simply trying to intimidate Job – but this is too simplistic, and it does not explain Job's reaction, who acts as if he has received a genuine insight. An insight which escapes me. (Arguing that Job's suffering isn't really God's doing, but the Devil's, to whom God has delivered Job, is of course unsatisfactory: and in any way the Book of Job puts less distance between God and Satan than comfortable). Carl G. Jung, in his ”Answer to Job”, seems to argue that God is essentially amoral and lacking in self-consciousness which means that the confrontation with his pious servant fills him with suspicion and doubt; the answer from the whirlwind being bluster to conceal this uncertainty. For now, this conclusion is much too radical for me.

But confronted with the God who seems in various ways complicit in the evils that befall mankind, there are a few possible answers (leaving aside the notion that ”there is evil because we are fallen” which I agree with, in a way, but which is compatible with all of the below and does not explain the morally difficult behaviour of the God of the Old Testament):

1. The God of (most) of the Old Testament is not the real God, but the God proclaimed by Christ is. This is famously the position of Marcion and also to some extent the Gnostics.
2. What we regard as evil and suffering is not really evil; it serves some greater good. This position is found in a lot of Christian apologetics (especially Swinburne; more subtlely, in Plantinga's free-will defence).
3. God is indeed responsible for a lot of suffering, pain and evil, yet he is still God. The right attitude towards God would be a paradoxical one of rebellion, but one not denying his Godhood. If I understand, this notion has been worked out by Elie Wiesel.

Of this, it seems 1) is too simplistic and dichotomistic for me. Yahweh is a highly problematical figure compared to the hellenistic omnibenevolent Perfect Being of Christian theology but he is not a bumbling demiurge either. Aside from which, the dichotomy Marcion drew between the Old and the New Testament seems to me to go against everything Jesus stood for in the Gospel. 2) is at worst twaddle (as in Swinburne's apologetics) and at best it fits very ill with the notion of fallenness. Often, it bears uncanny similarity to the comforters of Job. There are some things we, in my opinion, cannot have. We cannot have a theology in which we on the one hand have total depravity and on the other hand free will which God allows us for the greater good; we cannot have a theology in which we have total depravity and a consequent determinism or bondage to that depravity but also a God who is in any (recognizable) form good and concerned with his creation; we cannot have theology with on the one hand a notion of fallenness and depravity and on the other hand a notion of immanence of God who remains yet untouched by that fallenness (which means there is a tension between the central Christian notion of the fall and process theology). 3) is, I believe, a faithful and courageous stance – but it is a stance, first and foremost, and one which requires a very intense confrontation with evil, of a kind which in my very sheltered life have not had and hope I never will. Elie Wiesel is a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

I cannot read the Bible ultimately without theological glasses on. I can neither accept nor deny Bloom's disturbing Yahweh. What ultimately are my most basic notions of God are:

1. God is transcendent and immanent at the same time. He created the universe, but his creation is part of him.
2. God is concrete. He is the ultimate particular: a particular that cannot be caught by any universals. This I think is implicit in Anselm's argument which argues that actuality, concreteness is an inherent quality of God. When talking about supposed attributes of God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, and so forth, and then arguing about the possible existence or non-existence of that God, we are arguing about the God of the philosophers, not the living and present God; God cannot be characterized by a universal which may or may not be actualized. He is irreducibly particular. I believe the concreteness of God is well presented in the Old Testament, particularly in God's self-revelation to Moses as I am that I am (Exodus 3:14).
3. God is love. Love is a paradoxical self-giving to the Other, in which we become more ourselves.
We are, and can only be, by surrendering and giving ourselves away; we find our lives by losing them. Only in love do we become actual, and real; without it, we are just shadows. Love, I believe, is a (perhaps ”the”) genuinely creative force, it is an eternal ”and yet”, a way in which we are and are not lost in one another, a promise that the relentless laws of this universe, entropy and death are not the last word. I think God's nature as love is primarily manifested in his self-giving creative work – which I think is ongoing, rather than something already finished, and ongoing precisely in the emergence of actuality, concreteness, here-and-nowness. And that love has been revealed by Christ's death and resurrection as a literal symbol of that creative work; which is again symbolized by the eucharist.

In the last two parts of Dan Simmon's Hyperion series, the prophet Aenea (fathered by a cyborg with the personality and memories of John Keats, and raised by the poet Martin Silenus) travels through a far-future degenerate (though, in the end, redeemed) Catholic interplanetary theocracy. The Church promises its adherents eternal life through fusion with a regenerating parasite in a faustian bargain with a malevolent artificial intelligence (still bent on creating a machine God, an Ultimate Intelligence, whose battle at the end of history with the emergent Teilhardian God still reverberates in the today of the novel). The regenerating parasite, however, feeds on the void-which-binds, a dimension of the universe at the Planck scale – the scale of reality where time and space began to lose their meaning and become ”granular” – and which, Aenea reveals, is the repository of memory and empathy in our universe and, ultimately, the place where Love is present as a reality in the physical world. If Love is by its nature self-giving, self-sacrificial, the autistic immortality conferred by the parasite at the cost of destroying the feelings and memories of the deceased is very much the opposite. Aenea must convince her followers to renounce their parasitic immortality and surrender to their ultimate fate which is death – and after death, there is no survival except for what survives in the hearts and memories of others. Ultimately, she herself must surrender to her persecutors, and at the moment of her death, she releases the void-which-binds and creates a collective empathetic conscious, one more step towards the Godhead that, in the Teilhardian cosmology of the book, lies at the end of the universe. Very much like the religious figure which Aenea is reminiscent of (and who is mentioned obliquely in the book as a hypostasis of the emergent God-consciousness, or rather, empathy, fleeing backwards in time) Aenea ”realizes herself” by becoming what she represents, which for her, too, means sacrificing herself and yet living on.

I am the Way and the Truth and the Life (John 14:6) – but what does it mean to be the truth? Surely nothing else than to be true to the divine reality which, as imago Dei, Christ represents, to be Love in his actions, and finally death and resurrection, and in that way be particular and universal, reality and myth and poem, all at once? Are Son-of-God and Son-of-Man perhaps the same thing – Jesus becoming God incarnate by becoming Man-as-he-should-be, Man as God's image, the new Adam? Pilate, ironic for a sceptic towards truth, inadvertantly spoke the truth when saying ecce homo: behold the Man, more human than any other human, more real than any other reality, behold the human compared to which we are mere shades of humans.

Anyway, how does all this relate to the problem I mentioned above, that of the dark side to God as revealed in the Old Testament? I guess you get theological and philosophical systems by taking a grain of truth and running with it, building upon it. The immanence of God and the centrality of creativity is the (experiential) truth behind Process Theology. But the difficulties of reconciling Process Theology with the traditional Christian picture of Fall and Redemption I have noted above. The grain of truth behind Gnosticism is, I believe, the notion that we cannot wholly isolate the Divine reality from the Fall. Gnosticism runs with this and tends to become, in my opinion, way too dualistic and dichotomistic by positing a wholly transcendent God (yet immanent as a spark or an 'inner light' in us, and accessible to us through gnosis) and a creator-Demiurge, who is, if not wholly evil, at least very much less than perfect. I should read more on Gnosticism, for some ideas and groups are absolutely fascinating; such as the Carpocratians, who, if the writings of their enemies are to be believed, held that we must transcend and overcome sin by doing sin (and there may be a grain of truth here, too).

The problem is this: if we hold God to be transcendent being underlying all reality, we cannot at the same time accord Evil its own, independent reality. Unless we want to become Dualists, and oppose an Angra-Mainyu/Satan to Ahura-Mazda/God. The main reason why I wouldn't is basically that my God-is-concrete principle intuitively sits ill with hypostasizing a principle of Evil and a principle of Good as opposing Gods. Also, I see very little Biblical support for supposing Satan as some kind of independent agent of Evil. Put it in another way: if we hold to the metaphor presented in Genesis, in which the first humans were seduced by the snake (nevermind where the snake comes from in a creation that was supposedly ”very good”, don't tell me the snake was really the Devil as it doesn't say anything of the kind) and thereby disobeyed and rebelled against God, auguring in their alienation from God and from the rest of creation (”By the sweat of your brow...”) - then the very possibility of this rebellion, of alienation and sin, would have pre-existed in God's creation. As a universal (as any universal, as I believe God as the ”supreme particular” to transcend the world of universals) it too would have been created by God, or existed as thought, as possibility, in God's mind.

(Some Gnostics apparently believed that the snake was right. In that the snake was an emissary from the original Perfect-Being God trying to release mankind from the flawed creation of the demiurge. At least here the snake has a point being there. Seriously, though, it should be noted that the eating from the tree inaugurated both an elevation and a Fall: by gaining a reflective self-consciousness (note that the first thing Adam and Eve noticed was that they were naked) came alienation – from each other, from the rest of creation – as well. It is what 'elevates' humankind above the rest of creation that also contains the 'fall' of mankind. As a description of the tragic human condition, the Genesis narrative has few equals).

In Kabbalistic thought, the Fall and the emergence of Evil is a consequence of the way reality came into being. This is symbolized by the ”breaking of the vessels”; after withdrawing and creating a sphere within himself where creation could take place, God concentrated the light emanating from him in ten vessels, corresponding to the ten aspects of God symbolized by the Sephiroth (Malkuth, the Kingdom, Hokhmah, wisdom, and so forth) in the 'Tree of Life'. But the vessels could not hold the light and shattered, dispersing the divine light. It is probably too literalistic to ask whether God could not have made stronger vessels; the point of the symbol meaning that evil was somehow inherent to the process of creation, or to God's self-realization in his creation.

What I'm groping at is not the Gnostic dualism between perfect, transcendent Being and less-than-perfect Demiurge with the concomitant dualism between the material world as thoroughly evil and the spiritual one accessible through gnosis as thoroughly good and in fact constituting our original home; but something milder, in which ”Perfect Being” and ”Demiurge” are conceptualized as aspects of the same God, analogous perhaps to Whitehead's primordial (transcendent) and consequent (immanent) aspects in process theology. I do believe, however, that this would entail ditching not only the ”Omni-”s of Omnipotence and Omniscience but that of Omnibenevolence as well. I do not think this is much of a loss.

This does not mean that I believe God to be Evil, but rather that ”Good” and ”Evil” are universals applicable to part of God's creation but not God himself who is transcendent; God is love, but love cannot be characterized in simple terms as ”Good” and ”Evil”; it can (and should) inform ethical choice but cannot be abstracted to a system of ethics (neither can it replace ethics); it is irreducibly situational and concrete. I'm a moral relativist in the sense that I hold it the ethics that govern human societies to be specific to their time and place (and binding to the members of those societies, including, of course, myself) – I dispute the existence of a statable moral absolute. The moment it is stated, it becomes abstract, and thereby relative in its force. So I would forcefully reject any kind of ”Argument from Morality” as irrelevant as most of the apologetic arguments, not in the least because I would dispute the existence of the absolute moral rules and intuitions that are supposed to reflect Divine reason. A nice philosophical concept. Not God. The Divine commandments in the Old Testament do, obviously, not presuppose moral absolutism in that they are parts of covenants specific to their time and place. The one that is, of course, not is the one that informs all: love God and love your neighbour as yourself. And this ”law”, I would argue, is a little higher than any moral law or principle precisely because it is ”lower” in being irreducibly concrete.

Of course, this does not mean I can simply define Evil away and be done with it; if I hold love to be a principle transcending (but not replacing) moral good and bad, then something very much the opposite of love remains: the deterministic, entropic self-unravelling of matter in its natural state but also of people and their interrelationships; the denial of possibility and creative advance by unfreedom, suffering and death. Death. Death (and the many little deaths that precede biological death) ultimately as the foreclosure of possibilities, of the ”and yet...” that is love.

Somehow, I believe Evil in this sense to be a feature of the immanent aspect of God, rather than of a creation wholly seperated from God. The brokenness of our existence, and the brokenness of our creation, thus reflects a brokenness in God as well. The panentheistic notion of God to which I hold does seem to imply it.

The flip side of the coin is that, if God is indeed love, than in his creative activity, he is constantly overcoming and transcending Evil; by ”breathing life” into the universals, the qualia and the mathematics of the Platonic world and sustaining the actual, living world he at the same time overcomes the death-like grip that laws, regularities, etc. hold over the world. ”Transcending” is, of course, not the same as ”abolishing” Evil as much as overcoming Evil much as a seed overcomes the husk it is trapped in; ”Evil is the Throne of good”, the Ba'al Shem Tov reportedly said.

(Is this the truth that the Gnostic Carpocratians discovered?)

Dan Simmons' gentle prophet, Aenea, brought the bittersweet truth that Love does indeed transcend and overcome death, but does not abolish death as a reality. There is, in the universe of Hyperion and its sequels, no personally experienced afterlife. I wonder now if the logic of what I have written above must not lead to a similar conclusion. That to ”lose our lives” as Christ instructed does not mean getting it back later, bigger and better; but quite literally to lose it in order to live on in the hearts and minds of others, and ultimately and eternally, in that of God. But no personally experienced heaven or hell await us. When starting to explore religion, for a long time I specifically denied any afterlife as I did not want my reason to be clouded by wishful thinking: I am terribly afraid of death, of the great blackness, the non-being. Then at some point the Christian notion of the resurrection led me to accept some notion (however vague) of a personally experienced afterlife. Still, I find the idea sketched by Dan Simmons and present in Whitehead's philosophy as 'objective immortality' (being remembered, perfectly and eternally, by God; yet no further personal experience) irrestistably elegant if also harsh and frightening. There is a fragile beauty to temporality, and to the notion of the personally experienced human life as temporal, and sealed, forever, by death.

I wonder now if the resurrection of Christ is not, indeed, symbolical in nature; that the life of Christ is precisely the one celebrated in the Eucharist in the community of Christians, and that to follow Christ means, indeed, to ultimately resign to surrender ourselves to future generations in a similar way.

In Whitehead's philosophy, comparatively little is explicitly said of good and evil, but quite a lot of love and beauty. Beauty, to Whitehead, is the telos of the universe and aesthetic experience is defined as ”feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity” (Process and reality, p. 396). It seems to me that what Whitehead describes here is very much the Hegelian dialectic in which thesis and antithesis are overcome by a synthesis without being destroyed, but living on on a higher plane as it were, or more specifically, of the way we become 'more real', we become finally 'human' in love, which paradoxically entails giving ourselves away.

Yet Whitehead states this as an aesthetic principle. And of course it is. Poetic metaphor is precisely the kind of ”patterned contrast” Whitehead describes. And by by embodying its truth in a lie (as Michael Cabot Haley put it in his Semeiosis of poetic metaphor) the metaphor only becomes more true. In becoming love through his actions, his death on the cross, and his resurrection, Christ collapses the divide between literal, propositional and poetic truth and embodies a metaphor. One that signifies, truer than true, the nature of God.

The Bible is a love-story. One that deals with the troubled and difficult love between God and his creation, specifically, his people. I believe that the New Testament is part of the story, though I am aware of the usurpation of the Hebrew Scripture in Christianity which Harold Bloom so sharply criticizes. I am not sure it matters, as I believe the central truths of the New to be present in the Old as well: ”On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?" He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."” (Luke 10:25-27). And the story has not ended yet; the creation is still ongoing, and the seventh day has yet to come.

Martin Silenus was onto something, I believe. That to be a poet is to listen to the rhythm of the immanent God, the logos of the universe, to the creation of the world as-it-happens. A creation which is love. A creation which overcomes, transcends and defies death through death, not through simply abolishing suffering, darkness and pain – but by a dialectic ”sublation” which gives death and pain its unfortunate due and yet overcomes it by its eternal ”and yet...”. As Martin Silenus experienced with hideous concreteness (and as did his foster-child Aenea), being a poet means to ”suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity”. The Greek poiesis means creation. God is the poet of the world. And suffers the birth pangs.

Some silliness

2008-12-17T14:13:00.000-08:00

The Dutch Reformatorisch Dagblad has a gushing review of Creationist biochemist Duane Gish's book about dinosaurs. Judging from the review, it seems to be standard OEC boilerplate with a dose of cryptozoology (dinosaurs are, apparently, still with us). I should note that the Reformatorisch Dagblad is in general a quality Calvinist newspaper, if you look away from their quirks such as shutting down their website on Sundays.

Some quotes of Gish I just can't leave alone (my translation):

Have you ever seen the tail of a hippo?

This is, of course, of the Behemoth, which is argued to be possibly a brachiosaur. The article has a helpful article about a man (presumably Job?) staring at three brachiosaurs (aren't brachiosaurs supposed to have been semi-aquatic, though?).

The relevant passage from Job (40: 15-19)

Look at the behemoth,
which I made along with you
and which feeds on grass like an ox.
What strength he has in his loins,
what power in the muscles of his belly!
His tail sways like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are close-knit.
His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like rods of iron.
He ranks first among the works of God,
yet his Maker can approach him with his sword.

Now, at I understand, the reading of "hippopotamus" is based on the etymology of "Behemoth" which does seem to be a loan from an Egyptian word for hippo. Also, some of the other verses talk about the Behemoth hiding in swamps and under reeds, which fits the hippopotamus as well. But I agree that the 'tail'-part does not suggest a hippopotamus.

Then again, one might remark that cedars, as trees generally do, grow from the ground upward. Not sideways. So I can't see a brachiosaur reflected in the text either.

And look at the surrounding verses. First, we have amazement at the Behemoth's strength in the loins, then at the close-knit sinews of the thighs. 'Thighs' happen to be 'stones' or 'testicles' or 'male organs' in some other translations. The New International Version has a footnote that the 'tail' might be a trunk (supposing the Behemoth is an elephant) but, looking at the verse in context which reads as a praise to the creature's power and virility, my thoughts are drawn to a different organ.

I do not know whether 'tail' was a usual metaphor for that-other-thing in Biblical Hebrew (and can't be bothered to look up right now) but it seems natural enough (see for example German Schwanz which has both meanings).

For the record, I think it is fairly useless to speculate on what creature the Behemoth is supposed to mean. When the Bible talks about Behemoth, or Leviathan, it does not do so in quite the same way as it talks about sheep or camels - we do not find any Biblical figure encountering a herd of Behemoths. Rather, they are very specific monsters in the Biblical narrative as well. And I think that's what they basically are: monsters.

Elsewhere in the article Gish is quoted against the existence of transitional fossils:

None of the animals is on its way to change for 25, 50 or 75 percent; they are all complete 100 percent. Fossils are strong evidence against evolution.

The point of transitional fossils is one I have never understood.

It seems self-evident that if species A is the ancestor of species B (after a number of evolutionary changes) and that species B is an ancestral form of species C, that then species B is a transitional form between A and C, and fossils of it are 'transitional fossils'. Thus Homo Erectus is a transitional form between Homo Habilis and ancestral modern man. Which does in no way have to imply that species B (say Homo Erectus is in any way incomplete. It is only from the perspective of its ancestors and its descendants that it is a transitional fossil. As far as Homo Erectus was concerned, it probably was the pinnacle of creation. And of course Homo Erectus was a full-blown species, interbreeding with its companions, and persisting over a given quantity of time (perhaps some time after its modern descendants entered the scene. Most any creature is a representative of a species.

Likewise, from our contemporary perspective, we might state that Middle English is a transitional form between Old and Modern English, which does not mean Middle English was in any way an 'incomplete language'. Alternatively, if Monk A copies a Bible, makes a few mistakes, and leaves the copy to Monk B who adds some copying mistakes of his own in the copy he, in turn, is making, the intermediary form is a 'transitional form' from a historical perspective. It's still a Bible, too.

What has always remained entirely unclear to me is what, if my reading above is wrong, 'transitional fossils' are supposed to look like? Dinos with feathers? Check. Hairy reptiles? Check. Ape-men? Check. Ah, but all those are species in their own rights! But what else would we expect?

This ain't the summer of love: Marxism, Christianity and the glorious nature of suffering.

2008-12-13T10:51:00.000-08:00

This ain't the garden of Eden
There ain't no angels above
and things ain't like they're supposed to be
and this ain't the summer of love
Blue Öyster Cult

One of my favourite blogs in the Swedish blogosphere is Bloggelito's. This is because the writer is a heretic against what I regard as the "Swedish ideology" - the weird mixture of Social Democracy and moralistic feminism. And on many single political issues, I find myself in wholehearted agreement with him. With regard to worldviews, however, the distance could not be greater: being a libertarian secular humanist, the writer has an understanding of Christianity which makes Christopher Hitchens look like a subtle thinker. One example is Kristendom är fascism ("Christianity is Fascism").

The title is a response to a piece written by a Christian called Självmordshjälp är fascism ("Assisted suicide is Fascism"). I don't want to go into the question itself. I am rather leery of the state either banning or legislating euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Rather, I want to go off on a tangent based on the sneer at the end of the post (my translation):

Christianity is the mother of all fascism, with its insane emphasis on suffering (its symbol is a tortured carpenter on a cross). Whereas euthanasia is at home within the domain of humanism, with its outspoken aim to alleviate suffering..

Yes. YES. Y E S. Exactly. Guilty as charged! (Not about the fascism, mind you. That's nonsense of course. But on the suffering).

Suffering and the celebration of suffering lies at the heart of Christianity. We do indeed worship a tortured and wounded carpenter executed in one of the nastiest ways the local authorities could come up with. And depending on the exact denomination, we also worship a whole regiment of saints who faced down suffering, torture and death with death-defying, insane courage.

Again, there's various kinds of Christians. Some protestant churches are adorned with an empty cross, something I've always been puzzled at. The Roman Catholic and Eastern churches are an entirely different matter, of course. And then there are the Anabaptists, who have a glorious (and I mean precisely: glorious) history of martyrdom stretching into early modern times.

But Christianity, at heart, is about suffering and dying. It is about God, in the person of a carpenter from Galilee, showing us what it means to be human. Which as it happens includes a lot of suffering and dying. There's no way out from that. Christianity provides no spiritual painkillers, no escape from the harsh realities of the world. If you dream of immortality as a ball of pure life-energy circling the planets around Sirius or some such dross, join the New Agers. Christianity is about the suffering and dying. Which is serious business. Sure enough, as a matter of faith and hope, we may believe we will be resurrected before God - but as Christ himself showed, the suffering and dying has to be gone through first.

(The case of the Dutch Anabaptist Dirk Willems has baffled me since I first read of it. In 1569, Dirk Willems tried to escape the Church authorities across the ice. His pursuer fell through the ice, and apparently without a second thought, Dirk Willems turned around and helped him out. According to some reports, his pursuer was unwilling to arrest him but ordered to do so by the bailiff who stayed safely on the land. Dirk Willems was duly burned as a heretic.

Willems' case baffles me because he does not exemplify what a good man, or a morally upright man, or a "good Christian" should do. Only an utterly insane version of ethics would prescribe Willems' actions. Rather, through his actions, Willems transcended the logic of action and benefit, of practical rationality itself.

Willems' case keeps me awake at night. Because he exemplifies what I must intellectually accept what Christianity is about. At the same time, there's no question I'd have left the guy in the water. I'd probably have never gotten myself in that situation in the first place. It's not so much that I would break under torture, but that the mere suggestion of torture would be quite enough. And give up my friends and loved ones in the process. Because in the end, witnessing or causing the pain of others would be easier to bear than suffering oneself. It's not nice, but there it is.

This causes me to be quite hesitant in my own embrace of Christianity. Because if to be a Christian means to be a "follower of Jesus", I want to read the small print. Others may think of the miracle healings, the Sermon on the Mount, the parables. My thoughts are immediately drawn to nails.)

Back to the point: Christianity is about suffering and dying. It's about learning how to suffer. There's no way around it.

At the basis of Christianity is the understanding that the world is somehow radically not-as-it-should-be. There is a wrongness about things which goes right down to our cells, to the very heart of our being. Things are not as how they are intended to be. We are not as we're supposed to be. For the Christian, living in the world as it is is pretty much like holding a mirror which cries out: "Look at you! How hideous!".

This is of course not unique to Christianity. Marxism has a notion, in estrangement or alienation, which very much mirrors the Christian notion of the Fall.

Secular liberals are a different story. Secular liberals have a notion of wrongness, to be sure, but not radical wrongness. The wrongness of the world, in the mind of the secular liberal, often seems to lie in the rest of the world being reluctant to accept the political and social ideals formulated during the Enlightenment and exemplified in Western Europe and the U.S. But through the gradual approach between nations through free exchange of ideas and material goods, through the gradual emancipation of the autonomous, rational individual in China and Afghanistan as it is in America or Sweden, or, alternatively, encouraging the process along through U.N. sanctions or carpet-bombing, the values of the Enlightenment may yet spread around the world.

The Marxist and the Christian would probably find common ground in rejecting this notion, for not entirely dissimilar reasons.

In any event, there are a few possible responses to the radical wrongness of the world. The first would be to utterly reject and renounce the world, or to regard the world as ephemeral and illusionary, the underlying reality being a much better spiritual and ideal world which we may approach through religious ritual and contemplation. This is pretty much the road that the Gnostics took.

Another alternative would be to accept the world, but reject the self that sees the wrongness of it all. The ultimate ideal would not be an ascension of the self to some kind of better, ideal world, but an elimination of the self. My understanding of Buddhism is very limited, but I believe that there is at least some of this in Buddhism.

For the Christian (or the Marxist) neither alternative are open. We cannot liberate ourselves from this particular universe in favour of a better one. But neither can we eliminate our sense of the wrongness of things. The solution lies in the world-to-come. For the Marxist, this means the end of the alienation between man to man, and between man to nature, through abolishing the economic circumstances (methods of production, etc.) which perpetuate such alienation. For the Christian, the world-to-come is the Kingdom of God as announced and exemplified by Christ, which is at the same time here (in a community of followers of Christ) and not-yet-here - but contains the promise of reconciliation between us and the Creator which we, in our inherent 'wrongness', are estranged from.

At first sight, the Christian notion of Fallenness appears more thoroughgoing, and the notion of the Kingdom more radical. This may be true, but the decisive break in history which the advent of socialism would bring with regards to basically all human history that went before should not be underestimated.

I am reminded here by a quote of Marx presented by the blogger "Lenin" in a discussion following a post on the "New" Atheists. A discussion which demonstrates, in my opinion, why the Marxists are so much more serious and interesting intellectual opponents than secular-humanist atheists such as Dawkins or neocon atheists such as Hitchens or Harris. (No less than both my favourite philosophers - Collingwood and MacIntyre - got a mention). Anyway, the quote:

Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism.

Briefly, to the Marxist, both religion as well as atheism as a stance occurring in modern society are products of alienation. Religion, the 'heart of a heartless world', will no longer serve a function when that alienation is overcome - but neither will atheism, i.e. the denial of God. Truthfully, I am not sure whether, from my own religious viewpoint, I disagree with this.

In any event, neither Christianity nor Marxism can be easily reconciled with the Enlightenment discourse of inherent rights and disembodied moral principles, as it figures rather prominently in Bloggelito's post.

For the Marxist, the ideology of any given epoch (such as the ideology of secular liberal individualism) is the ideology of the ruling class of that epoch, and serves the interests of that ruling class. The eternal principles of the Enlightenment - such as the universalist notion of human right, of eternally valid moral principles which we have access to through a 'moral instinct', etc., are to a Marxist part of a historically and culturally specific ideology which serves a specific notion of society and a specific class interest. The Catholic (ex-?)Marxist Alasdair MacIntyre, in his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? makes this clear in tracing the development of property as an a priori, untouchable principle in Hume's thought. This does not mean, obviously, that Marxism needs to be implacably hostile to Enlightenment principles. The bourgeoisie was progressive in its time, and the development of a universal notion of human rights at the end of the 19th century was progress. However, the bourgeoisie is not progressive anymore, and it is its 'ruling ideology' which needs to be overcome.

Christianity is, I believe, neutral to the specific ethics and 'rights' accorded to people in a specific society. Because for the Christian, the ultimate end and goal of the human being is Christlikeness, the standard presented to us by God; and the example of Dirk Willems should make pretty clear what this takes. It is obviously impossible to dictate Christlikeness as the prevailing norm in a given society (if you doubt this, consider the example of a perhaps rather less admirable Anabaptist, namely John Bockelson van Leiden). Aside from this, there is a strong disengagement from political power in the New Testament:

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours."
Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'"
(Luke 4: 5-8).

(I think that, arguably, 'Christendom' as the notion of a Christian polity represents Christianity's own 'fall from grace', regardless of the benefits it may have brought society, or the probable inevitability of the historical process).

So Christianity has been combined with Enlightenment-based notions on morality and rights as happily as it has been with virtue ethics before. An example of the former is the employment of a 'moral instinct', an apprehension of eternal moral principles, in apologetics. Mind you, I believe this may well be wrong; that an underlying notion of ethical traditions which may differ a lot in time and place may be superior, and that the basic Christian notion of Christ-as-human-telos may have validity in a variety of such traditions. There is not one single Christian politics, or one single Christian morality; and the moral-political vision often represented by political Christianity often seems to go back to just the conventional morality of the turn of the 19th century. In other words, the 'Christian right' are just as much children of the Enlightenment as their secular opponents.

In any event, my understanding is that, from a Christian viewpoint, God owes you nothing. He created you in His image, and for every instant of your life, you depend on Him totally. What He has given you He can take away, just like that - and you have no cause to complain (which isn't to say you can't complain - there is a long and honourable Old-Testamentic tradition of complaining to God - just that you don't have any inherent right to). You may have rights granted by the society you live in - but before God, you have none.

And on my understanding of the Gospel, 'alleviating suffering', which Bloggelito regards as a hallmark of humanism, figures rather low in the whole plan. To the contrary, suffering and the endurance and overcoming of suffering and death through suffering and death figure rather prominently in the New Testament and early Christian history (as well as later Christian history if you're an Anabaptist). This puts Christianity at odds with a kind of humanistic utilitarianism which regards the maximum of happiness, or the minimization of suffering, as the moral standard of an action. As indeed it should be. If the purpose of life, for the Christian, is to follow Jesus, and to 'glorify God' through his actions, such utilitarian concerns should fall by the wayside.

These are not very pleasant thoughts. I believe that Christianity can co-exist with a lot of varying political viewpoints. David Heddle is a libertarian; a position that to me seems indeed to naturally flow from some New-Testamentic passages, notably those on the renunciation of political power. Others may be conservatives or socialists. I myself find myself drawn back to the hard left and to a Quixotic radical conservativism at the same time. And as it is, I happen to agree with a lot of the individual standpoints the secular libertarian Bloggelito takes. But from a Christian standpoint, I must put my hopes for the world-to-come in the Kingdom of God, and acknowledge that there will be suffering and death before.

There's the old notion of 'Lunatic, Liar or Lord', in that an honest appraisal of Christ must come down to one of the three. But perhaps a good way to put it is that to understand the New Testament, one must in a way adopt all these viewpoints. Because a lot of it is quite insane, offensive, scandalous to modern-day sensibilities. And it should be. There is nothing particularly comforting about the lines Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it. (Luke 17:30). And the more I think about it, the less comfortable I feel. What does it mean to be human? The answer is right there, right in front of me. And to be honest, I don't like one bit of it. But I nonetheless think it's true.

The demise of the Netherlands

2008-11-09T09:16:00.000-08:00

I want my country back. Venerable and anarchic Amsterdam, the glorious arse-hole of Europe, seedy and hungover, blinking at the harsh morning light. Or suspiciously modest Groningen, ill at ease in a countryside most of its denizens never see, bathing in the waft of tobacco factories, marijuana, and the scent of Surinam groceries. Or my hometown of Oude Pekela, teenage pregnancy capital of the country, jovial and violent, the dirty water of the river a deep and warm green in the afternoon haze. Living in one of the most orderly and squeaky-clean countries of Europe, I miss all that. And while I'm at it, I want my Guilder back, too, with the face of the Queen (a friend of mine reminds me that the Euro has the face of the Queen, too. But it's not the same). And the smoking sections in the trains. And a Communist Party which I can vote for once in every four years and rail against for the rest of the time.

I write this post after having read that the Christian Democrat Party wants to shut down the Coffeeshops, that most Dutch of Dutch institutions. First, they take away our real money and substitute it for fake money. Then, the moralist Mayor of Amsterdam starts a crusade against the red light district (okay, it's more complicated than that, but allow me to vent my spleen). Then, the Christian Democrats ban smoking in pubs - destroying the bruine kroeg, our Dutch equivalent of the British local pub. From now on, pubs in the Netherlands will be trendy hell-holes with abstract art on the wall, filled with non-smoking twits eating sushi and drinking drinks that glow in the dark. And now, they come for the Coffeeshops. For clarity: this is not going to happen. I do not believe it will be possible to introduce a prohibitionist mentality in a culture congenitally hostile to prohibitionism. But the very idea is enough to arouse my anger (ever-simmering as of late) at the direction the Dutch government has been taking.

Dutch culture has always had its own dialectic, a covenant between pencil-pushing bureaucracy and anarchism, between vicious social control and toleration, between finger-wagging moralism and libertinism. But the covenant has now been broken, and for the moment, the prigs and prudes and puritans seem to be in the ascendancy.

Secular-minded leftists often rail against communalism, the viewpoint that religious and cultural minorities in the West should be left, to a large extent, to handle their own affairs. The irony is that what is still the most liberal society in Western Europe is also deeply, thoroughly communalistic. After the reformation and the foundation of the Dutch republic at the end of the 16th century, Dutch Calvinism became the state religion - which it remained until halfway the 19th century - but Protestantism never attained the absolutely dominant position it did in Scandinavia. The Catholics remained a very sizeable minority (and currently, a majority among the religious part of the nation). The Calvinists very quickly fractured into orthodox and Arminian factions and continued to fracture. And Calvinist protestantism was never alone to begin with: the Anabaptists were the first organized protestants in the Netherlands, and the Doopsgezinde congregation remains (even if small).

Coupling this with the fairly weak state during the Republic (Orange-minded groups and institutions constantly competed for power with republican groups and institutions) goes a long way in explaining the Republic's tolerance for outsiders and dissidents. Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews came to the Netherlands and were left alone; philosophers and scientists such as Descartes and Linnaeus studied and worked in the Netherlands; protestant Huguenot refugees from France found a refuge in the Netherlands in the 17th century as did Catholic refugees from Germany in the 19th century.

The system that would gradually emerge in the Netherlands has been called pillarisation: any particular religious, cultural or political community had its own institutions, media, political organizations, etc., creating a 'pillar' of clubs and institutions surrounding the individual from birth to death. A Dutch reformed boy would go to a Dutch reformed school, join a Dutch reformed football club, work most likely for a Dutch reformed boss, marry of course a Dutch reformed girl, and would quite likely end his life in a Dutch reformed nursing home. For individuals, the system may well have been quite suffocating: at the same time, it worked - there was very little violence or strife between various religious groups (outside from maybe the traditional village-to-village brawls in the countryside). And communities would work together when needed. During the Second World War, the Communists and the hardcore Calvinists were both very active in the resistance, and they developed a curious respect for each other.

The system began to crumble and decline in the 1960s and later. The ruling Christian Democrat party is itself a symptom of that decline: being based on a 1980 fusion between a Catholic and two Protestant political parties. My own youth is pretty much a picture of the survival of 'pillarised' institutions in a secularizing society: I visited a Catholic primary school, a ecumenical (but largely Protestant) high school, played in a Dutch reformed marching band and attended meetings of the Communist Party.

Dutch television is still largely 'pillarised': public television airtime is divided between a Catholic station, an Evangelical one, a Social Democrat one, etc. But marking the demise of pillarisation, for example, is the fact that the liberal protestant television, after the 1960s, turned into the most artistically radical and countercultural station (the first to show full frontal nudity, etc.). We would watch their children's television when we were little, which was pretty edgy (I recall one show where the Monster of Frankenstein underwent a sex operation). But my parents preferred us watching that than watching the American children's animations on the other stations where people would be shot up and so forth. In any event, the station is currently protestant in name only - and where the other religious stations maintain a stronger identity, even the Evangelical one has been under pressure to secularize.

But even as the individual 'pillars' crumbled, the Dutch policy of leaving people pretty much alone to settle their own affairs flourished. A verb that entered politics was gedogen, literally 'tolerate' but specifically referring to the policy of neither legalizing a particular area of vice, nor prosecuting it. Prostitution has been 'tolerated' for a long time before legalization which meant simply that it remained technically illegal but the state refused to prosecute. The same still goes for the possession of small quantities of most drugs (quite aside from the regulated sale of marijuana in Coffeeshops). The policy remains, in my opinion, a fairly brilliant one: I still wonder whether gedogen is sometimes actually preferable to full legalization. Legalization is a double-edged sword: it tends to favour larger operations and companies which can deal with the regularizing and state intervention inevitably following rather than, say, the individual grower having a backyard full of weed plants or the individual prostitute. Also, legalizing a sphere of activity such as prostitution and bringing it under government control may lead to policy decisions not necessarily in favour of the persons involved: in the city of Arnhem, the red-light district (central, well-attended and therefore quite safe) was shut down with the official 'prostitution zone' removed to some kind of industrial zone at the edge of town.

In any event, the Dutch political equilibrium, and its toleration policy, was decisively disturbed with the meteoric political rise and murder of Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Fortuyn's movement channelled immense unrest and discontent about multiculturalism, the problems of which had been covered up with a suffocating blanket of political correctness for decades; with softness on crime; with globalization and the European Union which remains highly unpopular in the Netherlands; with the government constantly crowing on about economic good times which, somehow, surprise surprise, did not really trickle down to the poorer layers of society, etc. Fortuyn's jerry-rigged political 'party' did not survive his death for very long, but right-wing populism remains a force to be reckoned with in Dutch politics.

(As does, incidentally, left-wing populism: the Social Democrats have been bleeding supporters into the hard-left, economically socialist and culturally conservative Socialist Party, which is on the verge of overtaking them).

Basically, the feeling is that the Dutch policy of gedogen has also extended to 'tolerating' crime, vandalism, youth gangs and the ghettoization of parts of the big cities. At the same time - and this is a peculiar and interesting feature of Dutch right-wing populism - there is a (not unjustified) feeling that the muslim minority does not share the general Dutch tolerance for gays, alternative sexual lifestyles, etc. Pim Fortuyn was much more a libertarian than a conventional European nationalist.

Toleration in Dutch society has never been an enshrined principle in the way secularism is in the French republic, or constitutional values and individual liberty in the United States. Precisely because the Netherlands for such a long time has been a collection of various cultural and religious groups, living their own lives and pulling together as needed, depillarisation and its consequences have left us, I believe, grasping for such a basis: liberalism and toleration itself is not enough when dealing with the integration of a minority which has in some aspects quite illiberal values. At the same time, one might state that the integration of islamic minorities has been mismanaged from day one: guest-workers from the 1960s were discouraged from assimilating too much into Dutch society in order to discourage them from staying - and yet they stayed, leaving a second generation to grow up with one foot in a culture which is not theirs anymore, another in one which has never been quite welcoming and is currently utterly hostile.

The 2006 elections were, in some way, a revolt of the 'countryside' against the political elites of the big cities. The winners were the hard-left Socialist Party, with its base in the Catholic south and also strong support in the traditionally socialist/communist North-East; the culturally conservative and economically leftist Christian Union (itself a fusion of two denominationally different Calvinist groups: another example of depillarisation) which has its support in the Dutch Calvinist 'Bible Belt' from Zeeland in the Southwest to Kampen and Staphorst in the East; the Christian Democrats which always have been strong all over the countryside; and the hard-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, which has strong support in Limburg where Wilders is from. Losers were the Social Democrats, the liberal democrat D66, the right-wing liberals of the VVD - all parties with their power base in the big cities and the suburbs.

The resulting government has for the first time involved the Christian Union. I actually like the Christian Union (and the openly theocratic SGP) as opposition parties: they are excellent conservative watchdogs. I am less enthusiastic about their participation together with the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in government, which has driven an increasingly illiberal line. The apex of which are justice secretary Hirsh Ballin's efforts not just to preserve but to broaden Dutch anti-blasphemy laws (which were last used sometime in the sixties). As well as his efforts in having a Dutch cartoonist lifted from his bed and arrested by 10 armed coppers for violating 'hate speech laws'. Interestingly, there seemed to have been little pressure from the supposedly offended muslims at work here - rather, the Christian Democrats are using them as an alibi for their own campaigns.

What they want is turn the Netherlands into just another squeaky-clean, nannyist European country in which any actual discontent is covered with 'hate-speech' laws, we all step in line, obediently filter our internet, do not indulge into such unhealthy activities such as smoking joints, and correspond perfectly to the Brussels bureaucrats dreams of what Europe is supposed to be. It won't work of course. The illiberalism of the Christian Democrats is, ultimately, foreign to the Dutch mentality as a whole. Laws people don't see the sense behind are simply ignored. The same is already starting with the smoking ban, which is openly ignored by an increasing number of pubs.

On an optimistic note, here's rap group THC's patriotic hymn to Amsterdam:

Another very long post on sexuality

2008-11-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

Forged in Jesuit logic and tempered in the cold bath of science. I nevertheless understood at that second the ancient obsession among the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession, the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic trance. I realized at that instant just how surely the affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis - the God of Abraham.
Father Paul Dure in Dan Simmons' Hyperion

This is a post that I've been woolgathering about for a while. It's going to be one of those long chaotic ones. It's about sexuality, pornography, prostitution and sadomasochism. And religion. Consider yourselves warned.

Up front: I have no issue at all with homosexuality, am in favour of legalizing prostitution forthwith in the rest of the world as it is in the Netherlands, my main gripe with pornography is the poor quality of a lot of it, and I find sadomasochism relentlessly fascinating. This put me at odds, in part or in whole, with the mainstream of Christian opinion, as well as with the feminist-influenced Left (the standpoints of both overlap to some extent).

By 'mainstream of Christian opinion', I mean that body of opinion which tends to relate critically towards homosexuality and gay marriage, pornography, and legal prostitution. I am thinking here in terms of generalities which of course may belie the complexities of individual thoughts on the issue. Also, the underlying ideological basis of criticism is very different in case of the Protestant and Evangelical right than it is in case of the Catholic Church (or mainline Protestants, or Evangelical progressives, etc.), which tends to anchor its criticisms of, say, porn, into a general criticism of the commodification of humans and of human sexuality which relates to the Catholic Church's latent uneasiness with capitalism (in contrast, the Protestant right, especially in the US, seems to be extremely fond of capitalism).

Especially the Protestant and Evangelical right seem to be, at times, obsessed with such things as the photographic depiction of the girly parts of girls and the tendency of some men to scorn the girly parts of girls for the manly parts of men. As an example, take this letter from the Christian right group Focus on the Family warning about the horrors an Obama presidency would have inflicted on the United States by 2012. A remarkably large part of it is, you guessed it, about gays. I would bet that, regardless of their actual position on homosexuality, most European Christians would wonder why the gayness issue receives so much attention in comparison with, say, economic hardship and exploitation, environmental destruction, warfare, etc.

The unpleasant truth, I suspect, is that organizations such as Focus on the Family do not really mind such trivial issues as the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, the legitimization of torture and dehumanization of prisoners by their own government, and so forth – not as much as the paramount issue of gays doing gay things with each other and wanting to get married.

The question which presents itself to this particular socialist-minded Dutchman is to what genuine extent James Dobson-style Christianity is 'Christian' and to what extent it is a rather idolatrous legitimization of American aggressive militarism and laissez-faire economics. It is, in any event, of rather slight religious interest to me, and my internal ideological 'sparring partner' in the sections below would be, instead, a Roman Catholic or a representative of traditional Protestantism or maybe a Christian feminist.

There is very little, if anything, about sexuality in the Gospels – only that Jesus seems to have been extremely critical towards divorce. The main passage in the NT which can be used to support a conservative sexual morality would be Paul's first letter to the Romans:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (Romans I: 21-26).

As basis for condemnation of homosexuality, I find it unconvincing. Paul was commenting here on sexual libertinism in Roman society, which cannot be unquestioningly identified with homosexuality in modern society – concepts such as ”homosexuality” as a sexual orientation in addition to heterosexuality did not really exist for the Romans and Greeks, but sexual relationships between men were widespread in addition to male-female marriage, rather than exclusive of it. Male-male relationships often enough involved a slave on one side of it (who did not necessarily have much say in the matter). The modern conception of homosexuality as a lifelong orientation was quite foreign to this mentality.

A sin is not a simple infraction of any specific rule from the Old and New Testament – the message of the New Testament is indeed precisely that it is not. Sin as a turning from or alienation from God is both condition and activity – and as an activity, it much more refers to one's intentions and motivations rather than the outward features and consequences of that activity. Love between persons cannot be sinful – but to the extent that sin as a condition prevents the lovers from loving each other perfectly, that some of the alienation between us and the other can never be quite overcome. But nonetheless interpersonal love is a heroic attempt to overcome sin-as-condition and in that sense revelatory of God (regardless of whether you believe in Him or not). I am convinced that love for gay men or lesbians is not of a different nature than that of heterosexual pairs and that's the end of it, as far as I am concerned.

This is an interpretation. I am not sure if it is the correct one (though I hope it is). But there is no level of reading the Bible without interpreting it in some fashion – and it is better to do so explicitly. The Bible is not a recipe-book with abstract rules and generalities (and it seems to be that Christ's message was precisely one of moving beyond such an understanding of Scripture).

My imaginary sparring-partner would have an immediate reply ready, and state that where I exempt safe, normative and socially acceptable homosexual relationships, the Pauline condemnation of sexual debauchery still stand – and with it, pornography, prostitution, darkrooms, a pretty significant part of the inner city of Amsterdam, etc. The above would be quite compatible with an interpretation of sexuality as a symbolization of interpersonal love but a simultaneous rejection of lust as a perversion of such a symbol. With my fondness for symbolism in concrete life and acts, my sparring-partner would suggest, I end up at an interpretation of sexuality which is quite compatible with that of the mainline Protestant Churches such as the Swedish Church, which are quite ”sex-positive” in that they will celebrate sexuality as a gift from God, will abandon moralizing about, homosexuality or, say, masturbation or premarital sex - but will still tend to resist pornography or prostitution as commodifying and objectifying.

I would answer that in this sense, the mainline Protestants follow general secular liberalism in looking at sexuality through rose-tinted glasses. In other words: sex is great, as long as it's consensual and safe and so forth – but let's not look at the seedy sides, the sex industry and its objectification of women, prostitution, etc. I think this is precisely idealizing sexuality too much. I do not believe ”lust” to be a sin in any kind of simple sense, but neither do I believe sexuality and sexual lust to be in any simple sense a gift from God – except for all the bad stuff.

Pornography is notoriously hard to define and I am not going to make any bad jokes about defining it. But the depiction of sexual acts and naked human beings in picture and text goes back quite a bit (though the cordoning off of such from mainstream society as precisely pornography may well be a very modern phenomenon). I generally have little time for feminist objections against pornography: I agree, to a large extent, that pornography deals with the commodification of sexuality, and of the human body, and that in this sense pornography very well reflects the values of modern capitalism (just as the sex industry itself is part of a capitalist economy, though still a fairly marginal one with a strong countercultural element at its more ragged edges). I want to be careful here for taking an overly Eurocentrist view (the Japanese had a flourishing pornographic culture, complete with the trademark tentacles and monsters etc., before Japan's forcible ”opening” to the West) but this is simply the way it looks from my neck of the woods. Where I would disagree is whether pornography is just that, or indeed, whether the focus on objectification, humiliation, etc. in some pornography (mostly the one focused on the most by critics of pornography) is even a bad thing. A liberal Christian take on pornography mentions that ”The critical feature of all pornography is not that it deals with sexual themes, but that it eroticizes violence, humiliation, degradation and other explicit forms of abuse.” and that no images are neutral. Indeed, they are not – but images have also a habit of meaning more than they mean at face value, or are intended to mean.

Opinions on pornography are often formed on filmed and photographed stuff from the post-Deepthroat era. But before that, of course, there were the erotic comics of the 50s and 60s such as the bondage-themed comics of Georges Pichard, erotic novels such as the hilarious 1907 slapstick Ten Thousand Rods of Apollinaire, etc., etc., etc. - I'm not interested in objections to the extent of ”this is not porn, it's art!” since I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive, and if the objection means that pornography should be more artistic, well, yes, that would be nice. In any event, go back to the end of the 18th century and you meet with Sade, who was both a pornographer as well as an artist and a philosopher. In fact, I think Sade is probably my favourite atheist philosopher, and this relates very much to the contradictions inherent in the man – which I believe is reflected, to an extent, in the contradictions inherent in pornography as well.

I've never been able to read Sade's classic 120 Days of Sodom from beginning to end. The book contains a catalogue of perversities and cruelties which is still utterly ”out there” (it is probably for the best that videocameras were not yet invented in Sade's day). But in all its relentless focus on dehumanization, objectification, cruelty, something interesting happens. The villains of Sade's texts (usually members of the aristocracy, or priests, which are depicted with slightly more venom) are pretty much empty shells. To the extent that they have internal worlds, that is not what Sade is interesting in. He's interested in the internal worlds of the victims, in their thoughts and feelings. Sade remarked rather darkly somewhere that women are capable of more refined cruelty than men because of their more delicate nervous system. He hit upon something important here: the basis of cruelty and sadism is indeed empathy. The ability to identify with the other, and with the other in pain (and I've wondered whether at least in some cases, sadism may not be a variety of masochism). And the fascinating thing about Sade is that he relentlessly criticizes conventional morality and conventional religion in his novels (seeing it as simply one more way of keeping the weak and oppressed in their place) precisely through exploiting the titillating, prurient aspects of cruelty and oppression. For all the bloodthirstiness in his novels, Sade detested the very real bloodthirstiness of the French revolution (and succeeded in averting quite a few executions during his time as a functionary in the revolutionary government).

This humanistic strain in Sade's writings is captured very strikingly in Pasolini's film adaptation of the 120 Days, Salo. The Marxist Pasolini's version is the best film I will not want to see again in the foreseeable future. By which I mean that the film (in which the plot is transplanted to Fascist Italy: four Fascist functionaries round up boys and girls to a remote mansion for a final debauched escapade before the inevitable defeat of the regime) is brilliant but quite hard to watch. It is ultimately strangely optimistic, in that a certain essential ”humanness” is shown as surviving against terrible odds. The four predators force two of their slaves to get married in a perversion of a marriage ceremony; then, they sit down to watch the boy rape the girl. It doesn't happen: the two shily shuffle towards each other, try to cuddle, but to not follow their masters' script. One of the guards starts an illicit affair with a servant at the mention: they are caught and their sexual action is of an all-too-human, all-too-affectionate nature for the four masters. As they put the boy against the wall to shoot him, he makes a defiant raised-fist salute before he is riddled with bullets, and in that fashion exposes the weakness of the masters: they can kill him, but they cannot defeat him. And most strikingly at the end of the film, as part of the slaves are brutally murdered in the courtyard, two of the guards find a record of dancing music, put it on, and start dancing. One of them asks the other what his girlfriend's name is. The answer is ”Margerita”. Here, ”humanness” survives in a place where the four Fascists are not even looking. For all their trying, they cannot stamp it out.

There is an element – explicit in Sade but often potentially in a lot of pornography – which subverts traditional gender roles, oppression, humiliation and dehumanization precisely through its depiction of it. Of course, a great deal of it is dross – but the part that is dross is often the safer, softer kind, the surgically or digitally enhanced American beauties of Playboy (and even Playboy retains a love for the subversive and countercultural in its writing, if not in its photography). The dross is not the focus of much of the criticism against pornography. Anti-porn activist Nikki Craft's pages are adorned with bondage pictures and Hustler cartoons. Which, to me, suggests that Craft has a tin ear for the media she rails against.

Sadomasochism (and here, for clarity, I am speaking of consensual sadomasochistic practice) plays with some very dark symbolism – the ropes, the display of power and submission, the controlled infliction of pain etc. - but in doing so, it tends to subvert and transcend that symbolism. Being bound up and gagged may, if taken at face value, signify loss of freedom, loss of agency and objectification – but for the participant, it may also signify the deep trust put in the partner. Love may be the ultimate end of sadomasochistic practice just as of any ”normal” sexual practice – precisely because the symbols involved sometimes seem to mean very much the opposite of love. By acting them out, they are disarmed. It need not be that serious of course. But even when Max Mosley went around spanking prostitutes while dressed up in a Nazi uniform, the meaning of the ritual was not that Max Mosley is, or wanted to be, a Nazi. Instead, he was making fun of authority figures (another mainstay in ”kinky” sexual practice as well as in pornography). Which is a rather anti-authoritarian thing to do.

Another example: mainstream pornography has been criticized a lot for the supposed racism inherent in its depiction of blacks. Suffice to say that 'interracial' is indeed a subcategory in pornography and that there are whole lines of movies whose title I shall not mention but refers simultaneously to the blackness of the black actor's member and the whiteness of the female actor. Here too there is no simple, face-value ”message”. It can be seen as reinforcing the stereotype that blacks are well-hung and sexually active. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that this is depicted as desirable from the white female actor's point of view. I think the bottom line is that stereotypes about blacks do exist among white males, and that these stereotypes focus on various aspects of the supposed masculinity of black men. What pornography does here is not so much create the stereotype as take it and make a joke out of it.

I'm not saying here that in no way pornography reinforces conventional role-models and sexual stereotypes. It does, but at the same time pornography in the West has always been countercultural, has always developed in opposition to the sexual mores of the day, and even with the commercialization and growth of the porn industry in recent decades, it cannot entirely lose that edge. It is part and parcel of the attraction. This point has has not been lost on some of those discontented with conventionalized gender roles and their reflection in pornography.

What, then, of the dark stuff? What of the quoted liberal christian notion that pornography ” eroticizes violence, humiliation, degradation and other explicit forms of abuse”? The bottom line is, that I am a complex person and I assume other men (hetero or gay) are no less complex. There is part of me that likes the eroticization of power-play, violence, humiliation and degradation. And if these are indeed as prevalent in pornography as claimed, I am hardly unique. At the same time, I am more than a collection of turn-ons. The dark sides of my and others' sexuality are not in themselves, I believe, sinful, but a relentless focus on them to the exclusion of the other person as a person, to approaching of and sharing with the other, which is love, which is very much the opposite of sin – rejecting all that is indeed sin.

At the same time, if the demonic side of me is not a place where I want to live, neither is the angelic. I also reject the high-minded sex-positive notion of sex as a simple and straightforward symbol of love. Because, things aren't like that. Things aren't that simple. I am simply not the person that the sex-positive but anti-pornographical liberal christians claim that I am.

(I'll have to save working out my position on prostitution for sometime later. But it flows pretty naturally from my somewhat jaundiced view on sexuality. And here, at least, I have tradition on my side).

An unusually atrocious New Scientist article

2008-11-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

Via Victor Reppert, a pretty atrocious piece in New Scientist about the looming threat of Creationism to neuroscience.

First, I have to state I intensely dislike both the big pop science mags, New Scientist and Scientific American. For two reasons. First, they seem to be attracted to pseudoscience like flies are to shit - at least in as far as non-physics subjects such as linguistics are concerned. And I can only state this because I know nothing about physics. About subjects that I do know a bit about, both mags seem to have a tendency to colossally mess up. This is worrying.

Second, both of them represent the suave American liberalism that is the intellectually least interesting and most superficial of stances - coupled with a good bit of self-congratulatory "brave scientist saves the world from Republicans" nonsense. Which reached its apex in SciAms disgusting hatchet job on Bjorn Lomborg.

And if the "Global Warming Denialist" is the one perennial bugbear of suave American pro-science liberalism, the other is certainly the "Creationist". Both keeping the not-quite-highbrow sometimes-thinking left-leaning-but-not-too-far part of the population perpetually busy with their attacks on Science and Reason.

It is the latter that is the bad guy in this particular New Scientist article. Apparently, Creationists are now mounting their attacks on Reason and Science through neuroscience and philosophy of mind:

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

The first problem with the piece - and it's a very big one - is that dualism or the position that "matter and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things" (which does not necessarily imply Cartesian dualism, but anyway) has been a respectable minority position within philosophy of mind for God knows how long. I assume it is a minority position; my subjective impression is that most philosophers of mind hold to some kind of property dualism or emergentism which in effect acknowledges mind to be irreducible to matter while at the same time holding to some kind of ontological materialism. Then there's a minority of hard-core materialists (the Churchlands, Daniel Dennett) and a minority of dualists, panpsychists and idealists (Galen Strawson has defended a panpsychist account, which he regards as a kind of materialism, in a special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies).

Briefly, the viewpoint that there is a "hard problem" of consciousness, that mind cannot be scientifically explained or reduced to matter is pretty widely accepted. And various arguments go back a long way. The argument that the (normative) ground-consequence relationships of reasoning cannot be reduced to the (non-normative) spatiotemporal relationships of matter in a manner that is not self-refuting has been proposed with great clarity by Popper in The Open Universe back in the fifties but goes back to, as Popper mentions, to Descartes and Augustine.

The second problem is that the article stays firmly within the framework of "neuroscience". There is an irony here, in that in doing so, it repeats the main conceptual error of the ID/Creationist bogeymen (assuming that it originates with them):

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain.

(Aaargh! No they don't!!! Conceptually, the mind is something other than a material brain! The challenge is precisely to argue that dualism, or non-material causation, or whatever is explanatorily more comprehensive than materialism)

To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

The crux of the issue is, of course, that the relationship between mind and matter - the problem of qualia, intentionality, and so forth, and how these are to be placed in a material world of law-governed spatiotemporal entities, or the other way around - is a philosophical problem, not a scientific one. The natural sciences (such as neuroscience) must by necessity stay within their naturalistic, non-teleological explanatory framework. The human sciences (such as semiotics, linguistics, psychology) must by necessity stay within their teleological non-naturalistic explanatory framework. And neither science is able to justify the basic philosophical framework by itself. So looking for neuroscience to provide for a justification for materialism is an exercise in question-begging.

Just one example of this is the way in which Libet's experiments have been regarded as either an indication for the illusory nature of consciousness, or for the existence of retrocausal, non-materialistic phenomena with regards to the human mind.

Because, of course, things go both ways. For biological ID to succeed, it would need to argue for a shift in metascientific perspective: that a framework borrowed from the human sciences is more explanatory for biology than one borrowed from the natural sciences. It is often forgotten that there is a whole body of inquiry, in some areas at least as old as the natural sciences, in which "supernatural" concepts such as free will, goal-directed agency and so forth are methodologically presupposed even by those who would philosophically reject them: linguistics, history, psychology and the like.

The irony I referred to lies in the fact that scientism and it's ID/Creationist opponents often tend to take the same kind of post-Enlightenment one-dimensionalism for granted: there is a single world, and a single set of facts (scientific facts). Creationism tends to simply substitute the Bible as a replacement for the results of scientific inquiry.

But back to the article. I have a nasty feeling that at least some of the thinkers mentioned in the article as Creationist enemies have a viewpoint on some of the issues I mentioned above quite a bit more subtle than reflected in the writer's myopic focus on neuroscience. I haven't read J.P. Moreland, but glancing from the contents of his book, I would hazard a guess his place is within fairly mainstream philosophy of mind, rather than within some ID fifth column of neuroscience. And of Henry Stapp I know that he is working on a Whiteheadian process-philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has again everything to do with philosophical and metascientific frameworks and absolutely zilch with ID or Creationism.

Not to mention that process philosophy, which has been applied to mind-matter problems by others as well, such as Stuart Hameroff, is as far from Cartesian dualism as you can get. Farther, at least, than eliminative materialism. (Not to speak of conservative Christian theology).

And ultimately, upon the basis of what I can only see as an exercise in non-understanding, the article devolves in familiar scare-mongering. The ragtag bunch of non-materialist neuroscientists, quantum physicists and philosophers mentioned in the article are a Danger to Science and Reason, no less:

And as Clark observes: "This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as 'Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,' but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn't follow at all. There's nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that's just brains changing brains."

(Presupposing a materialist conception of the mind-matter issue, yes. Which is precisely the issue. See previous remarks about blatant question-begging.)

That is the voice of mainstream academia. (No. It. Is. Not.) Public perception, however, is a different story. If people can be swayed by ID, despite the vast amount of solid evidence for evolution, how hard will it be when the science appears fuzzier?

What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain - and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the "God of the gaps".

I have a better suggestion. On second thought, it would be too obscene to mention here. (I need to get outside and calm myself down with a cigarette).

(Back). I have a better idea. Neuroscientists should study neurology and not pretend they do philosophy. Philosophers of mind should study philosophy and not pretend to do natural science. Incidentally, I have a feeling that most of either group are already doing this and not need my advice.

Popular science journalists, on the other hand, should try their hand at reporting science. Not pseudo-science. Not politics or the intellectually barren perspective of left-liberal culture warriors. Not distort genuine, and interesting controversies through the lens of anti-religious hysteria.

Things like this almost make me root for a McCain victory, out of sheer spite.

The Devil's ransom. The problem of Evil, Morriston, Mitchell and Job.

2008-10-25T09:26:00.001-07:00

For my work, I am currently dealing with the Finnish bishop Eric Sorolainen (1546-1625) and his Postilla, his collection of sermons that was published in two parts in 1621 and 1625, and is the largest non-translated text in Old Finnish. I am mainly working on the linguistic features of the text, of course, but I can't really keep from forming an opinion on the man and his theology. Eric defends a pretty moderate Lutheranism throughout his texts - arguing not only against Roman Catholicism (obviously) but also against more radical protestant currents in Swedish society of that time - of course, religion was intertwined with politics: Eric, together with most of the Finnish nobility, supported the Catholic Swedish-Polish king Sigismund against the Calvinistically-minded duke Charles IX and was imprisoned for a time after his side lost.

In general, Eric's texts represent a sensibility and moderation which I find quite sympathetic. But one recurring feature which makes me groan is Eric's tendency (doubtlessly hardly unique to him) to regard sickness and worldly calamity as a punishment for sin:

We learn of the many ways in which God punished sins in this world. And in addition to the many punishments that are dealt out to Man, such as many diseases, Wars, frozen harvests and famines, fires, the plague and many others, he punishes also through Leprosy. As the fifth book of Moses mentions, where God threatens to punish all those that will not obey him, with all kinds of punishments. And this disease called Leprosy is one particular kind of punishment which God inflicts on people, as we see from many examples from both the Old and New Testament. (II, p. 393).

At another point Eric agrees with Hieronymous on that people who show charity and mercy will die a pleasant death:

For this, they will pray for those that have shown works of charity to them, that God will grant them a good end in this world and their reward in heaven. And indeed, their prayers are not in vain. As the old Teacher of the Church, Hieronymous, says: Non memini me legisse, mala more eum periisse, qui liberalitatem exercuit erga egenos & pauperes. This means: I do not remember having read anywhere that someone who has shown charity to the poor and needy has died a terrible death.

To be a bit snarky, I do remember of having read of one such case. A figure rather central, if you will, to Christianity.

But I should be more nuanced. As a Christian, I do hold that God reveals Himself in human history, that he works in and through the historical events that concern us people. At the same time, I believe those workings are only understandable in particular, concrete cases. And I cannot assent to elevating God's work to some kind of law-like regularity, in which the sinful are punished in this world, and the righteous rewarded in this world - even by a comfortable death. The world, with all its cruelties, in which the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer, in which the powerful do as they want and the powerless suffer as they must, seems to mock any such picture.

I've written before on the argument from Evil. I myself moved to theism mainly through contemplating some apologetic or near-apologetic philosophical arguments, and I still believe some of them may be valid. The irony is that I also believe the anti-theistic argument from Evil to be valid, but that it is precisely its validity which lends Christianity its strength as a worldview. In other worlds, the radical disconnect between the world as-it-is and the world-as-it-should-be, between the "here" and the "there", our intimation of the eternal and the divine and our consciousness of our own impending death and suffering, is precisely what lies at the root of prophetic religion such as Christianity is. The Cross and the Resurrection are answers to the argument from Evil, but answers which proceed from the essential validity of the argument: that there is a radical disconnect between the creation we see and the creation that God saw and called good. Therefore, I think any philosophical solution not referring to the gospel and its central events tends to conflict with Christianity - as Christianity proceeds from granting the argument part of its strength and saying that precisely because of the existence of Evil we believe in God, and the Cross, and the resurrection, as a sign of hope, as an answer to the evils of this world.

In other words, the reply to the argument from Evil would need to be narrative, or dialectical, in nature, rather than philosophical or logical. It does not "explain" Evil by subsuming and defusing it into some kind of philosophical order but by granting it its place in a story - the end of which is still to come.

Crucial for this is that the existence of evil as such, the suffering of the innocents and righteous, is fully recognized. Seeing sickness and terror as some kind of cosmic justice, as bishop Eric seems to have done, draws out the carpet from under the story. If the wicked are punished, and the righteous are rewarded in this world - then what of the next? Where lies hope for the poor, the hungry, the meek? Eric's notion draws out the eschatological "sting" from the Christian narrative - the hope for the Kingdom of God at the end of history - in a manner which I find almost paganistic.

And, of course, the logic is especially dangerous when inverted: why are the poor and the sick suffering? Surely they must have done something wrong. This argument, of course, is up-ended in the book of Job.

Now, I am in a troubled spot here. I affirmed before that I do believe in a God who is working in this world and at the same time I affirm that there is evil in the world which cannot be regarded as a consequence of God's works. In other words, I have exposed myself to the full bite of the anti-theistic argument from Evil. And the logic in bishop Eric's statements, as that of Job's three friends who come to console him but cannot imagine he did not, in some way, deserve his suffering is present in the Bible (as mentioned by Wonders for Oyarsa in his excellent posts on Job).

Also, I do not yet comprehend the book of Job wholly. To be sure, I understand why Job's consolers are wrong. But I do not yet quite comprehend the force of God's answer to Job. What does God mean when answering Job from the whirlwind, elaborating on the wonders and the vastness of His creation? How does this answer satisfy Job - as it obviously does?

Of course, following the storyline, we know why Job suffered: God delivered him to Satan in order to test the strength of his faith in adversity. But this is not what God answers to Job while speaking in the whirlwind. Was God being dishonest? Yet Job seems very satisfied with the answer he receives:

My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. (42:5)

So the writer of Job is making a deeper point here. But one that is somehow still obscure to me.

One obvious interpretation is, of course, that God's sardonic challenging of Job - Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? is just that: Job should not endeavour to know precisely why God does what He does - God is transcendent, and works in ways beyond Job's imagining. Evil, and suffering, and the suffering of innocents exist - but we should not challenge God to justify His ways before us. There is an anti-rationalistic streak in this interpretation that I find quite attractive.

Yet Job, in his response to God, does not act like someone who has just been put into place, but as someone who has gained a great insight:

My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. (42:5)

In his paper on Job, Wes Morriston dubs the above reasoning the "standard interpretation" of God's answer, and argues that either there must be hidden but good reasons for Job to be treated as he is (but the whole point of the story is that there are none), or God's justice (if God is indeed just) is a justice very far removed from and irrecognizable from our notions of justice.

Morriston works out the consequences of the second possible answer:

Whatever Job may have had in mind in chapter nineteen, the fact remains that the God who speaks out of the whirlwind in chapter thirty-eight to forty-one does not promise to raise Job from the dead, and does not offer him any assurances about the future. Instead, God changes the subject, forcing Job to step outside himself, and to see the world from a perspective that wholly transcends the normal human way of looking at things. What Job sees when he listens to God is a world of elemental forces, inhabited by creatures who eat one another. It is a world of terrifying beauty. It is not, or at least not obviously, a Moral Order.

He then turns to the interpretation of Stephen Mitchell in the introduction to his translation of the book of Job (which can be read here). Mitchell regards the answer from the whirlwind as allowing Job to share into a series of visions of creation from God's viewpoint - a viewpoint that stands beyond good and evil:

The content of the Voice’s questions, aside from their rhetorical form, gives another kind of answer. Each verse presents Job with an image so intense that, as Job later acknowledges, he doesn’t hear but sees the Voice. He is taken up into a state of vision, and enters a world of primal energy, independent of human beings, which includes what humans might experience as terrifying or evil: lightning, the primordial sea, hungry lions on the prowl, the ferocious war-horse, the vulture feeding his young with the rotting flesh of the slain. Violence, deprivation, or death form the context for many of these pictures, and the animals are to them as figure is to ground. The horse exults because of the battle; without the corpses, the vulture couldn't exist in his grisly solicitude. We are among the most elemental realities, at the center of which there is an indestructible power, an indestructible joy.

(...)

The Voice, however, doesn’t moralize. It has the clarity, the pitilessness, of nature and of all great art. Is the world of flesh-eaters a demonic parody of God’s intent? And what about our compassion for the prey? Projecting our civilized feelings onto the antelope torn apart by lions, we see mere horror: nature red in tooth and claw. But animals aren’t victims, and don’t feel sorry for themselves. The lioness springs without malice; the torn antelope suffers and lets go; each plays its role in the sacred game.

This is a disturbing interpretation. Mitchell emphasizes the disturbing nature of it by arguing it is actually a vision of paradise:

What the Voice means is that paradise isn’t situated in the past or future, and doesn’t require a world tamed or edited by the moral sense. It is our world, when we perceive it clearly, without eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is an experience of the Sabbath vision: looking at reality, the world of starving children and nuclear menace, and recognizing that it is very good.

According to Mitchell, the vision provides Job with a kind of liberating self-obliteration: by sharing in the terrifically beautiful viewpoint of creation (and all its apparent cruelties) that God provides him, he steps outside himself and recognizes the futility of his own personal pain and suffering.

Morriston finds Mitchell's vision compelling, but at the same time regards Mitchell's vision of Job's God as wholly transcending moral categories - as 'just' only in a way that it utterly beyond our comprehension - as deeply problematic and incompatible with a large part of the scriptural tradition within which the book of Job is placed. In the end, Morriston regards the book of Job as inherently paradoxical: at the same time, the book of Job presents a wholly transcendent, wholly other God to whom our categories of good and evil, of justice and injustice, simply do not apply; on the other end, a God who takes a deep and personal interest in his creature Job:

The Hasidic teacher, Rabbi Bunam, said that 'A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, "I am but dust and ashes." On the other, "For my sake was the world created." And he should use each stone as he needs it.'41 The experience of the Whirlwind has taught Job to use the first stone. But what we need, and what the book of Job tries, with only partial success, to teach us, is how to use them both together.

One could regard the Christian framework - in which God became man, was crucified, and resurrected - as a kind of dialectic in which the two poles of the paradox are reconciled: Job conquered his suffering by placing himself within - annihilating his selfhood into - an all-encompassing vision of creation with all its beauty and cruelty, but this vision seems to not allow for the God of justice and mercy that we find in the prophets (and who is, implicitly, present throughout the book of Job as well). The paradox is resolved when God himself takes on a human nature, suffers and dies on the cross and thereby conquers suffering and death - by undergoing it, facing it and looking through it as it were: the transcendent God of Job hereby shows Himself to be an immanent God as well, one willing to take our sins upon himself - that is, our alienation, our awareness of pain and suffering and the pointlessness of it all that Mitchell regards as the consequence of eating from the fruit of the tree - by suffering the worst that the world could throw at him, and emerging at the end of it.

In other words: where Job was allowed to view the world, for a while, from God's point of view, the "chasm" between us and God, the result of eating the fruit of the tree, was bridged for a while. But the Edenic viewpoint Job was granted had little place for post-Edenic human notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Christ, however, unites the two viewpoints in a single person.

I'm not too happy about this particular line of thought, however. I'm allright with the identification of Job and Christ - in some fashion (for another approach, see Wonders for Oyarsa) but I think it does no justice to the voice in the whirlwind. On Mitchell's interpretation, the voice in the whirlwind does not provide us with the kind of eschatological hope central to the Gospels. Briefly, Job found his liberation through losing himself into the grand vision of God's creation; the Christian narrative grants us a possibility of redemption from sin and a resurrection at the end of history.

Taking Mitchell's interpretation at face value, we are dealing here with two incompatible answers to the problem of Evil. In the first one, Evil is essentially denied; in the second one, it is conquered and defeated. The first one allows us to reject thinking of disease and misfortune and some such as punishment from God - but at the cost of denying the existence of Evil (from God's perspective) and affirming an image of God that is frightfully transcendent and alien. The second answer, the Christian narrative basically, is based on the problem of Evil in the sense that the paradox of the world - that of a good God and a suffering, sin-laden creation - is essential to its own framework.

So for the moment, I must stick to some kind of anti-rationalistic "standard" interpretation of the book of Job. We should not ask God to justify himself before us: He owes us nothing. At the same time I need to meditate a little more on Mitchell's interpretation. It is profoundly disturbing - but I am very fond of disturbing thoughts.

Twenty seconds

2008-09-19T12:47:00.000-07:00

Lately my thoughts have turned to such cheerful things as the severed heads of eels, still reflexively snapping. Beheaded chickens running into whatever direction they were running. The rumours that when one is decapitated, consciousness is not lost immediately - you remain aware for twenty seconds or so. Twenty seconds - a disquietingly long time.

Andre Brink's description, in An Act of Terror of crayfish, their bodies crushed, helplessly crawling around in their basin. And through that very futile action it curiously defies death. There is a melancholy inertia to life. When the lights finally go out in my particular case, my cells will continue to go about their business for a little while, not knowing I am dead. I have even read somewhere that the brain keeps on aimlessly shooting about neurons for a while - days, even. Death is a process, not an event.

Systems die too. And ideologies die. And for a while the outward workings, the rituals and symbols, keep going on but the spirit is dead.

The past few days, I have been alternatively convinced that market liberalism was dying and that market liberalism joined Communism and Christianity in the group of ideologies that have not to much failed but never been tried. There is the panicked behaviour of governments - or not so much governments which have been all but absent these past days but government bureaucracies which behave with an inconsistency and a substitution of strategy for immediate survival tactics which bespeaks the absence of any ideology. Reminiscent a bit of maybe Guenter Schabowski, the hapless East German functionary misspeaking on the television news and accidentally causing the downfall of the Berlin Wall. Leadership departed and gone, at the helm a fumbling bureaucrat who lost his rulebook and makes it up as he goes along.

Because that's what happening, isn't it? The ship of fools constantly being patched, jerry-rigged, held together by new threads which fall apart as soon as they are put into place - but the truth is, only the shell of an economic system is left. Only the inertia, the reflexive movements. The spirit has departed. I know a dangerous little about economics. But just enough to see that this isn't capitalism, this isn't markets sorting themselves out however painful the process may be. Rather, there is something of a pretense of a market being kept functioning - or pretending to function - by massive government intervention. (And I know just enough to understand that simply printing money and throwing it at the problem isn't a long-term solution, nor is forbidding investors to bet on stocks going down. Just enough to get a quaint sinking feeling).

I wonder where we're heading. In the end, all the big economic systems - feudalism, the various stages of capitalism, Soviet-style socialism, Western European social democracy - are just various ways of constraining and organizing exploitation and rapacity. So I guess is when the system fails, you end up with a rather less constrained and less organized form of exploitation and rapacity.

We'll see. This is going to be an interesting winter.

Something more cheerful...

2008-09-11T17:00:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do with any kind of religious point to be sure, but Tom Waits' God's away on business is in my head a lot these days. The lyrics have this nice uplifting pre-apocalyptic ring to them:

I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby
For a buck, for a buck
If you're looking for someone
To pull you out of that ditch
You're out of luck, you're out of luck
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
There's leak, there's leak,
In the boiler room
The poor, the lame, the blind
Who are the ones that we kept in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers...

And the video clip is way cool:

An internal exile reads MacIntyre's After Virtue

2008-09-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

I've politically described myself as a 'conservative anarchist', which does not make much sense, but makes more sense than just about anything else. I don't feel much at home with left-wing anarchism because it remains focused on direct democracy, egalitarianism, etc. - replicating the utopia of Marxism. And I'm not sure anymore whether democracy is the superior system it is so often thought to be. Or whether people are really equal. I don't feel at home with most right-wing individualist versions of anarchism either. Or libertarianism, or paleoconservatism. Because of the uncritical attitude towards capitalist rapacity, and the notion of the individual and its liberties as the atomic cornerstone of society. I remain too much of an ex-Marxist not to acknowledge that even if individuals may transcend society, they are at the same time constituted by society, social traditions, norms and ideologies. Then there's the national-anarchists, who are right in both rejecting capitalism and recognizing that people are unlikely to voluntarily enter an egalitarian, communist brotherhood of man. It's just that the Neo-Nazistic roots, including blood-and-soil mysticism and antisemitism, are sometimes still showing.

I'm also far from juvenile slogans about "No God, No Master!" There is a God, and there will be masters, too - some perhaps even worthy of service. At the same time, I believe that the modern national state is no longer a serviceable vehicle for human civilization - if it ever really was. The national state is dead - it just doesn't know it yet. Hollowed out by the disintegrative, commodifying forces of capitalism just like the family, the village, and any other civilizing institution (the Church may be a partial exception, but looking from the most secularized country in Europe, a very partial one). And no coherent political alternative to current political conditions can be formulated within the framework of the national state. We need to move on - perhaps by looking back to older forms of social organization. So 'conservative anarchist' is what it'll be.

I've been reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: a study in moral theory. (Notre Dame 1981). It's a persuasive and very disturbing look at ethical discourse in modern society, and at modern society through the prism of ethical discourse. In a (doubtlessly very inadequate) nutshell: MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project to find a absolute, universal standard for morality - whether it is in deontological ethics such as Kant's categorical imperative, or in utilitarian formulations of ethics - has utterly failed. The result is an incoherence in modern discourse about ethics - we retain fragments of the moral systems of earlier times, but no way to integrate them - and the rise of viewpoints such as "emotivism" in the 20th century, which regarded ethical discourse as basically emotional in nature: an ethical judgement no different, so to say, than a preference for a particular kind of food. MacIntyre connects the latter with the nature of human relationships in modern-day management capitalism: instead of basing human intercourse on rational argument, we see manipulation of human beings as so much more means to an end on a massive scale (to MacIntyre, the bureaucrat and the manager are iconical characters of the modern age).

In MacIntyre's view, the failure of the Enlightenment project in ethics faces us with a stark choice: accept the moral nihilism of a Nietzsche or go back to a teleological, virtue-based morality of Aristotle. MacIntyre rejects the first alternative, and argues instead for a teleological view on morality in which the concept of 'virtue' embodied in practices, traditions and historically local social and cultural groups is paramount (rather than the concept of a universal and abstract 'rule'). So, the basis of ethics is the self-actualization of a human being as-he-should-be, the development of the human being towards a specific goal: but this requires the integrity and coherence of the human life as a 'narrative structure' (a story, with a 'where do we come from' and a 'where are we going?' so to speak) as well as the integration of that human life within the life of a tradition, a historical community acting as the vessel of basic values and ideals. MacIntyre thus defends the local nature of morality and 'virtue', and their rootedness in the life of a community (for Aristotle, the Hellenic polis), yet this does not imply moral relativism, as it does not imply that there is no basis for a dialogue between traditions and the rejection of one conception of virtues to the other (just the absence of a disembodied rule-based morality).

There is a lot to say about MacIntyre's book (and a lot more for me to think, too). MacIntyre is, as I understand, a Roman Catholic with Marxist roots, and the book is aside from a essay on ethics a trenchant criticism of liberalism which is not afraid of being conservative without being backward-looking. But at the same time, its conclusion is unremittingly bleak.

Some fairly disconnected fragments and comments:

Before MacIntyre deals with Aristotle, he treats virtue as it appeared in 'heroic societies': the kind of society that survives in epics such as Homer's Iliad and the Icelandic sagas. Specific to heroic societies, according to MacIntyre, is a lack of alienation as it were: there is no way for the individual in society to 'step outside' its role and the ethical precepts and obligations which that role brings with it, which allows MacIntyre to make a contrast between the very close connection to the self and a role (with accompanying ethical precepts and ideals) in heroic society and modern-day pluralism, and thus between a local, tradition-bound virtue ethics and the failed Enlightenment project of socially and culturally disembodied universal morality:

There is thus the sharpest of contrasts between the emotivist self of modernity and the self of the heroic age. The self of the heroic age lacks precisely that characteristic which we have already seen that some modern moral philosophers take to be an essential characteristic of human selfhood: the capacity to detach oneself from any particular standpoint or point of view from the outside. In heroic society there is no 'outside' except that of the stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear.
Identity in heroic society involves particularity and accountability. I am answerable for doing or failing to do what anyone who occupies my role owes to others and this accountability terminates only with death. I have until my death to do what I have to do. Moreover this accountability is particular. It is to, for and with specific individuals what I must do what I ought, and it is to these same and other individuals, members of the same local community, that I am accountable. The heroic self does not itself aspire to universality even although in retrospect we may recognize universal worth in the achievements of that self.
(...) Nobody now can be a Hector or a Gisli. The answer is that perhaps what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first place.
(p. 118-119).

MacIntyre explores the problem of conflicting moral claims in Greek Tragedy, and argues that the presentation of this conflict in Sophocles' tragedies is of a very different nature than the presentation of moral heterogeneity in modern society by for example Karl Weber and Isaiah Berlin, in that the protagonist of Greek Tragedy had no way to step 'out' of his role and had no choice but to acknowledge the validity of both claims. There is thus no way of viewing the heterogeneity of virtues as somehow 'relativizing' them or seeing them as being neither true or false:

The interest of a Sophocles lies in his presentation of a view equally difficult for a Platonist or a Weberian to accept. There are indeed crucial conflicts in which different virtues appear as making rival and incompatible claims upon us. But our situation is tragic in that we have to recognise the authority of both claims. There is an objective moral order, but our perceptions of it are such that we cannot bring rival moral truths into complete harmony with each other and yet the acknowledgement of the moral order and of moral truth makes the kind of choice which a Weber or a Berlin urges upon us out of the question. For to choose does not exempt me from the authority of the claim which I chose to go against.
(...) the moral protagonist stands in a relationship to his community and his social roles which is neither the same as that of the epic hero nor again the same as that of modern individualism. For like the epic hero the Sophoclean protagonist would be nothing without his or her place in the social order, in the family, the city, the army at Troy. He is she is what society takes him to be. But he or she is not only what society takes him or her to be: he or she both belongs to a place in the social order and transcends it. And he or she does so precisely by encountering and acknowledging the kind of conflict which I have just identified.
(p. 134)

This subtle and dialectical formulation of the relationship between society and the individual enables MacIntyre, I believe, to assert the localness and rootedness of virtue traditions without moral relativism: moral relativism implies we take a vantage point which we in reality cannot take. We can transcend society in that we can recognize the validity of rivalling moral claims; yet we cannot place ourselves out of society as individuals whose life is a 'narrative structure' which is rooted the social transmission of ethical traditions. The consequence of this is that the good may be something which in practice is unattainable to us: yet the moral obligation remains. In other words, that we may not be able to do something doesn't mean we shouldn't:

One way in which the choice between rival goods in a tragic situation differs from the modern choice between incommensurable moral premises is that both of the alternative courses of action which confront the individual have to be recognised as leading to some authentic and substantial good. By choosing one I do nothing to diminish or derogate from the claims upon me of the other; and therefore, whatever I do, I shall have left undone what I ought to have done. The tragic protagonist, unlike the moral agent as depicted by Sartre or Hare, is not choosing between allegiance to one moral principle rather than another, nor is he or she deciding upon some principle of priority between moral principles. Hence the 'ought' involved has a different meaning and force from that of the 'ought' in moral principles understood in a modern way. For the tragic protagonist cannot do everything that he or she ought to do. This 'ought', unlike Kant's, does not imply 'can'.
(p. 208)

The same recognition of genuine conflict is implicit in the harsh way MacIntyre, through Aristotle's eyes, sees a conflict between patriotism and friendship as put forward by E.M. Forster:

Friendship, of course, on Aristotle's view, involves affection. But that affection arises within a relationship defined in terms of a common allegiance and to a common pursuit of goods. The affection is secondary, which is not in the least to say unimportant. In a modern perspective affection is often the central issue: our friends are said to be those whom we like, perhaps whom we like very much. 'Friendship' has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than a type of social and political relationship. E.M. Forster once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. In an Aristotelian perspective anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis; he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives. Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They possess at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage. That they lack the bond of friendship is of couse bound up with the self-avowed moral pluralism of such liberal societies. They have abandoned the moral unity of Aristotelianism, whether in its ancient or medieval forms.
(p. 146-147)

These are hard words, and MacIntyre's emphasis on the rootedness of morality in a historically local society - the Greek city-state in Aristoteles' case - has severe consequences for the survival of virtues in the modern liberal pluralistic society. Hence patriotism as a virtue becomes increasingly questionable:

In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of its citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratised unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes increasingly unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristically exercised in discharging responsibility to and in such government. When however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in the society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism. Loyalty to my country, to my community - which remains unalterably a central virtue - becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.
(p. 236-237).

Earlier MacIntyre has a sharp characterization of political disagreement in modern society: (...) modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means (...) (p. 236). MacIntyre distances himself from anarchism, but his rejection of the modern state seems nonetheless radical:

(...) this necessary distancing of the moral self from the governments of moral states must not be confused with any anarchist critique of the state. Nothing in my argument suggests, let alone implies, any good grounds for rejecting certain forms of government as necessary and legitimate; what the argument does entail is that the modern state is not such a form of government. It must have been clear from earlier parts of my argument that the tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features of the modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of the market to a central social place. It now becomes clear that it also involves a rejection of the modern political order. This does not mean that there are not many tasks only to be performed in and through government which still require performing: the rule of law, so far as it is possible in a modern state, has to be vindicated, injustice and unwarranted suffering have to be dealt with, generosity has to be exercised, and liberty has to be defended, in ways that are sometimes only possible through the use of governmental institutions. But each particular task, each particular responsibility has to be evaluated on its own merits. Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.

This is radical stuff - in as far as MacIntyre is a kind of paleoconservative (and I think it is arguable that he is), he is a paleo-paleo-paleoconservative, and he chides modern-day conservatives for rejecting parts of modernity, liberalism, and the social disintegration wrought by the omnipresent market; but remaining faithfully committed to the market economics that has produced modern liberalism:

The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke's own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the doctrine and institutions of the free market. The theoretical incoherence of this mismatch did not deprive it of ideological usefulness. But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.
(p. 207)

Though MacIntyre has some warm words for certain Marxists, in particular Trotsky, he firmly rejects Marxism as a political alternative to liberal individualism as well:

Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thorough-going its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Uebermensch: Lukacs' ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky's cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies.
(p. 244)

I do not share MacIntyre's positive valuation of Trotsky on this count. Though MacIntyre is right in praising Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism (The Revolution Betrayed, 1937), I am not at all sure Trotsky ever departed from the 'Nietzschean fantasy' inherent in Leninism's emphasis on the revolutionary vanguard with its correct and 'revolutionary' consciousness, etc. Indeed the Trotskyists have always claimed to be the rightful inheritors of the Leninist tradition and as far as I can see, they are correct to do so.

MacIntyre ends his work with a gloomy and disquieting look to the future:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognising fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
(p. 244-245)

MacIntyre published those lines in 1981, at a time when the Cold War was on its last leg, a wave of neo-liberalism was to set in in the United States and Britain, but at the same time leftist ideology seemed still in fairly good shape and multiculturalism as a political ideal was just being articulated. Now multiculturalism, at least in Western Europe, is something of an expletive: an acknowledgement that there are competing and incommensurable moral systems living side-by-side and that liberal individualism as an ideological basis for the modern state is simply incapable of integrating those systems is setting in. In that sense, MacIntyre was pretty far-sighted.

As I understand, MacIntyre converted to Catholicism not long after the publication of After Virtue. This arouses my curiosity as the Catholic Church has perhaps at least partially constituted a bastion against modernity - never quite accepting the Enlightenment and the concomitant 'dehellenization' (to use Benedict XVI's term) in the sciences and religion, and never accepting modern capitalism and its elevation of greed as a founding principle of society either. I earlier briefly mentioned the disintegrating effects of capitalism on society: the alienation between the worker and its work (currently, now that 'flexibility' is such a buzzword, involving even the dissolution of the long tradition of one person having more or less one trade or profession exercised at more or less one place; capitalism has turned the workforce into professional nomads); the commodification of everything - of art, of sexuality, of religion, and even of political radicalism; the slow but certain dissolution of national states (in Europe, through their incorporation into a faceless and bureaucratic entity named the European Union); the dissolution of the family - I could go on. Marx held capitalism to be a revolutionary force and for good reason. He may have been wrong to have held that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, of its transcendence by a superior socialist order. And if he was wrong, and if MacIntyre's right, capitalism is a force of mere destruction, a 'revolutionary' force that should make us all embittered counterrevolutionaries.

Religious traditions have hardly been immune to co-optation, through the acceptance of religious pluralism, the spread of New Age and other fad religions, etc. The great Protestant churches in Europe stand empty or cling to a dwindling local base such as the surviving reformed communities in the Netherlands. The Evangelical movements in contrast seem to be brimming with life. Though at least some of those movements have embraced modernism and especially capitalism a bit too enthusiastically (I am thinking, in particular, of the hideous 'God likes me, so I have a lot of money' monstrosities of prosperity theology). Though I think there is some kind of genuine vitality among Evangelicals, and also signs of some loss of attachment to the American Christian right. And the Catholic Church exists tenaciously on, almost as if to mock the modern world...

I wonder how the Christian tradition will develop and will survive the 'dark ages' which I agree with MacIntyre are upon us. And especially how the two strains that seemed to have steered clear of theological liberalism best (the Catholic Church and the Evangelicals) will do.

As to the larger political scene, some kind of alliance between the erstwhile political Left and elements of the political Right has developed over the last decade or so, specifically between the anti-globalist and anti-interventionist left and the paleoconservative (to a lesser extent libertarian) strains of the right. I am interested to see at least some elements of this same hybridity in MacIntyre's work: an uncompromising critique of modern capitalism (by implication also involving globalism, imperialism, etc.) coupled with a rejection of some key Enlightenment notions and a revaluation of tradition as the necessary vessel of ethics, virtue and civilization (counterposed to the traditional Left/Enlightenment ideal of progress). In that sense too MacIntyre's book is quite appropriate for times like these.

The Glory of the Useless

2008-09-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

So the Large Hadron Collider has been turned on, slowly powering itself up and zapping its particles through kilometres of gigantic tubes. A scare video can be found here.

What really gets my goat is the whining at the end of the experiments not offering any "concrete practical benefit".

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, some pointy-headed scientists began to ponder on some problems concerning energy and radiation of very tiny particles. Bit by bit, they came up with Quantum theory - something so outlandish that physicists themselves (who are quite a speculative bunch, I think) still don't quite know what to make of it. But the important thing is, it works.

It works so well, in fact, that Quantum theory has led to the development of stuff like lasers. And lasers have, aside from cool science-fiction weaponry, led to nifty things like the DVD. Which has led to wonderful new things such as the enormous variety of, er... nature documentaries you can find on DVD.

I still have a hard time figuring out how a television actually works. Something in me still believes that tiny little guys and letters wring themselves through the cable to put on a show behind the screen. Which is why I can't really fathom wireless internet. Where do the pictures come from? But it works. And it's quite amazing. A whole film on this tiny, shiny circular piece of metal.

Of course, had anyone asked Max Planck or Niels Bohr about the practical benefits of whatever they were thought to be working at at the time, they'd probably just have scowled - but they wouldn't have come up with something like the DVD player. Back then, people still believed that by this time, we would be moving between skyscrapers in flying horse-carts, or conquer the galaxy with gigantic zeppelins. What they wouldn't expect is that we would lock ourselves up in our apartments eating take-away pizza and watching films on personalized cinema's in a box.

And even if they had known, it still wouldn't have mattered. Quantum theory would be worth is just for the sake of the theory itself. For the sake of knowing. For the heck of it.

There are so many ways we can approach the mysteries of the universe. We can look upon it as a puzzle, to be uncovered, as the scientists do. Or as a story spoken to us in an unknown language, as the philosophers and the poets do. And all of these speak to a vital need of humanity. People who would disparage the uselessness of scientific experiments would perhaps be more hesitant to speak of the uselessness of a Shakespeare, or a Rembrandt - but what concrete use has art ever brought the world? And it comes down to the same thing. Without an insatiable curiosity for the world without us, or the world within us, we would be less than human.

Sometimes this deadening utilitarianism comes from unexpected corners. Take one Richard Dawkins who for reasons increasingly unclear to me holds something called the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science:

What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work! The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all?

When I was studying in Finland many years back, a friend of mine would often raise a self-coined derogative, ääliöpragmatismi, or "idiot pragmatism". I don't know if something like Dawkins' statement above was what he meant, but I think it well might, and "idiot utilitarianism" (in order to not associate the great Charles Peirce with this line of thinking, see below) would do quite well.

Of course, it is obviously false. Regardless of one's attitude towards religion, it does affect individuals and communities in an efficacious manner - it "works", for good or bad. And a very big part of theology is precisely concerned with how and why it "works". Aside from this, I am not sure how my own field of study - philology - would be doing without the methods of textual criticism developed in theology (especially protestant theology). Hermeneutics, the art of interpreting text (and by extension culture) which forms the central methodological foundation in the humanities, was developed largely through the theological preoccupation with Scripture. And this doesn't even begin to touch the points of contact between theology and philosophy in a more general sense such as existed in the Middle Ages and the Rennaissance, and continues to exist (Ernst Bloch's work on eschatology from a Marxist perspective, for example. Or Alasdair MacIntyre's work on Thomistic perspectives on ethics).

The thing is, I would have no doubt that the Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science would not hesitate to proclaim such disciplines as philology, linguistics, and philosophy equally useless. Or at least his more enthusiastic disciples. Human progress reduced to scientific progress, reduced to technical progress, reduced to a greater abundance of... stuff. A sad comment on the spirit of our age.

And likewise, even to ask the question of utility is to fall into philistinism. Because regardless of the benefits that science and art can bring, may bring, the question of utility should never guide scientific research itself. It is never about those benefits. It's always about the puzzle, or riddle, or the story, or however one puts the big question that the universe and our own place within it seems to pose. It's always about Truth, with a capital T.

I often find myself returning to Peirce. A singularly useless individual, never held down a steady job for very long or cared very much for the conventions of his time, who through his stubborn dedication to studying useless things for the heck of it, to thinking for the heck of it, broke new ground in metaphysics, semiotics, epistemology, and incidentally theology as well. And as the vast majority of his papers, as I understand, have not been even published, I suspect the true import of Peirce's works in semiotics and linguistics has yet to materialize.

Peirce had no time for "idiot utilitarianism" in the sciences:

The old-fashioned political economist adored, as alone capable of redeeming the human race, the glorious principle of individual greed, although, as this principle requires for its action hypocrisy and fraud, he generally threw in some dash of inconsistent concessions to virtue, as a sop to the vulgar Cerberus. But it is easy to see that the only kind of science this principle would favor would be such as is immediately remunerative with a great preference for such as can be kept secret, like the modern sciences of dyeing and perfumery. Kepler's discovery rendered Newton possible, and Newton rendered modern physics possible, with the steam engine, electricity, and all the other sources of the stupendous fortunes of our age. But Kepler's discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of Kepler — such penetrating minds as Descartes and Pascal — were abandoning the study of geometry (in which they included what we now call the differential calculus, so far as that had at that time any existence) because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the human race almost trembling in the balance; for had not the geometry of conic sections already been worked out in large measure, and had their opinion that only sciences apparently useful ought to be pursued, [prevailed] the nineteenth century would have had none of those characters which distinguish it from the ancien régime.

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.
(Collected Papers 1: 75-76)

The End of the World. Wednesday, That Is.

2008-09-08T14:00:00.001-07:00

Or perhaps not.

That's when the Large Hadron Collider comes on-line. Don't ask me how it works. Though the idea to smash elementary particles together at virtually the speed of light just to see what happens when you do that sounds interesting enough.

Some worry it might mean the end of the world, though.

Apparently, it's been argued that there is a tiny change that the experiment will create a miniature black hole, which will then proceed to gobble up the earth while it turns into a very voracious not-so-miniature black hole. Concerns have been dismissed, though, as Stephen Hawking's theories suggest miniature black holes should quickly evaporate.

There's the parts that I don't like so much though. Phrases such as "According to standard calculations...", "The consensus of the scientific community suggests...", and so on. I'm aware that the existence of black holes has been convincingly demonstrated, that we've indirectly observed them through watching stars being ripped apart, seeing tendrils of gas sucked into their, well, blackness, and so on. Yet the idea of a singularity, an infinitesmal point with infinite mass, sounds so cosmically obscene to me that I cannot wholly trust it. A small voice inside me suggests that if theory comes up with monsters like this, perhaps theory should be reconsidered.

Yet, I'm convinced that if any serious fraction of the scientific world were genuinely concerned that there was any practical chance that LHC would lead to Armaggedon, they'd be all over Discovery Channel describing said Armaggedon in glorious detail. Look at all the programs about dinosaur-class meteorites lurking in the interplanetary junkyard waiting to take us out, about supervolcanoes belching ominously underneath Yellowstone, etc. etc.

There's few groups in society so hyper-aware of possible Apocalypse scenarios than natural scientists themselves. I recall that when the hydrogen bomb was going to be tested, Edward Teller, hardly a chicken little, was seriously concerned that it would ignite the whole atmosphere.

Then again, they tested the thing anyway. That gives me pause.

We'll see Wednesday, I guess. I wonder what would happen if they inadvertantly create a stable black hole. I guess there'd be titanic earthquakes as the world slowly falls into itself, oceans boiling, the ground turning to jelly and some such unpleasantness. But I wonder how long it would take. Would it be a matter of minutes? Months? Or would we have years before the earth becomes uninhabitable?

One of my favourite SF-novels, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, involves precisely such a scenario: in the far future, Earth has been destroyed by a LHC-like experiment gone wrong and a mini black hole wolfing down the insides of the earth, precipitating humanity's flight to the stars. Thing is, we don't have the spaceflight technology that Dan Simmons expected we would have around now, or in the near future around now. If this one goes bad, we have nowhere to turn to. We're stuck. On a literally crumbling planet awaiting the inevitable spaghettification. Save some friendly alien species organizing a mass evac. And it'd be a rather embarrassing way of entering the League of Space-Faring nations.

Come to think of it, didn't Asimov's Foundation Trilogy feature black hole ashtrays? Or my memory may be playing tricks on me. Makes me think though, my room at uni could do with a stable mini black hole waste disposal unit. Just goes to show, the natural scientists may come up with gargantuan machines smashing elementary particles at near-luminous speeds just to see what comes out, but it takes muddle-headed humanities figures like me to find some actual utility for them.

UPDATE: So, they're going to turn the doomsday switch at 9:30 AM, European time. That's another reason why I view my colleagues at the physics department with suspicion: their tendency to deploy activities at ungodly hours in the morning. The owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk, as Hegel wrote, and I cannot but agree: I'm at my most productive in the afternoon and early evening. But 9:30 is in the middle of the dreamtime for me, and even a black hole crashing through the centre of the earth isn't likely to wake me up.

I guess that would be in character, though, dying in the harness so to speak: oversleeping for the end of the world.

There was thunder
There was lightning
Then the stars went out
And the moon fell from the sky
It rained mackerel
It rained trout
And the great day of wrath has come
And here's mud in your big red eye
The poker's in the fire
And the locusts take the sky
And the earth died screaming
While I lay dreaming
Dreaming of you...
Tom Waits, "Earth Died Screaming"

Theological post-it notes. Or the love-story of the universe.

2008-09-06T15:27:00.000-07:00

The below is an attempt to articulate for myself where I currently am, theologically; which is somewhere quite different than I was a year or two years ago. The theme is pretty similar to the preceding post, but hopefully less rambling and more systematic. Part of it is pretty much consolidated, in other parts I am still grasping at something I cannot yet quite articulate.

A side-note: I'm amused to find that I'm still decisively influenced by Whitehead and Hartshorne, but not so much anymore by their philosophy of God: I pretty much repudiate the primordial/consequent distinction as they put it. But more in the non-overt import they assign to creativity, novelty, as a central feature of the universe. And while I was re-reading the below, it struck me that what Whitehead regarded as the telos of the universe and named 'beauty', namely, (...) the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience which involves that: the subjective forms of these prehensions are severally and jointly intervowen in patterned contrast (Adventures of Ideas p. 324-325); alternatively that All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity (Process and Reality p. 396) pretty much conforms to the somewhat-Hegelian notion of love which I am grasping towards: the free self-determination of 'Others' yet united, emptying themselves into the other and determining themselves 'through the eyes of another'. Without gobbledygook: love is the self-giving, self-emptying which adds, rather than destroys, one's individuality.

And it is the secret to existence, to "what is", and the nature of he-who-is. The telos of the universe. This is a new thought for me, and one I still need to chew on.

METHOD

Science cannot be in a conflict with revealed truth of religion. Science deals with the general, external, quantifiable aspects of reality; where revelation deals with the particular, irreducibly individual aspects. ”The heavens proclaim the glory of God”, and the scientists chart the heavens, but to see the glory of God in them is a function of personal revelation; a gift of the Holy Spirit.

The kind of truth (natural) science deals with is likewise general, abstract and in a way ultimately circular: for a correspondence between a proposition and reality to become intersubjectively verifiable, falsifiable or even communicable, it has to be to a degree abstract and then will become part of a more or less coherent system based on certain basic propositions, and validated through that system. The kind of truth art, poetry and perhaps the human sciences deal with is particular, concrete and cannot be abstracted beyond the involvement of a subject, it involves an ”understanding” in analogical and metaphorical thought, rather than induction and deduction. It is by its nature dialectical and paradoxical.

The truths of religion are truths of the second kind – and both are truths. Art, poetry, religion and history convey truth about the world just as much as the natural sciences do. To the extent that they convey truths of great existential import, and deal with the particular, concrete and actual aspects of reality which lie beyond the purview of the natural sciences, they can even be said to be dealing with more fundamental, ”greater” truths.

Scripture is inspired witness to God's self-revelation in human history, culminating in Christ's revelation of God in death and resurrection. This self-revelation is the Word of God: a series of events which symbolically refer to a deeper reality. Christ is the incarnate Word. Scripture as text is not the Word of God but its witness. The meaning of Scripture is the Word; however, a Word conveyed through the language, cultural traditions and frameworks of its human witnesses. This said, Scripture is the only witness to God's self-revelation we have.

An implication of this would be that at least some of the supernatural events recounted in Scripture must be regarded as symbolic in nature and having literally occurred at the same time: they are symbolic precisely in virtue of having occurred as historical events. This would go at least for the resurrection and probably the healing/exorcizing activities of Christ.

GOD

God is a necessary being: conceptually, he is either actual or conceptually impossible. This implies that God is not an instantiation of given universals: by his nature, he is irreducibly particular, individual, concrete and perhaps particularity, individuality, concreteness in itself. This also implies God is transcendent, meaning that his reality is greater than the visible and invisible world we live in: he encapsulates the universe.

God the Father: God-as-God, God in himself and for himself. God the Son: God as revealed and as self-revealing for us, as the Word, in and through his creative work. God as the Holy Spirit: God as immanent in his creation and in that sense understandable to us through reason, the analogy between our human consciousness (created in the image of God) and the order of the universe. There is some similarity to Whitehead's primordial (transcendent) and consequent (immanent) natures of God, but God the Father would actually involve both the primordial and consequent nature, as would God the Son: God the Son would be the revelation of God through God's immanence, his interaction with and creative work in the universe.

The conception above is problematical: it seems to be somewhat Modalistic, though it does not imply a sequence of Divine natures (God the Father as turning into God the Son) as Modalism is generally taken to do. It is extremely difficult to regard the three sides of the Trinity as three Persons as in traditional Trinitarianism. However, I feel that in Trinitarian conceptions of Deity the focus has all too much been on what God is, and not on what God does; with its substances and Persons, it tends to become overly abstract and perhaps wedded to a late Hellenic framework of thought which we now have lost. The Biblical answer to the question who God is is very simple: ”I am who I am”: God is He-who-is, the supreme and sovereign, ultimate individual. For the rest, the focus should be on what God does, and what does what God does tell us about God?

CREATION

Creation may best be seen as creation out of chaos, rather than creation out of sheer nothingness: this would fit the Biblical narrative better (”Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”), and it means we are not wedded to a view of the universe having had a temporal beginning. Even if the general acceptance of an eternal universe appears to have subsided in favour of a Big-Bang picture, religion should not make itself dependent on this. Creation is ongoing: creation is another aspect of God's 'eternity' breaking into time, but not at any particular point in time. God wrestled the Leviathan and still wrestles it: right here and now.

The question ”Why does anyone exists at all?” in as far as it helps to understand God's creation is not so much a question after the existence of space, time, matter (with all its features) as apposed to sheer nothingness: but rather a question after raw actuality. What is it about existence that evades all scientific description? It is the ”thisness”, the ”here-and-nowness”, the particularity of things, and it is in these that God's creative activity reveals itself.

Rather than seeing God as the supreme author of scientific laws, God should be regarded as present in the contingency and novelty of what escapes the laws of nature. The notion of God as a lawmaker who is otherwise unconcerned with creation is Deistic and also wedded to a notion of laws of nature which may well be wrong: the laws of nature may well be statistical and emergent out of the basically non-deterministic goings-on of stuff, petrified ”habits” as Peirce and Sheldrake have it.

God's creation-out-of-chaos would mean creation of life out of death; of freedom out of deterministic law; of genuine novelty. God relates to his creation as to another subject in which he (as activity) ”pours himself out”, and which he yet allows to determine itself in freedom. This is revelatory of God's essential nature: that of love. God empties himself in his creation as an act of love, and yet he remains; God's creation likewise remains individual and other, though hopefully at the end of times, united with God.

Thus, God creates the universe to respond to him freely: the individual behaviour of his creatures is not determined and therefore not known by God; and it is besides the point to wonder whether God could 'force' his creatures to act in a certain way as doing so would go against his essential nature (love). So God would be neither omniscient nor omnipotent – even though he remains transcendent, and is unsurpassable by any of his creatures in both knowledge and power. Better, perhaps, would be not to speak in abstract qualities such as omniscience and omnipotence but in relational concepts: awesome, fearsome, glorious, merciful.

SIN AND EVIL

God's creative activity is creating life out of death; actuality out of possibility; genuine novelty out of determining antecedent conditions. He does not nullify death and necessity, but rather works through and beyond death and contingency. And the seventh day has not yet come, God's work is still ongoing. Hence, there remains raw contingency in the universe, including that of natural evil and natural disaster.

God has also endowed his creatures with a certain freedom to determine themselves and the form of their own actuality: a very small amount of freedom in case of small particles, perhaps, and more in the case of living nature and intelligent life. This freedom is only meaningful as contextually limited: a freedom which is unconstrained by any antecedent conditions is meaningless as a creature thus ”free” would be unable to affect its own circumstances, and its own course of development, in any way. This restriction is in itself a source of evil in that the same restrictions that make free action meaningful also imply the possibility of partially determining and constraining the self-determination of the rest of creation.

More specifically, free creatures have the power to assert themselves over other and enter into manipulative relationships with the rest of creation. This is seen in biology, biological evolution and specifically in human society. Specific to the human consciousness is that we have a power to shape our surroundings to our own will unmatched among the rest of creation, but that hand-in-hand with this comes a sense of alienation, from the rest of creation (to which we relate often very destructively) but also, with our peculiar consciousness of self, of other minds and other people. The fall of Adam and Eve describes this in mythical terms: Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden fruit, and suddenly become aware that the other is an Other, a stranger (and yet so similar), and of their own irreducible selfhood and loneliness, and with that comes shame and the desire to hide from God. From the Garden of Eden, where people and God walked together in bliss, comes a terrible and unbridgeable chasm between us and God. The story of Adam and Eve is mythical, but its subject-matter, original sin, is not.

Original sin is a feature of human nature; one which affects everything we do, and one from which we cannot escape. We cannot perfect ourselves, not by moral law, not by cultural evolution or by political ideology. In our alienation, we cannot refrain from building up walls to God and to others; to enter into manipulative relationships with others and to sway power over them (or come under someone else's sway) and even the love that may grow between people is shackled and blinded by a foreignness to each other that can never be quite overcome.

Individual sin, over and beyond original sin as a condition, is always an offense against God, which is an offense against love. Sin should not be abstracted into the breaking of a particular law: as the Sermon on the Mount makes clear; it is always the intention, the heart, of any particular action that matters. Sin is a turning away from God and the self-sacrificial, freedom-bestowing love that God represents for other things that seem so much more important: power, fame, wealth, all those small transitory glories which are inevitably sealed by death, which only God's love can conquer.

CHRIST

Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God: he reveals God through his actions, his healing of the sick and the lame, his association with the poor and the wretched of the earth, and finally his shameful death and his triumphant resurrection and victory over death. I do not want to speculate in whether or in which manner Jesus' consciousness combined the human and the divine: this focuses again too much on state, and it is process what we should be worried about: what did Jesus do, and what do his actions mean? Yet it should be perfectly clear that there is no room for demythologizing Jesus, or supplanting the New Testamentical Jesus with a ”historical Jesus” of our own making: the revelation of God in Jesus is God's eternal nature 'breaking into' the temporal world through a sequence of events that reveal that eternal nature; and the resurrection is essential to that revelation. To put the matter starkly: we stand or fall at Emmaus. For if Christ was not resurrected and did not appear to the twelve in a very real and literal fashion, then all is lost; the reality we confront is wholly a reality of sin and of death, and there is no hope beyond that.

Christ's narrative is paradoxical: he appeared as a carpenter's son in an outlying area of the Roman Empire in a province, Galilee, that was even seen as somewhat dubious among the Jews at the time; he offended just about any religious or secular power that he encountered during his short mission - and offended the radicals who wanted to fight that power (and, presumably, supplant it with another one of their own) as well, by gratuitously forgiving sins, associating with the scum of the earth at the margins of society, and proclaiming a Kingdom of God that transcended any moral law as well as any human sense of justice and tit-for-tat (the prodigal son; ”the first will be the last”); eventually was ingloriously nailed to the cross only to be miraculously resurrected after three days.

(Note: a good test of religious progress is whether you find Jesus ridiculous, whether you find him offensive, or whether you find your saviour in him: but there is no third way. It's either one of the three. To the philosophically somewhat literate atheist who approaches the gospel, Jesus cannot be but ridiculous. To the awakening religious consciousness which still likes to think highly of himself and his own moral standards, and likes to retain his tidy and well-organized views on the cosmos, on morality, and on justice, Jesus is utterly offensive. And maturing from that to a Christian religious consciousness is a messy and painful process, which involves quite literally that what the Dawkinistas like to think they do: Questioning everything. I'm not quite there yet. There are quite a few things about Jesus that I still find quite offensive. Which means my internal life at the moment resembles a peaceful fishing village after the Vikings decided to pay a visit. I am not sure how that reflects on the readability of these last few posts.)

Christ was love incarnate, and the standard he proclaimed, in his overt sermons as well as his parables was one of love – and as such almost offensively gratuitous, bestowed upon the undeserving as well as upon the deserving, rooted in the particular and concrete in a way that made a mockery of moral law and righteousness and justice. And in his life, death and resurrection, Christ embodied love: for it is love, God's creativity, that creates life out of death, raw and vibrant actuality out of abstract possibility, that ”makes everything new” and that made Jesus - nailed upon the cross and in that fashion embodying, symbolizing our sins, our brokenness, the grip that death has over us – alive after three days.

There is a dialectical movement going on here. Christ did not replace the old moral law with a new moral law; rather, he proclaimed a standard which transcended morality. He did not replace the old kingdoms and principalities with a new and better one; rather, the Kingdom he proclaimed transcended and transcends all temporal powers. And he did not simply deny death and suffering, stepping off the cross as he was challenged to do; rather, he underwent suffering and death only to pass through them and arise from them in triumph. Transcending death and suffering, and in that way, achieving a victory much more complete than any simple denial could be. ”Death, where is thy sting?”

The particular sequence of event in 1st century Palestine that is at issue here happened in time, but was not of time. In that they embodied God's eternal nature. And in that sense, Christ's victory over death was not something that happened back then, and is over and done with now. It has – Christ has conquered death – and yet at the same time, his suffering, death, and triumph, is happening here and now and at every point in history, in God's eternal present.

But as a particular sequence of events, what they reveal is a reason for hope: that the suffering and death that await us will not be the end of it; that sin, temporal powers, alienation that chain us may not have the last word. That regardless of our wretchedness God may - on the seventh day, the big Sabbath of the world, the end of history – restore and renew us. The same, yet different. That creation as a whole may thrive in the union with God that Christ attained, united in love yet individual and free.

God is love. Some perplexed notes.

2008-09-03T12:48:00.000-07:00

In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life in the subject senses life in the object
Hegel, Love, in: Stephen Houlgate, The Hegel Reader, p. 31.

First, an irony connected to the subject of this post. I believe that in many of our ventures, we seek somehow to undo, to roll back the curse of Adam and all that the eating of the fruit brought him: sense of self; alienation from God, from the other, from nature; an apprehension of a great chasm between us and God. In answer, we seek to lose ourselves, in mystical experience or in mass movements or in sex or love or material wealth. There's something gnawing at us in the depths of our hearts that we seek to flee from, yet can never escape. A sense of being ultimately and irreducibly alone. Of never being able to share or pour out all of our being into the other; there is always something that remains hidden, unshared, and it gnaws.

The irony being that I think it is precisely in loneliness, in solitude, that we may intimate that we are not alone at all. Christ approached the poor, the marginal and the sick; but not because being poor is good, or vice versa that the poor and the marginal and the sick were more sinful than the rich and powerful and hence needed him more. The reason, I think, that they lacked the barriers that we build up between us and God as soon as we can, the noise that we immerse ourselves in that drowns out His presence. Christ went to the poor and the sick because they were able to hear and understand him.

The God of Israel is a God of the desert. To approach Him, you must go to the desert. Or make a desert in your heart.

I have been moving towards Christianity sideways like a crab, with a lot of misgivings and a lot of hesitancy. Someone was hammering at my doors, at the edge of my consciousness, but for a long time I was not sure who. I was afraid it was not Him, but the other one. The bad one. Not joking: I am not sure whether I believe in an actual Devil, but I very much believe in temptation. And I am not particularly difficult to tempt once you know my weaknesses (and there's plenty of those). Eternal life? I am so utterly afraid, horrified, cowering at the very idea of death that I could not believe it, afraid to be led into wishful thinking. Hence, I could not but distrust a Gospel, Good News. Because some Good News was precisely what I was longing for.

But now I have no doubts anymore - and I am no longer afraid that I am led to worship a Devil, real or one of my own making.

God is love.

And no demon, nor any creature of my own making could lead me to begin to grasp a sliver of the truth behind those three words.

I am becoming some kind of an existentialist or a pragmatist about truth. Mark Twain at some point wrote that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Of course, this is about metaphors, words which convey poetical truth, but the matter is the same: as it is precisely poetry that conveys individual, existential truth that we live by. And there is a similar kind of difference between understanding something as an abstract concept, and understanding that same something as something of fundamental, enormous subjective importance. A kind of understanding that makes one's legs go to jelly, that makes one feel as if pierced by arrows, and light shining through the holes.

I don't want to sound presumptuous here: I think I understand very little. At the same time, in my own crab-like manner, I think I'm slowly getting somewhere.

God is love.

An alternative way to put Anselm's argument, or other ones trying to explicate God as a necessary being. When we talk, say, about a tree, we talk about an instantiation of a set of universals: a tree (as any tree) has stem, branches, leaves or pines, etc. All of these universals embodied concretely by the particular tree we talk about. Yet there is something about any particular tree that is not exhausted by any set of universals we may use to describe it. Something about the "thisness", the raw actuality, the "here-and-nowness" of the tree escapes any determination in terms of universals. In other words: existence is not a predicate, or better, actuality is not a predicate, and we cannot reason from universals to actual existence.

However, God is not an exemplification of any set of universals such as the tree, or my hat, or any other contingent object. Just as we can talk about unicorns in a world which lacks unicorns, we could talk about trees in terms of certain universals in a world which happened to lack actual trees. But we cannot talk, in similar fashion, of God as a set of universals (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) which may or may not be instantiated in the actual world. Such a being would lack in the transcendence we ascribe to God. It would maybe be a god, but not God. We can only refer to God as to a concrete and actual being, a particular that transcends all universals - because otherwise we would no longer be referring to God! So God is either a necessary being or utter nonsense - but what he is not is a set of properties that fails to be instantiated. In God as a necessary being the opposition between universal and particular is collapsed as it were: necessarily actual, "here and now" He lends actuality, hereness or nowness, the "fire" in the equations of science and all abstract thought that will forever escape scientific and abstract description, to the world and everything in it.

Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?" God said to Moses, "I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'
Exodus 3: 13-14

In Whitehead's philosophy of process, the basic 'building-block' of the universe is an actual event, a concrete little happening, a little 'flash' of experience, which defines itself with the universals it instantiates and against its own past of actual events, thus reflecting in a way its whole past universe - yet is not determined by it. There is always something undetermined, something creative, something genuinely new, about actuality. The ruach, Spirit, breath of God.

He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!"
Revelations 21:5

As human beings, it is precisely in our thisness, in our utter individuality, that we are free. We may be partially determined by our biological make-up, by our past experiences, but never wholly so. Our own concreteness, like the rest of the actual universe, remains underdetermined by universals, defies exhaustive description, and this is what makes us free.

God is love. And love is that mysterious force between the subject and the other that allows one to pour oneself out fully, to give oneself wholly to the other, without losing one's individuality and actuality. That allows one to behold oneself and become a self through the eyes of another. To ground oneself, one's whole existence, in the other while yet remaining free. Difference in sameness: it is paradox, Hegel's dialectic made flesh, laughing at identity, mocking cause and effect. The making that does not break, creativity and genuine novelty, creatio ex nihilo right here and now, as impossible as it sounds.

God is love - it is not a metaphor, not a hackneyed phrase from a pop song. It is literally, blindingly, astonishingly true. Love is not a human feeling, it is more than that; it is not a physical force, it is more than that; love is the more than that, the principle underlying the existence of all, me, you, trees and rocks and gas giants.

In Peirce's terms, law is 'thirdness', regularity, persistence. As such it is opposed to 'secondness': concrete actuality with all its interrelatedness with the rest of the actual universe, and 'firstness': the bare universal.

Regularity which in the case of moral law becomes an abstract norm, which we may obey or rebel against. But love, as God has revealed Himself to be in Christ, remains pure actuality, 'secondness', or rather, is 'secondness', a concrete, situational here-and-now which curiously transcends any regularity, abstract norm, law, or 'thirdness'. Christ as the incarnate Word is the eternal, God, 'breaking into' the temporal, history, and revealing Himself therein as the ground of all being, love. Just as God is not an instantiation of an abstract universal 'Godlikeness', so Christ-as-history is not an exemplification of a moral law. In as far as Christianity means following Christ, striving after Christlikeness, it is antinomian in that love relativizes any moral law including that of the old Covenant.

Yet, as Paul made clear, this does not lead to a license to sin:

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
Romans 6: 15-18

Sin is a turning away from God, a failing of the two Commandments that remain: to love God with all one's mind and strength and all one's heart, and one's neighbour as oneself. If God's self-revelation as love and the new Covenant is an invitation to (in Kierkegaard's words, if I remember) ground ourselves transparently in God, then sin is a failure to do so, and thus the substitution of the moral law with love as an absolute standard hardly makes sin meaningless - it only makes it even more acute.

Some of the above may have sounded a bit neo-orthodox. I am attracted to some neo-orthodox notions, particularly that of the Word of God as embodied by the events, God's self-revelation in human history as witnessed by Scripture, rather than Scripture itself. Likewise, I think that it is helpful not to understand Christ's Godhood as a "thing", as a "substance" like wine in a bottle. The Word is not a thing. The Word of God is not a given text. It is precisely the way in which God reveals Himself in what he does in human history: and the apex, the absolute centerpiece of this is precisely the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. And the notion that God is love is the key to making sense of it. The ultimate and total self-sacrifice of God-in-Christ in death and His consequent triumph over death after three days reveal who God is.

God is love. And as love, he approached the ones who, in all their wretchedness, recognized Him for who He is. Love is the curious force that creates without destroying, heals without breaking, allows the lovers to be grounded in one another while yet remaining themselves, and more than themselves:

A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
Isaiah 42:3

And thus alone transcends law, the barren, mute cycle of cause and effect, and death. Conquers death. Breaks the barriers of our loneliness, alienation, sucks out the venom of sin.

And Christ took sin upon himself, and shame, and pain and savage death, and yet he rose. He poured himself out into the world, sacrificed himself, and yet he rose. The "and yet" goes to the essence of love. The "and yet" that whispers that the curse of Adam was not the whole of the story, that something yet follows, that there is an answer to death and sin and the hold they have over us. And what an answer!

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15: 54-55

This is why the one Biblical miracle which I unconditionally believe in is the Resurrection. The walking on water, the sharing of the bread, the healing of the sick - I can accept them as symbols or metaphors (though I do not mind literal interpretations of them as well). But the one truth which they point towards, as symbols, is precisely encapsulated in Christ's death and resurrection. The basis of our hopes that the "sting of death" is not the end of it all. That there is an and yet in God who is love. Were I to demythologize the event, to regard it as a mythological expression for our hope, I would undercut precisely the basis for that hope.

God is love. And those three words are the key to my slow, piecemeal understanding, and my all-too intermittent, hesitant faith in the God of Abraham and Jesus. I'll continue my sideways, crab-like movement to Christianity. Peer at it shyly and carefully, nose pressed against the window. But I am grateful beyond words, beyond expression to have gotten where I am now.

Some quick jots

2008-09-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

I'll be back to serious blogging soon. Meanwhile some quick thoughts:

- A podcast by James Howard Kunstler on tattoos and what passes for clothing style among people these days. Kunstler's cheery view on modern American (and by extension, given some minor changes, Western European) culture is summed up in this quote from his blog:

Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all.

I had been wondering about the suprising prevalence among tattoos as well as the general "gangster-like" clothing style of young kids (baggy clothes, hat the wrong way around, etc.) earlier yesterday. When I was in high school during the mid-nineties tattoos were still something new and edgy. Nowadays just about everybody sports them, even people who look otherwise civilized. And most of the time they're ugly and unoriginal as well. Things like barbed wire, "tribal" flame-like patterns, Chinese characters and especially those awful little stars. I mean, if you want something inked into your skin which you can never get off, ever, shouldn't you want something more personal, more individual than tribal flames or barbed wire? Something more meaningful?

So to a big extent, I share Kunstler's dim view of tattoos. According to Kunstler, both the tattoo rage as well as the prevalence of "hip-hop" style clothing (hoodies, baggy jeans, hats the wrong way around, etc.) reflect the general hopelessness and purposelessness of modern-day life in that they combine the marks of a warrior culture (tattoos) with those of infantilism (the baby-like clothes). Fitting for a society which has little place for warriors or indeed responsible, individualist adults - in response to a Nanny state which abhors any healthy kind of warrior instinct, people dress like babies and decorate themselves like warriors. Or, in Kunstler's words, like "violent clowns".

Countercultures are good, and healthy (even if the social discord and marginalization that produces them may not be). At best, they're havens of artistic creativity, genuinely subversive thought, and progress in the realm of ideas. Christianity at best is the counterculture to end all countercultures - the Kingdom of God. But there's something rotten with a society in which countercultural values, codes, symbols instantly get commodified and adopted by mainstream culture, where the borders between "high" and "low" culture have been breached to the extent that culture as a whole seems to survive parasitically on "low" culture. And that's what you are seeing, I think, with the proliferation of tattooing, "gangster-like" dress style, the popularity of music and song that glorifies crime, thuggishness and violence, etc. That's not good for "high" culture which seems to have all but lost its bearings, and not good for countercultures either.

- The liberal interventionist Hurry up Harry is busy denouncing VP candidate Sarah Palin for apparently supporting Pat Buchanan in '99. Now, the general purpose of a blog like Harry's place is to indignantly denounce anyone on the left or right who breaks the cherished taboos of the babyboomer/armchair bomber left, so if it is indeed true that Palin at some point endorsed Buchanan, this increases my interest in Palin considerably. I like Pat Buchanan. He writes well, though occasionally with some pathos; he's predictably ultra-conservative, though happens to be correct a lot more often than the proverbial stopped clock.

Everytime there are American elections, the Western European media, pundits, etc. will en masse support the Democratic candidate, no matter how incompetent or crooked, to the point of shamelessness. A low point of this during the last election was the Guardian's "Operation Clark County" or "Write a letter to a stupid American to vote for John Kerry" - which may well have been a small factor in George W. Bush's eventual victory. One of the prominent participants in this project was none other than Richard Dawkins. Incidentally, this changed my opinion about the man and his attacks on religion forever. Dawkins doesn't have the hatred and bile of a Hitchens. He's disarmingly and embarrasingly honest and sincere. It's just that he has no capacity at all to understand a viewpoint radically different than his. Something which explains both his misunderstandings of religion and his participation in that risible campaign.

But in any event, the same state of affairs concerning Obama (McCain is all but boycotted in the Dutch media) arouses my contrarian instincts. I'm now wondering whether a McCain presidency would be all that bad. And I cannot but like some of the things I read about Palin. Some socially conservative leftists, such as David Lindsay and The Exile feel the same.

- For a good example of what's wrong with the European right, go no further than this article by the Brussels Journal's Fjordman. It starts off very interestingly by breaking down some of the politically-correct taboos surrounding cannibalism and human sacrifice in primitive societies. But then it devolves in an equally politically-correct harangue against any attempts to relativize the alleged superiority of European cultures as well as against the usual postmodernist bogeymen. This leads him to miss some very interesting points. For instance, commenting on a writer seeing analogies between Aztec human sacrifice and the institution of highly ritualized public executions in the Europe of the same period, Fjordman sneers:

So, the Aztecs were a sophisticated bunch of natural philosophers who were great lovers of food and had good health care. They were presumably at the brink of developing microwave popcorn, interplanetary travel and laser eye surgery when the Europeans showed up and invented racism and global warming.

It is undoubtedly true that there were brutal aspects of early modern European culture. It was a brutal age. However, whatever Europeans did at this time, they didn't eat other people's internal organs on a regular basis. I know of indications that human sacrifice was once practiced in Europe, China, Egypt and elsewhere, but that was in very ancient times. By the sixteenth century AD, human sacrifice was not an established feature among any of the major Old World civilizations, but it was quite common among New World peoples.

The thing is that one would think that the prevalence of cathartic sacrificial practices among people - whether the actual killing of actual humans or the driving off of a vicarious one such as the scapegoat of the Old Testament - is of interest to conservatives. Because they tell of a basic need in human society: the one to purge itself of sin and evil, and to ritualistically re-establish loyalty, social cohesion, and the ideal basis underlying society. The theatrical aspects of pre-Enlightenment public executions in Europe are obvious, and the scapegoat mechanisms at work in the purges and show trials of the Communists even more so. Sin and evil are not outside forces to be conquered and defeated, as liberals might believe. Human nature is what it is. And evil is right there in the middle of it.

In general, the problem of the European right as exemplified by the Brussels Journal is that it is a thoroughly secular right in a thoroughly secularized society - one which thus lacks the symbolic means to examine itself and its components (the human individual). As well as to understand other societies. Rather, the European right strongly defines itself against religion in the form of Islam, and gathers itself around politically-correct shibbolets of its own, such as women's rights and gay rights. And don't get me wrong here: I'm in favour of both. But I see little hope for a political attitude that, when confronted with the practices of other cultures, cannot even understand them and the language they speak, but instead scoffs and says: "See? We are not that barbaric. And in fact, we never were."

In other words, we have the old myths of progress and perfectability of man, clothed now in a "conservative" and slightly xenophobic garb. I'm not that optimistic. We were that barbaric. In our hearts of hearts, we still are. And we may yet be.

"Peace" in Georgia?

2008-08-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

Well, a day after a cease-fire and draft peace deal was agreed to, Russian troops have entered and are patrolling Gori; Georgian villages have been burned and looted by South Ossetian militia and brave Russian peacekeepers; and the Russians appear to be heading towards Tbilisi while Russian commanders strenuously deny they are doing so. The move towards Tbilisi may or may not be real, but if Georgia has learned the past few days how much Western support is worth, it now learns exactly how much deals with Russia are worth.

These are harsh lessons.

I dislike Saakashvili; I thought that if the military attack on South Ossetia was vitally necessary from the Georgian perspective, the shelling and levelling of Tskhinvali was unbelievably stupid. But recent events only underscore how important it was for Georgia to take control over its secessionist territories. Because the Russians have no interest in a peaceful and independent Georgia, and instead are imposing what is at best a fractured, dismembered existence under Russian military control.

I hope that, whatever happens over the following weeks or months or years, the Georgians find a way to determine their own fate against the Russians and whoever stands against them.

War in Georgia

2008-08-10T07:35:00.000-07:00

Hard to find out precisely what's going on. Russian sites such as Russia Today not to speak of the ever-hilarious Pravda seem to offer a mixture of genuine news and black propaganda. Civil Georgia has been off-line a lot. Some good analysis on Fistful of Euros and The Brussels Journal, and by Mark Ames on The Exile(d). Waiting for Gary Brecher to shed his light on events on the latter sites. Also check Wu Wei from Tbilisi.

At the moment, it seems like Georgian troops are retreating or have retreated from South Ossetia, though apparently they attempted some kind of counterattack just yesterday night. South Ossetians claim some 2000 dead - probably exaggerated, but the prolonged shelling of Tskhinvali (which seems to have been levelled - it's not a big town) must have led to a lot of casualties. The question is what the Russians are up to now - whether they will be content to control the areas in South Ossetia they currently control, whether they will continue to secure South Ossetia and Abkhazia by attacking Gori and Zugdidi near the Abkhazian border (Zugdidi has reportedly been bombed and the Georgian-controlled Kodori gorge in Abkhazia has been under attack) or whether they will try to grab the whole of Georgia.

I'm still not quite sure what on earth Saakashvili was thinking. Either he attempted a lightning-quick grab of the main roads in South Ossetia in order to present the Russians with a fait accompli, or he was coaxed into a trap by South Ossetian skirmishes earlier last week (both possibilities discussed by Fistful of Euros). Either way, he seems to have succesfully made himself into a punchbag for Russia's newly assertive military. Which appears to have been suspiciously ready to intervene.

There's no good solution to the conflict. The natural border between Georgia and Russia is the high Caucasus, and to make the country at least somewhat defensible, Georgia had no choice but to try and gain control over South Ossetia. Tskhinvali lies on the central plain, very close to Gori and the main road between Tbilisi and the west of Georgia. If South Ossetia would be occupied by the Russians or even annexed into the Russian Federation, Russia would basically militarily control Georgia. On the other hand, the ethnically Ossetian population of South Ossetia have been wanting to rejoin their kin from the north since the early nineties.

I lived in Tbilisi during 2001-2002, when Shevardnadze was still in power. I only once heard a Georgian say something positive about him - which was something like "Shevardnadze can't help it either". He was widely despised and blamed for the electricity blackouts, the unreliable water and gas supplies, the general poverty and anarchy as well as of course the Russian/Abkhaz control over Abkhazia (South Ossetia did not seem nearly as much of an issue. Most of the population of Abkhazia were ethnic Georgians, who had been driven from their country and living in poverty in Tbilisi at the time). But somehow Shevardnadze succeeded in playing both the Americans and the Russians without making a decisive choice for either. And South Ossetia too, as smuggling station, played a role in the anarchic ecology of the country.

I haven't been to the place since. Saakashvili has made a decisive pro-Western choice including Georgian participation in Iraq. His promise to re-unite the country succeeded initially with Ajaria in the Southwest, where local strongman Abashidze was driven out fairly bloodlessly, but stalled with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. I guess his patience ran out. But it's water under the bridge - I don't see how he can now dislodge the Russians from South Ossetia, or even politically survive this.

I hope the Russians will be content with their prize in the form of South Ossetia and maybe Abkhazia. There, they have local support. If they try to bring the whole of Georgia under their control, things will be quite different. It's a beautiful place, full of ancient churches, monasteries, wonderful castle ruins and craggy mountains and fascinating people with murderous driving habits. It's just located a bit too close to Russia.

Moral relativism

2008-08-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."
John 8: 1-11

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. "Why stoning?" asks North. "There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Thrift and ubiquity aside, "executions are community projects--not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his' duty, but rather with actual participants." You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. "That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes," North continues, "indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians." And he may be right about that last point, you know.
Invitation to a Stoning, Reason Magazine, November 1998.

1. Humans universally have some innate intuition of what is morally right and wrong.
2. The normative (such as morality) cannot be reduced to the material, on pain of committing the naturalistic fallacy. One cannot get an 'ought' from an 'is'.
3. Therefore, the best account of universal morality is grounding it into a perfectly moral Being; we have an innate sense of the good because there is an absolute Good, which is God's essence.

It's a good argument, probably one of our better ones. Which is why I am going to attack it. Not interested in the Euthrypho dilemma at the moment. Instead, I'm going to argue, in my trademark sloppy and tentative manner, that the first premiss is wrong and some form of moral relativism is correct; and that this is eminently compatible with Christianity. Please, don't take the below argument too seriously; I'm running far ahead of myself here in that I'm not terribly good at ethics, and I'm mainly interested in seeing where the argument leads.

As it is, we have good examples of relative normative systems. Language is one of them. The previous sentence is correct in the linguistic system of English, and wrong in the system of Finnish. You cannot escape being part of one of such a conventional, socially situated normative system - Wittgenstein famously dismissed the possibility of 'private languages' by pointing out the user of such a private language would need the social input of actual communication in order for the language to become an actually normative system to him. I've toyed with fantasized languages or 'conlangs' for a bit: actually using such a language is virtually impossible since you can change the rules on a whim.

The main alternatives for 'grounding' languages seem to be a Platonic one, defended by Jerrold Katz, and an emergentist one, proposed by Paul Hopper in the eighties but going back much longer. The drawback of the Platonic one is that we have to assume that not all actually existing, but also all possible, potentially existing grammars exist as Platonic forms. The emergentist alternative tends to err in believing it can 'explain' the normativity of grammar with reference to some more basic, individual plane, cognition for example. Nonetheless, I think some version of emergentism may be correct if we regard some intentional and valuating level as basic, but this doesn't go far beyond a hunch at the moment.

Logic and mathematics are other examples of normative systems. I'm not sure of their relativity. This said, there seem to be alternative versions of logic such as the traditional one and the dialetheist one which allows contradictions to be valid in some cases; and a variety of mathematical systems have been proposed. My understanding of mathematics is minimal; I'm aware that a lot of mathematicians are Platonists.

Then there's morality. Let's define moral relativism as the notion that the moral correctness of an action is relative to the system of moral rules transmitted/embodied by a particular society with a particular culture. Moral rules as any norms are ultimately social: it is not possible for an individual to determine one's own, particular kind of morality (though it is possible for an individual to shift to the morality of a different society or culture).

Take a suitably abhorrent kind of cultural practice, such as the stoning of women for adultery as still practiced in some places.

A secular humanist who is a moral absolutist would roundly and vigorously condemn the practice on the basis of a given set of moral precepts regarded as universal: Enlightenment values of individual autonomy and universal rights; opposition to the death penalty, etc. One can charge the secular humanist with explaining the grounding of the moral principles as per the argument above, but I think that in fact the secular humanist might be justified in stonewalling the charge and arguing that the set of moral principles simply must be regarded as absolute, and that the question of its particular grounding is unanswerable. This would mean there are loose threads in his/her philosophy, but I think that so there are in anyone's.

The vast majority of Christians who are moral absolutists would equally condemn the practice on the basis of arguments perhaps not too dissimilar from the secular humanist's, but grounded in a specifically Christian system of values. Unfortunately enough, a small minority of Christians would greet the spectacle with enthusiasm and pick up stones to join in.

A moral relativist, of course, would argue that, abhorrent as the practice is from his/her particular perspective, the stoning is morally correct in the particular system of the society in which it takes place.

My argument, in a nutshell:
1. The moral relativist is correct; there are no universal moral standards by which to evaluate the different moral systems embedded in different cultures. An action may be right or horribly wrong depending on the cultural perspective one takes.
2. There are, however, a few absolutes which transcend morality. The absolute worth of the other; absolute duty towards God; the commandmend of Love. These may inform but not replace morality. Morality being an abstract system of rules, bound up with a culture or a society, neighbourly and divine Love are always individual and concrete.
3. We cannot, by our own devices, hope to escape the imperfect and 'fallen' moral systems which we, as social beings, participate in and reach the Kingdom of God. This does not mean one cannot or should not be involved in movement in social change including change in the moral valuation of certain actions; but Christians, progressive or conservative, better not confuse this with some kind of establishment of 'Christian values'.

C.S. Lewis at some point argues inductively to the absoluteness of some moral values. In other words, most any tribes throughout history have maintained that random murder is wrong; that rape is wrong, etc. But I am not sure whether one can inductively reach a moral absolute in this fashion. One could easily argue that it is a contingent matter that no cultures have held wanton murder as a moral good, that perhaps such cultures, if they have existed, were wiped out by (amoral) Darwinian principles, etc. More importantly, universal agreement on the wrongness of murder has not led to universal agreement on the wrongness of honour killings, burning witches, necklacing police informers, executing the Kulaks, etc. etc. More specifically, it may be wrong to wantonly kill humans - but who is a human? Societies have regarded whole classes of human beings as mere property in the past - women, slaves. Currently debate on the humanity of the unborn and the moral obligations we have towards them is still raging.

I am sidestepping here for a moment the question of Divinely ordained moral principles in the Old Testament. I hold that they were rooted in Divine commands; yet at the same time most Christians hold they were superseded by a New Covenant, and even the Old Covenant was culture-specific. I do not believe that it is possible to argue against a moral relativist position on their basis.

There are, however, Biblical principles which one could hold to be absolutely valid. The notion of humans as created in the image of God, and the commandment to love God and love one's neighbour. I do not believe, however, that this commandment is moral in nature, much less that it easily translates to the moral systems we are condemned to live with.

Back to John 8: 1-11.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."

Note the following:

Jesus is not, in fact, proposing to replace the morality enshrined by the Old Testament laws with a different morality. To replace the abstract system of principles according to which adultery is wrong, and stoning a just punishment, with another abstract system according to which adultery is either not wrong, or stoning is an unjust punishment. What Jesus is doing is causing the would-be executioners to see their own sinfulness, and their own unjustifiedness and impossibility before God - crushing the selfrighteousness which made them desiring to throw stones at a fellow sinner. Jesus himself refuses to condemn the adulterous woman, and in that he transcends, rather than negates or affirms, morality.

In that sense, distasteful as it is, there is no contradiction between the Gospel and the enthusiasm for stoning sinners exhibited by the Reconstructionists as quoted at the beginning of this post. And to be sure, the nominally christian Kingdom of Sweden in the 15th century condemned adulterous women to be buried alive (in a paragraph significantly placed under the chapter of "Thievery" since adultery was a crime against property). One may argue whether this is more moral, or more Christian, than throwing stones at them.

However, stoning people for adultery is very clearly and very absolutely sinful. Because few actions symbolize hatred so much as collectively throwing stones at a helpless and defenseless person. A hatred which is in absolute conflict with and absolutely offends against God's nature of love, and the Christian commandment to "Love God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself" - and let's not forget precisely whom Jesus pointed as neighbours: the marginalized, the lame and crippled, the prostitutes and publicans, the sinners who knew they sinned. Sin is not an offense at any given moral law, or any given immoral action, but a turning away from God whose nature is Love; as Kierkegaard somewhere puts it, the opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith.

Love, mercy, forgiveness transcend morality: they do not and cannot replace morality. They are irreducibly particular. One cannot elevate love, mercy or forgiveness to abstract moral rules (which, incidentally, I think is a problem with liberal and progressive critiques of the penal system and the death penalty which incorporate such notions. Forgiveness is up to individuals; forgiveness of sins is up to God, but the State, and abstract entity, is not in the business of mercy or forgiveness lest the notion become meaningless. I am an opponent of the death penalty, but on different grounds).

As I understand it, Situational Ethics is a Christian ethical system which does indeed seek to replace morality with Love. Sympathetic as it appears to me, such a system of ethics would, in my case, be tantamount to placing Dracula in charge of a blood bank. Adultery and lying may be immoral, and yet it may be able to encounter situations in which love would require both - but if you allow me to run with such a notion, I'd end up creating some kind of a catastrophe. I am, after all, a sinner. And I need my moral precepts. Situational Ethics seems to me to try and bring a kind of ethic appropriate to the Kingdom of God to the here and now.

In some ways, the logic of love, forgiveness and mercy may appear profoundly amoral. It is pretty basic to our moral intuitions that one should get what one deserves, and that if one transgresses some moral precepts, one deserves punishment in a proportional fashion. The Christian message, however, to me says that we deserve nothing and may be forgiven for our sins in an utterly disproportional manner: God's love is gratuitous.

In other words, based on the argument above, it is possible for an action to be moral (relative to the culture and society that the particular morality is embedded in) and sinful at the same time. As the hypothetical stoning of the adulterous woman in John 8 would have been. Love, in the shape of Jesus, transcends the moral precepts of society.

As I said, I'm following an argument here to see where it leads. The notion of actions that are (relatively) morally right and (absolutely) sinful and offensive towards God, and the accompanying possibility of actions that are (relatively) morally wrong and (absolutely) pleasing God (see the previous post!) is counterintuitive. But I think there are some advantages.

We cannot escape being part of a normative, moral system transmitted by and embedded in our specific society and culture. At the same time, I am not aware of a society or culture which did not in some way incorporate unequal relationships of power, exploitation or oppression at its very roots. Humans being what they are. And this will invariably reflect upon the moral precepts shared by society as a whole.

In the modern West, adultery is regarded as a private matter. Immoral, to be sure - but an immoral act restricted to a private sphere from which society and the punitive powers of the state have withdrawn. I do not disagree here - the general moral ideology of modern Western Europe is one that I share with perhaps a minor deviation here or there. But it is not hard to see that, for a 15th century Swedish peasant, things were a bit different. It was not for nothing that a woman was classified as property. The well-being of a household depended on the presence of a woman, and, marginal and being at the mercy of the harvest as he was, he was in very serious trouble if the woman chose to run away with another. The penalty - hanging for a male adulterer, and burying alive for the woman if her husband chose not to forgive her - seems disproportionally severe to our own modern eyes, but not to medieval Swedish eyes.

In the Bible, the dependence on the whims of nature that people have felt for generations, the raw necessities of survival, and, indeed, the alienating relationships of power which still exist between men and women, are clearly connected with the fall from grace:

To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Genesis 3: 16-19.

In these circumstances, any moral system, any conventional, socially shared system of moral rules and precepts, is tainted with sin.

As exemplified by Jesus' encounter with the adulterous woman, neighbourly and Divine love, mercy, and forgiveness do exist as absolutes which may transcend morality - but they exist in the particular, in the concrete situation. They cannot be generalized to abstract rules and systems.

Maybe, analogously to language, morality may be said to 'emerge' from the concrete, the particular, where Love dwells; but unfortunately for us, Love is not alone there. The Kingdom of God is not a kingdom that we can build.

And, facing the dreadful version of the Kingdom favoured by the Reconstructionists, perhaps this is for the best.

Confessions of an unwilling Gnostic

2008-07-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

I do not mean to suggest that I subscribe to doctrines of an evil demiurge, or of an evil material world that he created, or that the snake was right, or that Christ escaped crucifixion and gloated over poor Simon of Cyrene as he carried his cross toward Golgotha. What I mean is more that I always and still seek salvation through understanding, much as I might rebel against that and acknowledge the insuffiency of reason in religious matters by mouth. My heart is not
there yet. Faith is still a very faraway country.

I am increasingly reserved towards attempts to reconciliate religion with science, or religion with science via philosophy. Regardless of the role that theistic philosophers played in my own journey over the past few years. The below will no doubt veer a bit towards an extreme anti-rationalistic position. But it is useful to explore extremes sometimes.

I'm not afraid of the possible ramifications scientific research can have on Christian doctrine. There cannot be such ramifications, there cannot be a conflict. Natural science deals, by its very nature, with the abstract, the general, the repeatable. It is interested in atoms, in The Atom, but
not in this or that particular atom. And at the smallest level of the physical world, the thisness or thatness of elementary particles becomes acutely problematic. Likewise, natural science may have an interest in Man but not in this or that particular experience of this or that particular man.

The science that deals with concrete thought is, as Collingwood claimed, precisely history, and for that reason history will be forever irreducible to the natural sciences. Concrete facts are always concrete facts for some experiencing or thinking subject - to wit, if no one is looking at the moon, it is not (concretely) there. (I know this is a controversial point, suffice to say here that I am aware what I am saying).

And the God of Abraham and Israel and Jesus is a God of history. God is concrete, particular. There seems to me something very unsatisfactory about the notions of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, and so forth, that have been tied up with classical notions of God. The God revealed in the Bible inspires awe, fear, longing, wanting to hide - thoroughly relational, subjective concepts. And neither science nor philosophy seem to have much to say about the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ - that most concrete, most particular of historical events (nothing good, at any rate).

God is transcendent with regards to His creation - do we need to further specify Omnipotence and such things? God is a God of forgiveness, and mercy, and love - it is necessary to wrangle over the question whether he is furthermore good? And whether his existence is commensurable with the evil in man and creation?

I've stated sometime before that the Problem of Evil is the sharpest arrow in the atheist's quiver. I'll go further: it is the only arrow. For all the other arguments or counterarguments may serve how an abstract idea of God - or a rejection of that idea - underlies other presuppositions we use to make sense of the universe. But they have little to do with the concrete God of religion. With the Problem of Evil, it is different. The whole of the Bible is concerned with it - from the Fall of Adam to the resurrection of Christ. And it is concerned with it in its own concrete, particular fashion. It says little of Evil, or of Pain, or of Suffering - but a lot of the particular evils and suffering that befell figures such as Job, or Christ.

It seems to me that the theist cannot even allow the admissability of something such as the Problem of Evil without exploding all that. For to allow for the possibility of doubting the existence of God on the basis of Evil seems to be counterposed to the Biblical answer of hope, and of faith in God. And, to me, it seems almost sacrilegious to think that we could find a philosophically satisfactory answer to the problem of Evil. Comprehending by our reason why Evil exists, why we sin, and why nevertheless God is good or goodness itself almost seems to me to be tantamount to comprehending God. At most, philosophy may show there is no logical contradiction here - but this is hardly going to convince the atheist raising it as s/he may well have very concrete, particular situations in mind. There is something that remains unsaid, something unsatisfactory, when we try to answer these in general, abstract terms.

Briefly put: if the answer is faith, then no exhaustive, satisfactory answer to the Problem of Evil can be admitted by reason. If this answer is denied, and the point is conceded, then all hope is lost.

But as I said, faith is still something I can but marvel at. I am still too enamoured by my own understanding. I don't like to admit that there are things that I will never be able to comprehend.

I've been reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. It is one of the most disturbing texts I have read so far. Some people are, I understand, deeply offended by the idea that Catholics believe in the real and concrete presence of Christ in the Communion Wafer. I understand that these people are especially numerous in the comment boxes of certain ScienceBlogs.
I can only implore these people not to read Kierkegaard. If the doctrine of transubstantiation causes your Reason to be so deeply scandalized as to applaud PZ Meyer's adolescent mockery as some kind of highly incisive piece of performance art, Kierkegaard's analysis of the story of Abraham would have you ready the Molotov Cocktails.

Genesis 22:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"
"Here I am," he replied.
Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains
I will tell you about."
Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, "Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you."
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?"
"Yes, my son?" Abraham replied.
"The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"
Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son."
And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it.
He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!"
"Here I am," he replied.
"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, "On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided."
The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me."

At the beginning of his work, Kierkegaard lays out a number of alternative stories of Abraham, all of which somehow end in him failing this particular test. In one very poignant one, Abraham turns towards Isaac as they ascend the mountain and tells him he is not a servant of God, and not Isaac's father, but an idolator, and he is going to sacrifice Isaac. Terrified, Isaac calls out for God to help him, and Abraham is satisfied he at least succeeded to save Isaac's faith. But by doing so, he has lost his own.

Kierkegaard contrasts Abraham as a "Knight of Faith" with those that, for the sake of eternity, the greater good, resign into sacrifice something dear to them. There are many such stories: Agamemnon ordering the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis so that the ships may sail towards Troy; Jephta promising to sacrifice the first thing that
approaches him from his house if God grants him victory, and ending up sacrificing his own daughter. Harsh as these stories are, Agamemnon and Jephta have some kind of transcendent ground to take comfort in. The well-being of the many, the prosperity of their people. Abraham has little such comfort. No ethical justifications. Just the command of God - to him alone.

What, according to Kierkegaard, makes Abraham into a "Knight of Faith" is that, as he ascends the mountain, he holds the absurd and impossible hope that Isaac may yet be restored to him. That even if he were to strike his son with the knife, God would revive him. This absurd hope co-existed side by side with Abraham's absolute and perfect obedience to God's commands. The state of mind that Kierkegaard describes is, simply, terrifying to contemplate.

Note that in no way Abraham had an assurance that Isaac would be restored to him. He had faith. He had hope. But he did not know that God would provide for a ram at the last moment, and, for that matter, he did not know that it was God speaking to him, and not some terrible demon.

There are to be sure mad people who believe they must sacrifice their sons and daughters. If we were to meet Abraham on the way to the mountain, probably little would distinguish himself from such a madman. We should probably try to
stop him by all means from performing such a foul deed, and perhaps even kill him in order to save his innocent son. And yet, by this action, Abraham became the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Thus, to Kierkegaard, faith is faith in the impossible, in the absurd. It is groundless. It is unreasonable. And yet it was what made Abraham to such a towering figure, such a giant looming in our religious consciousness - greater than
Agamemnon, greater than Jephta.

There is another corollary Kierkegaard explores. If Abraham acted against all ethical duties towards his family, and indeed was full prepared to commit a particularly gruesome crime - killing his own son - then either he should be condemned or one's duty towards God should be taken as particular, as absolute, and overriding ethical concerns. This, too, is an extremely disturbing notion.

In Kierkegaard's terms, ethics is something general, universal - the collective mores of a particular social group, etc. He makes the point that in this and other aspects, God raises the particular, the individual, above the general and the universal. It is one's individual, particular duty to God that is of paramount importance. That is absolute. Kierkegaard explores precisely what this implies - and the implications are uncomfortable, offensive to our reason, our sense of ethics, and so on.

The New Testament often seems to reflect a similar notion. Jesus is fond of talking in parables, of using a very particular situation to make a general point, or to answer a general question. When he is asked by an expert in the Law,
in Luke 10, what loving one's neighbours means, who is a neighbour, Jesus answers with the very specific example of the Good Samaritan. Much more strikingly, there are some parables which seem to offend our human notion of justice:

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard.
He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing.
He told them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went.
He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, 'Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?'
'Because no one has hired us,' they answered.
"He said to them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard.'
When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, 'Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.'The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner.
'These men who were hired last worked only one hour,' they said, 'and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.'
But he answered one of them, 'Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?'
"So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

In other words, God relates to you particularly, individually; he does not weigh your merits against another. He is not being "fair" in that sense - he is the ground of your being, the one you absolutely depend on with every breath you take, why would he? God is a God of love, not a God of "fair" of "unfair" or a God of "good" or "evil" in human terms - but a God whose love is gratuitous just as your existence is gratuitous.

God is concrete. A God who calls you by your name.

Books and teapots

2008-07-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

So exhibitionistic atheist PZ Meyers declares that not only has he desecrated a communion wafer but a Koran, and something secret he won't tell us about until tomorrow. I am not sure what desecrating the Koran is going to mean, but the Koran is a book, and I don't like the idea at all. Not one bit. If "desecrating a communion wafer" means you're an uncivilized boor with a perplexing desire to demonstrate your lack of comprehension, "desecrating" a book in any way that damages or tarnishes said book demonstrates you're a barbarian, a modern savage, pure and simple.

(And I don't mean to go soft on the Catholic League here either. Bill Donohue's vow to sic the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Meyers is a touching manifestation of the ecumenical spirit. But it only heaps more undeserved attention on Meyers' stunt, as well as shows more than a whiff of a victim/persecution complex).

But amidst all the din on PZ blog, David Heddle attempted to get a point across about Russell's oft-quoted teapot analogy. There's something that always bothered me about that analogy. I read very little of Russell. I have his history of Western philosophy somewhere on my shelf but it's in the partially-read state so many of my books are in. But I'm at least aware that he wrote it, and I'm aware that Russell remained on friendly or respectful terms with such thoughtful philosophical theists as Whitehead, and that he engaged with philosophical defenses of theism. Why would he put forward such an awful argument?

Unless, as David Heddle argues, the argument is not so much an argument against theism as such, but an argument against a careless way of shifting the burden of proof:

Theist: Why would the burden of proving the existence of God be on me? After all, as an atheist, you surely cannot disprove the existence of God.
Russell: Ah, but there are many things I cannot disprove. I cannot disprove the hypothesis that somewhere around Saturnus a tiny teapot is orbiting - one so tiny that our most powerful telescopes can't catch it. But surely this is not an argument for accepting the existence of such a teapot?

The catch here is of course that the retort only flies in as far as the theist leaves unspecified whether the God whose existence is debated is an empirical reality, a metaphysical presupposition, or some kind of transcendent reality encountered in faith and mysticism. And that's as far as it goes. If the theist specifies that God is a purely empirical reality, an "entity" part of the cosmos in the same way particles and gas clouds and supernovae are, then he must furnish possible ways of falsifying or verifying God's existence - and if he does, out goes the analogy (regardless of whether the theist's further arguments are any good). If he is arguing for God to be some kind of metaphysical presupposition, he would need to defend it by showing how more everyday, including empirical, ideas about the world depend on it. And so forth. Russell's analogy, on Heddle's reading, works but it only works as a reply to one specific kind of argument by a very careless theist. Used as a general argument on theism, it often rests on unexamined presuppositions (such as a positivistic theory of knowledge, i.e. the only propositions worth discussing are those that are empirically verifiable or falsifiable) which the theist is under no obligation to share.

UPDATE: So Myers did mistreat his communion wafer, if it is indeed that - together with ripping out pages from a translation of the Koran as well as The God Delusion. I'd have betted on Origin myself. In any event, the juvenile behaviour in question is accompanied by a long piece on Catholicism and Anti-Semitism which would be interesting just about anywhere else, as well as with the following exhortation:

By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities' knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

I cannot but marvel but at the mentality which couples destroying books with questioning everything - but I guess questioning everything is useful. For a little while. Until you find out that there are things that are sacred, that there are truths that you live by, and that these have been mediated by tradition - and that's just the first step.

Karadzic

2008-07-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Don't send him to The Hague, to a Tribunal instituted by Nobody, representing Nobody and handing out sentences in Nobody's name. Do not be fooled by such concepts as International Community, Humanity, and so forth. Humanity is, absent the Kingdom of God, an ideal, a possibility, but not here yet, and certainly not involved in the administration of international justice. And those who feign to act in its name are liars. Instead, there are tribes, clans, religious communities and nations - and it is against these that Karadzic committed his crimes, and it is these that should sentence him. His place is in Sarajevo.

Do not be concerned about fair trials, as those that were hand-wringing about the fairness of Saddam Hussein's trial. Deposed tyrants and kings and vanquished warlords and generals do not receive fair trials. Hussein did not, Ceaucescu did not. The Nazis at Nuremberg did not. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette did not. The Czar was not even given a trial (the Bolsheviks understood the real point of the exercise well enough). Responsibility is too scattered among too many smaller thugs and officers and functionaries. It is not about justice - there is no room for such a thing at historical points of transition. It is about power. For the new state to be born and assert its legitimacy, the old must be done away with in an expiatory act of bloodshed.

I was strongly against the extradition of Milosevic to that Nobody's tribunal in The Hague, not because of much sympathy to Milosevic. If, in defiance of NATO and the European Union and the United Nations and other such nonentities, the Serbs would have asserted themselves and done a Ceaucescu on him, such an action alone would have bestowed more dignity on that people (as well as on Milosevic himself, oddly) than anything much else that has happened in post-Milosevic Serbia. Note that there was enough to object to with the tribunal itself. Its inability to decide whether to have a trial or an extended therapy session for one - if I recall, Milosevic was in the sixth year of his imprisonment at the time of his death, and the trial had anything but ended. Then there is the time of the indictment, which was at the height of the bombings of Yugoslavia, by which the tribunal made itself rather blatantly into a party in the ongoing conflict. Of course, this was not surprising, since this, too, was about power rather than justice. In the end, I just happened to disapprove of the entities wielding said power.

Or indeed the ideology behind it. Which was that of the most blatant worshippers of power - the Western European babyboomer former radicals. The privileged brats of 1968 who turned the Left from anything remotely to do with practical politics to the uncritical worship of any far-away armed movement with the vaguest allegiances to "socialism", to desperate acts of terror in the cities of West Germany and Italy, to hopeless sectarianism encapsulated in minuscule "workers vanguards" ran by their miniature tinpot Stalins and Maos complete with miniature tinpot show trials, excommunications, etc., etc. - and eventually, rather comfortably, to the hallways of power itself. Where the iron faith in the perfectability of man by high explosives turned into the worship of American warplanes bombing old European cities. The ideology of Joschka Fischer, Tony Blair, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Stalinists-turned-MEPs and other ideologues of military humanism.

Yet the world has moved on. Military humanism - the spread of Western-European and American ideals of democracy and liberal society through the massive and coordinated use of firepower - has pretty much met its fate in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not to be lamented - if a resurgence of Talibanism in Afghanistan definitely would be. Multi-ethnicism, the attachment to which pretty much defined the Western liberal response to Yugoslavia, is a dirty word now in most Western European societies, which seem to be obsessed with the idea of Muslims either planning to kill us or to outbreed us. We're falling apart.

Which is why the Serbs and Bosnians should pay no heed to the demands of the European Union or international organizations running courthouses - the legitimacy of these institutions themselves is under increasing strain. The legitimacy of Serbia as a nation is not, and that of a multi-ethnic Bosnian nation may not be either. But it must be asserted over and outside the confines of Europeanism. Karadzic should not be shuttled out far away to some clean maximum-security prison cell in some country like Italy or Norway or another which has nothing to do with him. He should not be prosecuted by a Swiss or English attorney and sentenced by a panel of judges from France or South Korea or some such. Instead, he should answer to the people of Bosnia and them only. Don't let your modern sensibilities be offended by such notions as blood sacrifice and the like. Not all old ideas are bad. It's not about justice, even though justice may be done: but a symbolic exercise of power by the hands of a people over the ghosts of the past that still haunt it. Karadzic should be tried, accused and shot in Sarajevo. "International community" and the rest of the world be damned.

Encountering the Communion Wafer

2008-07-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

PZ Meyers got himself into a bit of a fracas with Catholics. See here, here and a bunch of other places on his blog. Reason? PZ Meyers solicited consecrated communion wafers for him to publicly desecrate:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

Now, why would an adult, and a well-educated and intelligent one at that, want to do such a thing? When I was fifteen, I didn't even bother about winding up Catholics as they weren't nearly bothersome enough to me. Much more fun to wind up the Evangelical kids and Youth for Christ types who were attempting to "save" me. Funny how things turned out. In any event, PZ Meyers wants to respond to the issue of a University of Central Florida student who smuggled out a Communion wafer from a Catholic mass:

Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.

"When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him," Cook said. "I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they'd leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth."

A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that's why he brought it home with him.

"She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand," Cook said, adding she wouldn't immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.

Diocese of Orlando spokeswoman Carol Brinati said she was not aware of anyone touching Cook. She released a statement Thursday: "... a Catholic Campus Ministry student representative filed a complaint with the Student Union regarding the behavior of the two young men. A Student Government Representative called Catholic Campus Ministry to apologize for this disruption."

Cook filed an official abuse complaint with UCF's student conduct court regarding the alleged physical force. Following that complaint, Brinati said church members filed their own official complaints of disruptive conduct. Punishment for either offense could result in suspension or expulsion.

"The church feels that I'm the problem here," Cook said. "The problem is actually that this is a publicly-funded religious institution. Through student government here, we fund them through an activity and service, so they're receiving student money."

Cook is upset more than $40,000 in student fees have been allocated to support religious organizations on campus for the 2008-2009 school year, according to student government records. He denied he is holding the Eucharist hostage to protest that support.

I'm not sure what to think of this, except that the student seems to me to be the self-important rebel-without-a-cause type, who apparently knew little of the Catholicism he supposedly wanted to teach his curious friend about.

One of the first things I learned when occasionally attending mass as a child:

You get the wafer, you put it in your mouth, chomp-chomp, down. Immediately. You don't wave it around, or crumble it to little pieces, or slowly nibble on it while sitting again on the bench. People tend to dislike that.

And if you don't want to respect that, you have no business holding that wafer or being in a Catholic Church in the first place.

So the student's explanations, based on the above article to me, smell like crap to me. Methinks he was deliberately provoking people in order to make some political point about religious funding - and regardless of the merits of his cause, I take a pretty low view of his methods (deliberately disrupting a religious ceremony). He should go back to his books, apologize, and stop being such a twit. Same goes for PZ Meyers as far as I am concerned.

This is not to say that the Catholic League is not overreacting by calling for the student's expulsion and action against Meyers on the part of his employer. The student in question may still grow up, and Meyers' competence as a researcher or teacher has little to do with his middlebrow atheism.

A nuanced take on the whole affair at Prosblogion here. Another one from another ScienceBlogger here.

I had just been reflecting a bit on the doctrine of transubstantation - the notion that, at the moment of the Eucharist, the communion bread takes on the essence of the body of Jesus Christ while all its accidents - all its material appearances - remain that of bread. Philosophically, I can't do much with a doctrine that states that an 'essence' can actualize with no change in 'accidents'.

This said, I have no issues with the doctrine either. To an extent, I can apprehend the sense behind it. Of course, the sharing of bread and wine as the body and blood of our Lord has a deeply symbolical sense, affirming the presence of Jesus Christ in the community of believers. But symbolism and literalism don't always contradict. I can very well see how literally holding that, for one indivisible moment, the bread becomes the body of Christ in a very real sense, lends an enormous poignancy and strength to the very symbol. And the believer is part of that symbol, submerging himself into it. One could perhaps argue that, paradoxically, the Eucharist is symbolical precisely by virtue of the presence of Christ in the bread and wine being real (compare my comments on Collingwood's notions of symbolism and faith here).

I'm not sure if I'm getting at anything here. It's just the vague notion that if we call the Eucharist as just a symbol or merely symbolic, we are in a way placing ourselves outside of the event in a way which obscures quite a bit of the religious import of the symbolism to us.

Atheists who har-har-har about the 'irrationality' of religious believers engaging in the Eucharist miss this point. A miraculous event is not a miraculous event in virtue of transcending the laws of nature. It's a miraculous event in virtue of being a sign - something that refers to a reality beyond itself. Criticizing it on the basis of, hey, it's just a cracker, really does not begin to apprehend what the Eucharist is about, what is actually going on in there. If you don't want to, fine. Though your ignoring a dimension to your existence that is as essential to being human as an appreciation for art, or indeed, science.

Just keep your hands off that wafer, and don't whine if you get pushed around a bit while you are essentially sabotaging a religious ceremony. You're not a paragon of rationality and Enlightenment values - you're being an uncivilized boor.

The Transitional Program on the Mount

2008-07-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

There was in the 1930's across 7th Avenue a giant sign, a quote by Earl Browder, 'Communism Is 20th Century Americanism.' And when I heard about that I thought, hmm, I want to put another sign across 7th Avenue, 'Trotskyism Is 20th Century Calvinism.'
James Robertson, Spartacist League/US, 1978

On the issue of morality, the Law, and the impossibility of us meeting God's standards by our own devices, David Heddle has a post up with which I pretty much agree. I'm not a Calvinist (I think) but I can very much sympathize with the doctrine of Total Depravity as explained by "one-point Calvinist" Heddle.

Reflecting on the stuff I wrote in my last post, it struck me that the reasoning was all too familiar to me. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Back in my Trot days, I was acquainted with the logic of transitional demands - of demanding the impossible, essentially, in a similar fashion as Jesus demands the impossible from his followers.

Most main-stream Communist parties have always essentially followed the method of Social Democracy combined with some overt genuflections towards the Soviet Union or other "actually existing socialist" states - without this reflecting on their actual political program very much. Which basically contained demanding a reform of the conditions within Capitalism. For socialism and better toilet-paper in the factory bathroom, so to speak. I do not mean to be so disparaging as I sound, on second thought - main-stream Communists as well as Social Democrats have actually gotten important things done in Western Europe, when given the chance.

A smaller group essentially followed the logic of demanding everything, right here, right now. Full-blown Communism, with fully common ownership of the means of production, etc. the morning after the revolution. Some Maoist and Ex-Maoist groups, such as the Progressive Labor Party in the US, have tendencies towards this kind of maximalism. From a Marxist perspective (not to speak of a pragmatical political one) it's of course nonsensical. We make our own history not in circumstances of our own choosing - and overcoming the constraints of the (reformist) general ideology of the workers' movement cannot be simply done by stamping our foot and saying that we really, really want full-blown Communism. Right now.

The third approach is the one actually pioneered by Leon Trotsky in his 1938 Transitional Program. The approach is, somewhat like the maximalists above, to "demand the impossible" but not in an abstract, general fashion like "Communism now!" but in the shape of concrete demands in response to concrete situations. The political program of the Fourth International would have to propose solutions to the concrete problems of Capitalism which cannot be accomodated by the Capitalist system itself. The "ideal", the "then", must appear in some concrete shape as a programmatical demand, allowing us to basically transcend the logic of reforming the Capitalist system within the boundaries laid by Capitalism itself and apprehend a revolutionary political logic. Basically, the Transitional Program is a political program which constantly reaches beyond Capitalism, with yet its feet firmly planted in the now.

The tragedy of the Trotskyist movement is that it has preserved the dialectical "edge" of Marxism more than any other Marxist or post-Marxist current, contained and contains some of the finest and most acute minds of the radical Left (starting with Trotsky itself) and yet has remained utterly marginal. And constantly ripped apart by the twin temptations of sectarianism and ideological puritanism on the one hand (see the Maoists) and political opportunism, foregoing the transitional program for the logic of campaigning for small, piecemeal changes in the here-and-now, on the other.

In any event, what I saw laid out in the Sermon on the Mount reminded me strongly of the political logic that I had tried to wrap my head around earlier. The demands of Jesus are impossible. We cannot refrain from hating and despising and lusting after one another - this follows simply from our condition, our fallenness, our alienation from God and each other, our Total Depravity if you're a Calvinist. How, then, can we hope to enter the Kingdom of God? We cannot, not by our own devices - but by the undeserved grace of God. Where Trotsky's Transitional Program basically criticizes the current, concrete conditions of Capitalism from the viewpoint of the future and thereby allows us to transcend our ideological constraints, the Sermon criticizes our fallenness from the viewpoint of the Kingdom of God, and thereby allows us to apprehend precisely what it takes to enter it - which is the first step towards a reconciliation with God.

I wrote this because I found the similarity amusing. There is no question where my own sympathies lie - I have written before that I believe the precise tragedy of Marxism to lie in its notion of Man as shaped by social and ideological circumstance and therefore mutable and perfectable, rather than, as in Christianity, as simultaneously containing an inalienable, essential dignity as created in the image of God and an ineradicable stain in its fallenness. This lead the Marxists to sacrifice current generations of men in the name of the next on the killing fields in Siberia, China, etc. It does not do to say that Stalinism was corrupted, or that the Stalinists and Maoists were evil. Even if they were, the sting lies precisely in the recognition that their crimes were made possible by the actions of those who were trying to do the good.

Dawkins the Marcionite

2008-07-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

(Via Exile from Groggs) a confused but funny piece by Dawkins on 'Atheists for Jesus'. Key quote:

Of course Jesus was a theist, but that is the least interesting thing about him. He was a theist because, in his time, everybody was. Atheism was not an option, even for so radical a thinker as Jesus. What was interesting and remarkable about Jesus was not the obvious fact that he believed in the God of his Jewish religion, but that he rebelled against many aspects of Yahweh's vengeful nastiness. At least in the teachings that are attributed to him, he publicly advocated niceness and was one of the first to do so. To those steeped in the Sharia-like cruelties of Leviticus and Deuteronomy; to those brought up to fear the vindictive, Ayatollah-like God of Abraham and Isaac, a charismatic young preacher who advocated generous forgiveness must have seemed radical to the point of subversion. No wonder they nailed him.

Then Dawkins goes on to marvel at humanity's capacity for altruism, which has evolved far beyond what reasons for survival would have dictated. Dawkins wonders how the memes of the 'super-nice' could be encouraged to spread. Apart from the memetics idiocy, this part is actually not all that bad. It shows the very big gulf between Dawkins' ideas and social Darwinism. But then Dawkins comes up with:

I am no memetic engineer, and I have very little idea how to increase the numbers of the super nice and spread their memes through the meme pool. The best I can offer is what I hope may be a catchy slogan. 'Atheists for Jesus' would grace a T-shirt. There is no strong reason to choose Jesus as icon, rather than some other role model from the ranks of the super nice such as Mahatma Gandhi (not the odiously self-righteous Mother Teresa, heavens no). I think we owe Jesus the honour of separating his genuinely original and radical ethics from the supernatural nonsense which he inevitably espoused as a man of his time. And perhaps the oxymoronic impact of 'Atheists for Jesus' might be just what is needed to kick start the meme of super niceness in a post-Christian society. If we play our cards right - could we lead society away from the nether regions of its Darwinian origins into kinder and more compassionate uplands of post-singularity enlightenment?

I think a reborn Jesus would wear the T-shirt. It has become a commonplace that, were he to return today, he would be appalled at what is being done in his name, by Christians ranging from the Catholic Church to the fundamentalist Religious Right. Less obviously but still plausibly, in the light of modern scientific knowledge I think he would see through supernaturalist obscurantism. But of course, modesty would compel him to turn his T-shirt around: Jesus for Atheists.

A few thoughts:

1. The article pretty well illustrates the sophisticated, condescending position that Jesus was a great moral teacher, sort of like Gandhi, just a pity there's so much supernaturalist nonsense in the New Testament. If we would just take away the conversations with daemons, the healing of the blind and the crippled and the sick, the walking over the water, the resurrection after three days - all the miraculous fairy-tales which, in our age of Science and Reason, we have outgrown - we could well assent to his teachings. The problem with this position is of course that it is, well, shit. Without the miracles, the temptation in the desert, the daemons and most importantly the death and resurrection, the gospel is reduced to nothing. And if you don't understand why all those things that offend our modernist sensibilities yet must be there, you haven't really understood anything of it.

2. Another thing: Dawkins makes a lot of the supposed contradiction between Jesus' teachings and the 'vengeful', 'vindictive' God of Abraham. It's an unfortunate but very commonly human phenomenon that we either see contradictions or continuities - but not both at the same time. And in as far Jesus stood in contradiction to the Old Testament he also stood at the end of a line that was drawn throughout the Old Testament. I am not talking here about the Messianic prophecies - but in the way the Old Testament, at the same time as it lays down the Law, continuously reaches for something beyond, something transcending the Law.

3. The God of Abraham is, of course, the God that reveals Himself by rejecting human sacrifices. A God who in one key passage is persuaded by Moses not to destroy the people who have turned away from him:

"I have seen these people," the LORD said to Moses, "and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation." But Moses sought the favor of the LORD his God. "O LORD," he said, "why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, 'It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth'? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: 'I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.' " Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. (Exodus 32: 9-14).

Or the God of Jonah, who was moved by the repentance of the Ninevites he had intended to destroy, to the displeasure of his prophet, and who gives Jonah the following lesson: Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live." But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?" "I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die." But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" (Jonah 4: 5-11).

Or the God of the prophets, who continuously rejects outward ritual observance in favour of lived faith, the spirit of the Law: Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations — I cannot bear your evil assemblies. Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts my soul hates. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. (Isaiah 1: 13-17).

Or: With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6: 6-8).

Or indeed the maligned God of Leviticus: Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him.
Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD. Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. Do not go about spreading slander among your people.
Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor's life. I am the LORD. Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19: 13-18), When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19: 33).

This God is the same God of love, compassion and forgiveness that Jesus preached.

4. Dawkins quotes the Sermon on the Mount:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.'" But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5: 38-48).

Now, first of all, with these injunctions, Jesus was not proclaiming a new Law to succeed the old: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." (Matthew 5: 17-18).

Second, the passage that Dawkins quoted may indeed sound pleasant to well-meaning, pacifist-minded secularists. But what of the following two?

"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell. (Matthew 5: 21-22)

"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. (Matthew 5: 27-30).

They, to me, illustrate the difficulty of taking Jesus' sayings as mere ethical injunctions. As injunctions towards 'niceness'. Or even 'super niceness'. Reflecting on them, I am painfully conscious of how far I fall short of them. I may restrain from adultery - but the very thought of adultery? And how often I have called my brothers idiots - on this blog, to begin with? Compare the spirit of the passages above with the basic 'golden rule' ("Do unto others..."). This is a call to action, or the refraining of actions - whereas the passages in the Sermon of the Mount call for a cleansing of the spirit, which is much, much more difficult to obtain. More precisely, they illustrate precisely how radical the Biblical commandment of love is.

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?" "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments." "Which ones?" the man inquired. Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,' and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'" "All these I have kept," the young man said. "What do I still lack?"
Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. (Matthew 19: 16-22).

Notice first how Jesus is reluctant to explain to the young man what is good. At his question, he first explains the commandments, and only when the young man perseveres in his questioning, Jesus answers that if the young man wants to be perfect (see the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect., Matt. 5: 48) he is to abandon his wealth and follow him.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Matthew 19: 23-26).

Jesus here illustrates the impossibility for a wealthy man to enter the kingdom of heaven by his own devices, but elaborates on the astonished questions of his disciples that what is impossible for humans may yet be possible for God.

5. Again, if we bowdlerize Jesus' message by taking out all the supernatural stuff and concentrate on the notion of 'Jesus as a great moral teacher', we are left with a moral teacher who sets impossible standards. And leaves me, personally, feeling very much like the rich young man who leaves Jesus' company dejected. An alternative is to read the passages as illustrating precisely how high the standards are that God sets for us, and how impossible it for us to meet them by our own intermittent, occasional goodness, if that. But this exercise is futile on an atheist/secularist reading of the gospel such as Dawkins proposes.

6. If you'll allow me to indulge in stereotypes, there's two kinds of atheists. The first one is the liberal secular humanist type: they like their universal moral standards, universal rights and liberties - just no God, please. This is the type that tends to react as though bitten by a snake if you bring up the Argument from Morality as they tend to intepret it as to say atheists can't be moral, and being moral is important to them. To the extent that a lot of their criticism towards religion is inspired by the very immoral past and present behaviour of religious leaders and institutions. And if we were to just leave these behind and have our decisions guided by the light of Science and Reason, we will evolve towards a more just, tolerant, happy society. Most 'New Atheists' are exponents of the first type.

The second one would cheerfully allow the Argument from Morality and contend that, as there is no God, there are no universal morals either. We are bags of chemicals and subject to whatever chance and necessity nature has in store for those: normative systems are entirely conventional. I would guess some Satanists are of the second type. As may be Sartre. And my favourite De Sade.

Now, if I were adrift in shark-infested waters, thrashing around and seeing black fins approach me, and at the same time a boat full of atheists holding a rope, I would hope they would be first-type atheists. That goes without saying.

Nevertheless, I am much closer in my outlook to the second type than the first type. Because I am not so convinced that humans are particularly good or moral. In his brilliant satire Justine, Sade describes a virtuous heroine who continuously falls victim to all kinds of tormentors, and who when confronted with an opportunity to kill one of them, refuses to do so as such an action is not virtuous (after which the victimization of the heroine continues). In other words: either become an amoral predator or fall victim to one. Eat lunch or be lunch. And religion and morality, to Sade, are pious lies to convince the lunch to resign to its fate.

Were I an atheist, I could not but agree. And I cannot but agree with Sade that, taken in themselves, the torture and the pain of others are rather delightful things. It's ugly, but there it is. Certainly the behaviour of people when given the slightest chance does tend to convince me that the sentiment is widespread.

So if an atheist were to ask me: Do I need God, do I need Divine commands to do the right thing? I would have to answer that I pretty much do. You're blessed if you don't. But I do. For as far as I can be arsed to do the right thing, that is.

7. If the Gospel would be merely a message of morality, of being 'nice' or 'super-nice' as Dawkins wants it to be, I would despair of it. Turn my face away, and depart like the rich young man in Matt. 19. I would turn to some libertine cult with lightly-clad ladies and hallucigenic substances, or some weird Gnostic sect with lots of arcane and cryptic writings to satisfy my liking for puzzles. But not Christianity (let alone Dawkins' secular humanism with Christian influences).

Fortunately, it isn't. It's about hope - hope that the small death that I experience in my reptile-brained desires and fears, arrogance and pride, and all that, sin, basically - the wilful turning away from standards that I am all too well aware of, and the big death that looms at the end of the road might yet be conquered. Has been conquered by Christ and the grace of God.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he leads justice to victory. (Matthew 12: 20).

That ultimate message, which speaks to the depths of a broken and stained soul and whispers it may yet be clean, cannot be secularized.

Collingwood on faith

2008-06-10T14:15:00.000-07:00

One of the more annoying features of theist/atheist discussions is the confusion about the concept "faith". Some atheists will all too easily assert something like: "faith is belief without evidence" which basically tries and fails to comprehend religion within a framework not at all adapted to it. The issue of the existence of God, and the issue of evidence, is an interesting one for philosophy of religion - but it simply doesn't do for religion itself, where God is encountered or experienced more than the existence of God is believed or disbelieved in. And on the other hands, some theists will assert that scientific thought departs from unprovable assumptions too, which is true, but does not make those assumptions a matter of faith in the religious sense. Placing believing in the existence of other minds (a necessary assumption for scientific activity) on a par with believing in God as faith at the same time trivializes religious faith (as it is not a background assumption which we can live our lives holding but never really questioning) and trivializes the genuine ambiguity of the universe with regards to the question of theism and atheism.

I've often in discussions like that tried to distinguish the theism question as an issue of philosophy from the question of faith/religion as an issue of attitude. As it is possible, I guess, to hold to the existence of some supreme being and at the same time not care very much. And on the other hand, it is possible to enter in a very definite relationship with God while remaining profoundly ambivalent or doubtful on the question of the existence of God. So theism would essentially deal with an "I-it" relationship (the "it" being an abstract concept), while faith and religion proper deal with an "I-You" (the "You" being the concrete presence of a personal God).

I've been reading further on in Collingwood's works, and he has a slightly different, but very interesting take on the matter. In Speculum Mentis (1924), Collingwood discusses first art, as a paradoxical activity at bottom imaginative and intuitive, yet marked by a conceptual structure and by (normative) rationality. Religion, for Collingwood, is essentially artistic activity which asserts (other than art proper) the reality of its object. Collingwood first criticizes the equivalence sometimes drawn between religious faith and "faith" in ultimate metaphysical principles (p. 132):

But faith is the specific form of the religious reason. It is that knowledge of ultimate truth which, owing to its intuitive or imaginative form, cannot justify itself under criticism. This qualification is important, for other modes of knowledge - science, history - fail to justify themselves under criticism, as we shall see, and yet are not forms of faith. To overlook this is a common source of confusion and sophistry. Religious apologetic, seizing upon the truth that science depends in the last resort upon unjustifiable assumptions, accuses science of being in the same boat with religion, the boat of faith. Nothing could be less true or better calculated to confuse the whole issue. Faith is essentially intuitive and not assumptive. God is the object of faith, not an hypothesis: Euclidean space is an hypothesis, not the object of faith.

Then Collingwood argues that the hallmark of faith is that it is directed towards a symbol which refers to a meaning which we cannot wholly abstract from the symbol itself, and we therefore cannot hope to wholly analyze in the same way as we can with the symbols of philosophical or mathematical (or everyday) language. The defining characteristic of faith is that it is directed towards a symbol which refers to a reality which we cannot otherwise grasp in quite the same way (p. 133):

Faith is thus the mind's attitude towards a symbol which expresses a truth not explicitly distinguished from the symbol. Hence the truth is something 'not seen', for the symbol, so to speak, occults it, it is hidden behind the symbol, which is opaque to the truth and yet is felt to be charged with the significance of the hidden truth. By being so charged, it acquires an intense emotional value, for it 'reveals' the truth, that is, presents it in an intuitive or imaginative form, not a form that can be justified by criticism. We cannot argue about the truths of religion just because they are thus occulted by their own symbols; and it is this hiddenness, this darkness of the glass, that gives religion all its negative characteristics.

The positive characteristics of religion are its illumination, its freedom, its power of saving the soul; in a word, its priceless gift of ultimate truth. Its negative characteristics are that it lives only by faith and not by sight, that God is not known but only worshipped, 'reached' but not 'grasped' by the mind, that it cannot justify itself to reason or rise wholly above the level of superstition, and that therefore in the long run and in spite of all its best efforts it falls back into feeling, emotion - love, awe and so forth - and therefore, like art, is an intermittent and unstable experience. The division of life into sacred and profane, Sundays and weekdays, is a permanent and necessary feature of religion, though the highest and most positive religion always fights against it and tries to sanctify the whole of life. For this division is the logical consequence of the negative side of religion, that side which makes it a matter of mere faith. This negative side reduces religion to feeling, and therefore affects it with the necessary impermanence and instability of feeling.

And, concluding, (p. 133-134)

Its negative side condemns religion to leave something outside itself, to have an opposite standing over against itself unreconciled. This opposite appears now in the form of body as opposed to soul, now in the form of the devil as opposed to God, now in the form of secular life as opposed to sacred, or the priest as opposed to the layman, but fundamentally and most deeply in the form of man as opposed to God. These oppositions are the fruit of religion's intuitive nature; as feeling is necessarily intermittent, so the intuitive form of truth erects into two concrete and distinct images truths which are really not distinct but complementary aspects of the same truth. Because religion is rational, the specific task of religion is to overcome these dualisms, and to this subject we shall return in the sixth section of the present chapter.

Thus, the notion of faith as attitude towards God is encapsulated in the emotional load that the imaginative symbols bear. The notion of faith as a mode of knowledge unjustifiable by criticism ("faith is belief without evidence") is encapsulated in the notion that the truth to which the symbol refers cannot be wholly abstracted from, and analyzed without recourse to, the symbol itself. Think of a poem. It is composed of linguistic symbols, with meaning and referents, but the meaning cannot be simply abstracted from the poem because the poem - the rhythm, the patterns of sounds and the paradigmatic structures and associations drawn by those - and not just structure, but structure which conveys or rather which is beauty - are precisely part of that which the poem refers to, signifies. If art, as Collingwood argues, is concerned with beauty and religion, in contrast, with worship, that which is beautiful or to be worshipped cannot be considered apart from the symbols of art and religion (Art cannot be translated because it has no meaning except the wholly implicit meaning submerged, in the form of beauty, in the flood of imagery, p. 129). Collingwood regards the effort to experience God, the "ultimate truth" of religion, outside and independently of the symbolic and ritual language of religion (of which the concept "God" is part), as noble but ultimately self-destructive:

The great saints really do find God everywhere, (...) really do transfuse with religion the whole of life. This is at once the perfection and the death of the religious consciousness. For in grasping the inmost meaning of ritual and worship it deprives these special activities of their special sanctity and of their very reason for existing; the whole body of religion is destroyed by the awakening of its soul. But the awakened soul, in this very moment of triumph, has destroyed itself with its own body: it has lost all its familiar landmarks and plunged into that abyss of mysticism in which God himself is nothing. Mysticism is the crown of religion and its deadliest enemy; the great mystics are at once saints and heresiarchs. (p. 127)

I am attracted by the idea that the core meaning of faith in the religious sense lies precisely in the artistic, imaginative nature of the symbols at heart of religious experience, symbols which simultaneously reveal and hide. We cannot express our (fleeting, intermittent, often ambiguous but nonetheless very real) experience of the Divine ultimate "ground of our being" except in metaphorical language. "God", "Father", "Lord" are metaphors. There is an obvious acknowledgement of that fact in the Jewish taboo on God's name and on imagery of God, but perhaps also in the deeply paradoxical nature of the Trinity in Christianity. The paradoxical wording of the Chalcedonian creed on the nature of Christ (the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ) is not simply obscurantist, rather, it conveys that the precise nature of God and Christ lies beyond our understanding. And yet real.

And ultimately, I am attracted to these notions precisely because I hold the events of the New Testament to have really occurred. And at the same time, they are obviously symbols. It is not so much that the Gospels are poems: it is that the events they depict are a "true myth", a poetry of events. It does not do to wonder whether Jesus could really walk on water, the point is to wonder why he did so, what did he mean by it. And why did God the Son, God the Word - the Word as the rational structure underlying reality? Or at the same time as the Word as a revelation of ultimate, Divine reality in a way we could comprehend? - become flesh? Wondering how such an event has come to be is one thing, but the key to understanding it is understanding why - what did God mean by it? It's nothing less than exhilarating to keep the symbolical and the literal as complementary aspects of the same events, rather than as mutually exclusive.

For Collingwood, the assertion of the reality of its object is central to religion (as opposed to art), and is closely connected to the social nature of religion, which flows from the fact that reality is common to all of us (p. 115-116):

Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labelled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art never can be. (...) This is because religion achieves an explicit logical structure. It is assertion, and in its higher forms knows that it is assertion, though even in its most primitive forms its implicit logic produces the instinctive and unreflective sociability of primitive cultus. Now assertion or the logical function of the mind is the recognition of reality as such, and reality is that which is real for all minds.

It is the explicitly rational character of religion that necessitates religious controversy and persecution, for these are only corollaries of its cosmological and social nature. To deprecate them and ask religion to refrain from them is to demand that it shall cease to be religion; and the demand is generally made by those shallow minds which hate the profundity and seriousness of the higher religions and wish to play at believing all the creeds in existence. This religious aestheticism, or degradation of religion to the level of play, for which a creed is a mere pretty picture to be taken up and put down at will, is only one of the enemies which religion to-day encounters, and a despicable enemy at that.

My own conversion to Christianity started many years ago when reading the story of Abraham. I was somehow struck by the internal coherence, logical and beauty of the story: of God showing himself to be a true God, and a reliable God, through refusing the sacrifice of children, at the same time as Abraham showed himself to be a trusting servant of God by leading his son to the altar without doubt or fear. I began to suspect that the justification of the story somehow lay in the story itself. The same thing, much later, with the Gospel: the witness of God becoming flesh, suffering on the cross and conquering suffering and death by rising on the third day somehow made such tremendous sense that I could not but hold the Gospel to be true on both the poetic and the literal level.

I think this gets close to what Collingwood means when he argues that in religion, we encounter ultimate truth in a symbol charged with a truth which cannot be simply separated from it.

But now I also understand why C.S. Lewis experienced his own conversion in such a gloomy and dejected mood. For every conversion is in a way a surrender of the intellect, in that we open ourselves up to a highly symbolical encounter with a reality which our minds can never fully grasp. So the atheist that charges that faith is belief without evidence is not entirely wrong, but tries to express a truth in terms which are unsuitable for it.

But it is a glorious surrender, nonetheless.

Against democracy

2008-06-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about democracy, and decided I don't like it. Democracy has made it impossible to light up in a bar, caused Finland to not win this year's Eurovision Song festival and brought Hitler to power. But more seriously, the supposed superiority of democratic government is a bit of a sacred cow in the West. Few people think of possible alternatives, and the main question seems to be whether to impose democracy on deviant states elsewhere through bombing them back to the stone age or imposing sanctions and boycotts on them.

Truthfully, I think that the more people involved in the making of any policy decision, the worse the decision will tend to work out. More specifically, democracy and individual rights do not always mesh well - especially in a society paralyzed with fear of terrorism, alcohol, passive smoking, etc. Chesterton's quote on idolatry ( (...) committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.) comes a lot to mind nowadays. And most seriously, no democracy can really cope with policy alternatives that really call into question the foundations of the state or the national economy. The Weimar republic was a democracy confronted with serious policy alternatives. And in the current absence of genuine ideological discussion, European democracies at least seem overly focused on nannyistic micromanaging of citizen's lives, fending off imaginary threats to safety and security, etc.

I've been looking for a new political home, and have been reading up on National Anarchism - a far-right version of classical anarchism mainly associated with Troy Southgate, a political nomad on the British far-right fringe. The basic idea seems to be the substitution of the modern state by self-determining communities (villages, city-states) with a moral regime, ideological underpinning and ethnic structure of their own choosing. There's a lot to intensely dislike about National Anarchism. First of all, the perennial racism (National Anarchists are big on "racial separatism", which entails that the communal structure of future society would be ethnically segregated) and the anti-semitism. And in as far as National Anarchists seem interested in religion, they are interested in the wrong kind - namely, paganism and the mystical as opposed to the prophetic side of Christianity.

This said, Left-wing anarchists seem to be under the delusion that people will tend to egalitarianism, common ownership, equality between the sexes, ethnic diversity and mixing, if you just let them. Socialism without the Stalinist jackboot. I simply don't think this will work. Every time you put more than two people together, they will tend to define themselves against a common perceived enemy. And tend to prefer the company of those of similar cultural background (note that I do not speak of race, or ethnicity. It's quite possible for multi-ethnic societies to work if endowed with some kind of common cultural foundation or idea). Aside from this, I'm not so sure any more of the ideal is even desirable. Quite regardless of whether the anarchist/socialist ideal of common ownership of the means of production can work, I'm finding my universalism (the idea that humans, created in the image of God, are all endowed with some universal rights, intrinsic worth, etc.) chafing against my conviction that cultural diversity is valuable for its own sake, and that any advancement of universal rights in a community must come from within that community rather than imposed from the outside.

At least the National-Anarchists seem to take self-determination seriously. Just a pity that they see nefarious Jews everywhere, and seem to be enamoured with a hopelessly static and stifling blood and soil mysticism.

The political solution I favour instead is a return to the system of government of the Dutch Republic (1581-1747). See, in modern European monarchies the monarch is essentially a figurehead with the state being a de facto republic. An exception is England at least before a few years back, when the House of Lords had serious power. But the conservative, unifying, galvanizing function of the monarch in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden is a bit of a joke. Mind you, there is no serious republicanism in any of these countries. People are attached to the monarchy. But they are attached to the monarchy for sentimental and gossip-loving reasons, not because the monarch has any viability left as a living embodiment of the nation. Belgium is happily falling apart regardless of the monarchy, and in the Netherlands the monarchy seems powerless to prevent the rapid loss of legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the people. So, I suggest that things should be precisely turned around. Instead of a de facto republic with a de jure monarchy, we need a de facto monarchy in a de jure republic - exactly like the Dutch republic, with the powerful position of the Prince/Stadholder assigned to the Princes of Orange. The consequence would be that the Stadholder would actually function as a "living symbol" of the nation because he would actually exert power.

But better even, the Prince/Stadholder and the republican authorities would be perpetually at each other's throats, jealously guarding and expanding their own privileges at the costs of another. This would keep them too busy to seriously mess with the citizens' private lives, which would make the country a haven of liberty. As in many ways the Dutch Republic was - attracting international luminaries from Descartes to Linnaeus (granted, there was the imprisonment and expulsion of Hugo Grotius, but that was a single case). As governments have an inborn tendency to expand in undesirable directions, the best solution is to provide them with a perfect check on expansion - another, competing government.

So, long live the House of Orange and the Republic of the Netherlands! Rise, Prince William Alexander, and march on The Hague to liberate your long-suffering people from the oppressive regents! Rally your citizen militias, cities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, to guard your ancient privileges against the Prince! And leave us all to our own affairs.

On reading Collingwood's "Essay on Metaphysics"

2008-04-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

Took R.G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics (1939) with me for weekend reading, and it's one of those books that are hard to put down. I'm very fond of his Idea of History because it suggests a metascience for history and historical linguistics that makes a tremendous amount of sense: if what a historian does is indeed re-enacting a historical event (namely, an act of reasoning: as all historical events (as opposed to say natural) are rational actions) in his mind, owing up to this may liberate the historical sciences from methodological principles borrowed from the natural sciences on the one hand, and despair on the other. In the study of language change, the rational, logical structure of the events we deal with are very much in our faces - the reanalysis of grammar, the analogical extension of grammatical relations across different paradigms, etc. Yet teleology in language change is a tremendously controversial concept. Collingwood's philosophy of history (which has been applied to linguistics mainly by Raimo Anttila) allows for a way for historical linguistics to "return home" to the human sciences.

But back to the Essay.

No, I'll get to that in a bit. I must first say that, in general, reading stuff like this makes me very melancholy. Most of the philosophers I tend to get very interested in were active in, say, 1880-1940. But it seems such a fascinating (though rather bloody!) time to be alive in other ways as well: in terms of scientific progress, with the previously complacent view on natural science exploded by the Einsteinian revolution and quantum stuff, and in terms of art, literature, music... I get acutely conscious of a wasted education, having had to spent too much time in high school on useless crap instead of Kant and Hegel. Classical languages were probably the most useful subjects I had - even if I have forgotten most of my Latin and Greek, it did give me a definite edge when tackling linguistic concepts later in university. I'm currently scavenging my way around philosophy and theology and all that, picking up something here, something there - but I still lack a basic acquaintance with big ones such as Aristotle or Kant, and my attempts at Hegel were as painful as they were interesting - I can make sense now of the dialectic (something which I never could, funnily enough, as a Marxist), but Hegel writes against a certain historical background with a certain terminology which makes him, for me, very hard to understand.

And I suspect that brilliant generalists such as Whitehead and Collingwood wrote in an intellectual environment which encouraged generalization and engagement with tradition (even if both of them were swimming against the intellectual stream of their own times). I also suspect that modern universities do not really provide such an environment any more. I don't even want to speak of high schools. I'm not whining here - as long as they still have libraries, I'm happy. Wasting a lot of my intellectual energy on Lenin and Trotsky was wholly my own choice, and perhaps some good will still come of it.

But look at the state of our civilization. Look at modern and postmodern art which has ironicized and revolutionized itself to death. Look at the soulless crap of modern popular music. Call me a reactionary, but as far as I am concerned, civilization ended a few decades ago, and all that is left is to poke about the rubble. We just don't know it yet.

But back to Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics, this time for real.

Fascinating move that Collingwood makes: metaphysics is a historical science, as the study of the absolute presuppositions of the scientific knowledge of a given historical actor or epoch (Collingwood uses 'science' and 'scientific' in the broad and correct sense of 'ordered knowledge about a determinate subject' which includes the natural sciences, the humanities, and also applied sciences). 'Historicizing' the subject in such a manner allows Collingwood to deflect the charge of the positivists that metaphysics is concerned with unverifiable propositions, and therefore nonsensical: though Collingwood concedes that the absolute presuppositions underlying a body of knowledge are neither true nor false, the subject of the metaphysician is not so much these presuppositions themselves as their place within the knowledge of a given historical actor, and the truth or falsehood of metaphysics thus seems to be the truth and falsehood of a historical proposition.

This sounds radical on the one hand, but may not be that radical. Last time I read The Idea of History, it struck me that the notion of the human sciences as somehow secundary or subsidiary to (and waiting to be reduced to) the natural sciences puts things on their heads: when studying metaphysics, we study basically rational systems (with all their logical interconnections, analogies), etc. - which is precisely the 'thought studying thought' that is basic to the study of history. If I grapple with a given linguistic change in Old Finnish, I try to 're-enact' what went through the mind of a given writer (or the 'collective mind' of a speech-community). But in the same way, if I try to model, say, process philosophy or Hegelian dialectics in my head, I am doing something very similar. In both cases, it is hermeneutics, rather than a narrow positivist view of the scientific method, that is king.

Now, additionally Collingwood localizes philosophy as historically situated knowledge: the attempt to uncover the absolute presuppositions that underly scientific knowledge in a broad sense:

Let it be understood that the business of metaphysics is to find out what absolute presuppositions have actually been made by various persons at various times in doing various pieces of scientific thinking. Let is be understood that if a certain absolute presupposition has been made on one occasion by one person this fact makes it probable that the same presupposition has been made by other persons having in general what may be called the same cultural equipment as himself: the same outfit of social and political habits, the same religion, the same sort of education, and so forth; but correspondingly improbable that it has been made by persons whose cultural equipment was notably different. At the same time let it be understood that probabilities are not history, which demands proof; and that the only way to prove that somebody has made or has not made a certain absolute presupposition is to analyse the records of his thought and find out (p. 60).

Collingwood exemplifies this in an interesting way: namely by analyzing the role of Christianity, and of a certain conception of God as an absolute presupposition, in the development of science. In context of this, he has a fascinating take on Anselm's argument:

Anselm's proof is strongest at the point where it is commonly thought weakest. People who cannot see that metaphysics is a historical science, and therefore habitually dock metaphysical propositions of their rubric, fancying that Anselm's proof stands or falls by its success as a piece of pseudo-metaphysics, that is, by its success in proving the proposition that God exists, as distinct from the proposition that we believe in God, have allowed themselves to become facetious or indignant over the fact, as they think it, that this argument starts from 'our idea' of God and seems to proceed thence to 'God's existence'. People who hug this blunder are following Kant, I know. But it is a blunder all the same. When once it is realized that Anselm's proof is a metaphysical argument, and therefore a historical argument, it can no longer be regarded as a weakness that it should take its stand on historical evidence. What it proves is not that because our idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit therefore God exists, but that because our idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit we stand committed to belief in God's existence. (p. 189-190).

So, instead of "God is a perfect being" -> "God is a necessary being/cannot fail to exist", we have "God is a perfect being" -> "We cannot think the preceding concept sound yet disallow for God to be an absolute presupposition in our own knowledge of the world". This would not be too far from the modal readings of Anselm's argument defended by for example Hartshorne: if we allow for the possibility of the concept, we are committed to its necessity; likewise, if we are convinced of its impossibility (as J.N. Findlay seemed to be), we stand committed to rejecting the existence of God. In either case, we are far removed from the God that Dawkins et al. disbelieve in, namely, the contingently existing "Star Trek's Q" version of God:

For the Patristic writers the proposition 'God exists' is a metaphysical proposition in the sense in which I have defined that phrase. In following them here, I am joining issue with my 'logical positivist' who evidently does not think it is anything of the kind. In his opinion it has nothing to do with the presuppositions of science but with the existence of a quasi-human but superhuman person. And the department of knowledge (or if you like pseudo-knowledge) to which a proposition concerning a matter of that kind would belong is, I suppose, psychical research; or what booksellers, brutally cynical as to whether these things are knowable or not, classify as 'occult'. There can be no conceivable excuse for classifying it under metaphysics.
If the proposition that God exists is a metaphysical proposition it must be understood as carrying with it the metaphysical rubric; and as so understood what it asserts is that as a matter of historical fact a certain absolute presupposition, to be hereafter defined, is or has been made by natural science (the reader will bear in mind my limitation of the field) at a certain phase of its history. (186-187).

Collingwood proceeds to defend the view that, for early Christian writers, one of the ways to defend their faith was to show that it in fact solved some open issues within the reigning classical metaphysics of their time.

I will have to reflect on this a bit. Collingwood's view on metaphysics seems attractive to me in the sense that it confirms my intuition that metaphysics is ultimately a human science with the same basic methodology as other fields of the humanities; his contention that it is also a historical science I need to digest a little bit more. If Collingwood is right, reflective theists would want to think about how God functions as a presupposition in their own body of knowledge - not only scientific, but also pragmatical (as most reflective theists do, I think). We could also drive the atheists up the walls by explaining that the notion that God exists is strictly taken neither true nor false, yet absolutely necessary as a basic presupposition. At the very least, the notion of God would need to be attacked or defended in connection with the ordered body of knowledge it is a part of. Perhaps this may suggest a way of grounding belief in God in continuous religious practice. Which is something I've been getting more interested in as of late.

Wilders

2008-03-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

(UPDATE: It seems Wilders' film has appeared. I'll have a look at it later).

(UPDATE OF UPDATE: LiveLeak removed the film because of threats. Still available though at http://www.fok.nl/mirror/fitna.html. Dutch version, at least. Otherwise check google videos.)

(UPDATE 2: I just saw Wilders' overhyped videoclip. First impressions: not unskilfully done, but the classical music is too soft. Would have needed something more ominous and martial, like Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War". As it is, it makes me want to go to sleep. The film itself consists of gory footage of Islamists atrocities and footage of extremist preachers and politicians in the first half, coupled with manipulatively translated sections of the Quran - I seriously doubt the Quran has a word for "terrorize" with exactly the same implications we see in the word. In the second half, it switches to scare-mongering about Islamic mass immigrations, photographs of mosques sprouting up in the Netherlands, niqaab-clad women pushing prams, etc. The start is pretty menacing, but the film loses steam very quickly. There's no comment or anything, so as a whole the film becomes overly disjointed and transparantly propagandistic (letting the imagery "speak for itself"). As the film didn't make me hate muslims, I guess it's a failure. Wilders deserves special points for confusing Theo van Gogh-killer Mohammed Bouyeri with Moroccan-Dutch rap talent Salah Edin. Also, he isn't really tearing a page from the Quran, but a page from a phone book while the screen fades to black! Boo hoo! What a coward!)

Michael Moynihan at Reason magazine has a good piece (good, that is, aside from mentioning the words "thoughtful" and "Christopher Hitchens" in the same sentence) on the Geert Wilders controversy in the Netherlands at the moment.

But the article itself is unfortunately another sign of Holland's troubles making it's way into the international press. We used to be famous abroad for our dikes and our tulips and linguistic abilities. Now we are getting famous for islamic extremists murdering filmmakers and empty-headed "Mohammed was a pedo" anti-islamic discourse from what I guess used to be our intelligentsia. Wilders, at heart, is a windbag and a blowhard of little consequence. One who relentlessly focuses on one single issue without any underlying greater vision on Dutch society - which distinguishes him from other fierce critics of Islam such as the late Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh who stood (however incoherently at times) for the libertarian streak in Dutch political history. Wilders, by contrast, is a relentless authoritarian, whose self-serving rumblings on "freedom of speech" when his own speech is concerned contrast sharply with his quickness for calling for bans on speech he doesn't like.

In a normal society, he would be regarded as the village idiot he is, and would have an assured the two seats in parliament normally alotted to cranks. However, thanks to the hysterical response from the Dutch political class to Wilders' planned (and eagerly awaited) fifteen minute anti-Islam videoclip Fitna, he has had just about all the attention the country could muster for the past month or so.

It's not only that the government is trembling in the face of the possible response among our own. It's also that we are involved - without much conviction - in the doomed nation-building project in Afghanistan. Now, the Dutch parliament will ask questions whenever a guy with a beard squints angrily at a Dutch soldier, and our Afghan enemies have not been slow to exploit this.

The result is that Wilders has been granted the political limelight, an electorally comfortable potential-victim role, and reasons to cry censorship, with little effort of his own. Thing with Wilders is, he's a coward at heart. He rejects offers by muslims to debate him. He has rejected an offer by the Dutch Muslim Broadcasting Company to screen his film (provided the film even exists). So he can continue to play the persecuted hero speaking truth to power. This again contrasts him with Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh.

And in the end, Muslims will be right to be angry about Wilders' film if it indeed turns out to be the substance-free hate-fest I expect it to be. Just as they were right at being angry at the Danish cartoons portraying them as scimitar-waving terrorists. Let's make no bones about it: like the cartoons, the film will be designed to offend, to hurt feelings, and nothing more. Any blathering about provoking political discussion about the nature of Islam should be seen for the crap it really is. That's not what Wilders and his supporters are interested in. The whole point of the exercise is to taunt and to jeer and to offend - to vent the frustrations of twenty years of official multiculturalist ideology and it's wilful looking-away from the very real problems immigration brought with it, without actually facing and thinking about those problems.

Sometimes I think Christians should be a little more offended at the crap routinely - and without much protest - thrown at them. The difference is that Christianity in the Netherlands is historically so splintered that most Christian denominations (at least, those that are still vibrant) are used to being inwardly directed, living their own lives within Dutch society. Or being liberalized to death. This is why I am getting a grudging respect for Pope Benedict XVI. Conservative as he may be, he acts with conviction, in line with being at the head of the institution he leads. So I loved it when he snubbed the parvenu American emperor's emissaries, or when he did not sit up and roll over for the secularists at La Sapienza university. This despite with disagreeing with him on many religious matters. I would love to see a little more conviction among Christians participating in the political discussion in Western Europe. It's time to stop making excuses to the secularists for your very existence.

And the same goes for the muslims. The problem is that we are locked between weak-kneed, frightened calls for censorship on the one hand, and the extremely lowbrow nature of the discussion on immigration, secularism, the position of muslims in Western society, and so forth on the other hand. Much as I despise Wilders' views, I hope his film will not be censored and I hope it will be shown on Dutch television. And I would defend his freedom of speech, while holding my nose. Just as I would defend the freedom of a bad cartoonist drawing a dog wearing a turban, or God doing a blowjob, with similar distaste. Though I would rather live in a society where these would be seen for the puerile exercises they really are. Perhaps, the ultimate problem is really fear. A fear which sees no alternatives to dealing with religious minorities by the equivalent of scatological graffiti on the one hand, and denying any sort of problem on the other.

Simon Blackburn on respect and religion

2008-03-20T15:14:00.001-07:00

British philosopher Simon Blackburn has a draft article up on issues of religion and respect from a puzzled atheist perspective. Some thoughtful comments by Chris of Mixing Memory here.

Blackburn starts off with recounting a dinner party where he was asked to join into some kind of religious observance, and refused. I sympathize to some extent with Blackburn here - he was right to refuse to take part in some kind of ceremony signifying something he doesn't believe in.

The rest of the article suffers, I think, from a much too stark dichotomy between what Blackburn calls "onto-theology" - religious beliefs thought as referring to something real, some kind of more or less detailed transcendent reality, and "expressive theology", which draws attention to the symbolic, the metaphorical, without necessarily referring to any transcendent reality. The problem of course is that assenting to some or more of the claims of "onto-theology" does not entail any rejection of the attention to religious practice as involving symbolism, myth, etc. in "expressive theology". And I think a lot of theologists are somewhere in between the two extremes that Blackburn sketches.

But the key quote, as mentioned by Chris at Mixing Memory, is this:

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it--not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. Or, if it is to our advantage that they have false beliefs, as in a game of poker, and we am poised to profit from them, we may be wickedly pleased that they are taken in. But that is not a symptom of special substantial respect, but quite the reverse. It is one up to us, and one down to them.

I think this is mistaken on a number of levels. First of all, the issue of "true" and "false" beliefs is problematic when dealing with religion - without this in any way entailing epistemic relativism. Elsewhere Blackburn writes that "In the
days of onto-theology, we knew what went on when someone claimed that ‘God exists’,
and we knew how to argue that there is not the slightest reason to believe it.". But I kind of doubt that. Because at least with Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, the existence of God becomes quite a different kind of existence than the existence of me or my table or my CD collection (Dawkins has expended great effort on avoiding to understand this). The notion of a necessarily existing being depends on a lot of philosophical framing which may be true of false but cannot surely known to be so (merely shown to be coherent, self-consistent or incoherent; useful and productive or the counterpart, etc.). The same goes for the, overt or hidden, metaphysical presuppositions on which the atheist seeks to challenge theism.

Then there is the notion that we cannot respect beliefs we hold to be false, but rather would seek to convince the holder of such beliefs to abandon them. That's highly doubtful. Much as I believe in certain religious propositions, I am aware and will always remain aware (in this life at least) that I may be mistaken. I believe theism is rationally defensible. So is atheism. And that's as far as it will go. The fallibilistic notion that whatever I believe to be true may eventually turn out to be mistaken for me entails the desire that if I turn out to be mistaken, someone will set me right, which of course necessitates that person holding different beliefs. No intellectual progress can be made without difference of opinion, and thus, with people holding false beliefs. Blackburn's notion that We would prefer them to change their minds illustrates that one should be careful what one should wish for.

That of course raises the question what it should take for a false belief to be respectable. Some kind of fallibilism, probably. Chris at Mixing Memory mentions the pragmatic consequences of the beliefs in question as well as intellectual integrity (as in actually studying the position one polemizes against - a good and venerable practice unfortunately frowned upon in Militant Atheist circles).

It is true that calls for blanket respect for this and that position can quickly turn into some kind of patronizing support of communalism, in which the validity of a position no longer matters. But there is a counterpart - a kind of descent into mindless jeering, without actually dealing in any way with the opposite position - which is just as bad and in a way just the other side of the coin. Some of the more extreme sides of the Militant Atheist spectrum occasionally descend into that (see Rational Response Squad and suchlike outfits). But I was thinking more about the non-approach to islamic minorities in Western Europe. In both cases - blanket respect and ill-informed attacks - actually facing the other position is studiously avoided.

Reading Leonard Cohen's Scorpion

2008-03-06T12:51:00.000-08:00

One book of poetry which I read frequently when I was about seventeen was Leonard Cohen's The Energy of Slaves. Rereading it now, it strikes me how unremittingly bleak most poems are. Back then, they must have fitted my mood just fine.

Leonard Cohen's The Energy of Slaves appeared in 1972, a year after his album, Songs of Love and Hate. Compared to his earlier albums, Songs of Love and Hate is much darker - where some of the work on Songs and Songs from a room are wistful and melancholical in an almost light-hearted manner, the tone on Songs of Love and Hate is much more serious, sometimes sardonic and mocking.

One poem from The Energy of Slaves which hit me immediately upon reading it the first time was Scorpion. Rereading it, it hit me again. The poem is a lyrical, defiant declaration of love of a woman to the scorpion - a brooding, solitary, but in some way heroic figure. The love which is sung in the poem is not an easy love: it is one which consumes and may ultimately destroy the singer. There is a tragic kind of mutual dependency here: the scorpion keeps his woman captive, in a way, in his own isolated sphere, at the same time, his woman is his window on a world he hates. There are many ways to read the poem: as the testimony of a love which lives despite everything: despite the dangers of the outside world, despite the hints of a very abusive relationship strewn throughout the poem, etc. It may also be a very rueful and puzzled comment by a male figure - the scorpion himself - on the love and loyalty shown to him despite his own tricks and his own malice.

The 1971 album, Songs of love and hate, starts off with one very much about both: Avalanche, a brooding, menacing anti-love song which may, perhaps, very well be read as the scorpion's answer to his beloved:

You who wish to conquer pain
You must learn what makes me kind
The crumbs of love that you offer me
are the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential here
It is the shadow of my wound

But, back to Scorpion:

O rare and perfect creature
who has made your nest in me
I'm on my way home to you
singing with the lips
you bloodied out of jealousy
I am your world
I am your wall

I'm on my way home to you - from where? Where has she been? The mention of bloodied lips and jealousy may hint at an act of violence between the two lovers - yet she decides to, despite all that, return to him. The last two lines here are wonderfully paradoxical: I am your world I am your wall - at the same time, the lover is the scorpion's window to the outside world, on the other hand, she presents herself as his protector, his shield, his wall.

You are the last scorpion
who never longed to be a man

What does it mean to long to be a man? Perhaps in a way we become human only when we enter a relationship of mutual, interpersonal love - becoming human only in the eyes of one's beloved, at the same time world and limit to the world. The scorpion heroically and defiantly rejects this. Compare the following lines from Avalanche:

You strike my side by accident
as you go down for your gold
The cripple that you clothe and feed
is neither starved nor cold
he do not ask for your company
not in the centre of the world

And, later on, puzzled:

I have begun to long for you
I who have no greed
I have begun to ask for you
I who have no need
You say you've gone away from me
but I can feel you when you breathe

Continuing Scorpion:

It is only in my heart
that you can dream
of your relentless invasion
of the sunlit plain
when you moved among the numberless
and a woman far more beautiful
than I am
was your invisible queen.

The lover feels unequal to the scorpion, knowing she falls short of his standards; at the same time, she is very much aware of how much he does in fact depend on her. But what does the invasion, the moving among the numberless, refer to? A dream or fantasy of collectivity, of transcendent purpose, by an ultimately isolated and hopelessly alienated individual?

Scorpion scorpion
master of the hollow stone
I will not let them crush you
I do not like their reasons
My heart is numb and swollen
from keeping you
in the safety of your anger
I never could foretell
the loyalty that would claim me
They will not wear you on a brooch
they will not watch you
in a paperweight
I am your dominion
I am your exercise

Again the lover presents herself as the scorpion's protector against a hostile outside world, though perhaps the "I do not like their reasons" means that the offences she suffered for her labours are not forgotten. Her tone is defiant but tired at the same time. On the one hand, her lips are bloodied, her heart is numb and swollen, on the other hand, there are stark declarations of self-sacrifice. Especially in the harsh last lines:

You hate the world I visit
and I am punished
by your solitary truth
Everything you say about the world
is true

Why did the poem hit me? I think that I immediately related the two actors in the poem - the lover and the scorpion - as two conflicting sides of myself. The solitary, withdrawn scorpion, content with himself and his powerful (if ultimately impotent) dreams about his "relentless invasion of the sunlit plain", and hating the world outside him. And the lover, mediating with difficulty between the scorpion and the world that surrounds him, protecting him from those that wish him harm, yet receiving little in way of thanks. And the lover's feelings of insufficiency in the face of her implacable scorpion. In some way, the scorpion, self-assured in his uniqueness and his beauty and his lack of needs above all, represented an ideal I knew I was not equal towards.

I recall being about three or four years old and stroking the cat, and wondering whether the cat had an "internal world" just like I had. And then wondering whether my parents had. Somehow the eyes were important here, as I reflected that the cat had eyes, and so did my parents, but was there anything "behind" them, or were the eyes empty and opaque? Somehow the idea that they had an inner world like I did seemed very odd to me, though at some point I guess that I simply accepted that they had, even if I saw little argument to support the assertion. I've read that a "theory of mind" is supposed to be common to all human beings, but I doubt it. I do have some kind of "theory of mind" but it's a very weak, tentative theory. But to make a long story short: the social sphere, interacting with other people, and all that, did not come very naturally to me. I was always most happy with the company of a book or a sheet of drawing-paper and my "internal world".

My parents took nevertheless a lot of care to teach me the basic rules, to be attentive, to not ignore my playmates, and all that. And in pre-school and high school environments where a some eccentricity was rather well tolerated, I thrived just fine. So I assimilated quite well. Where in some areas I still have trouble, I have my strengths as well.

But sometimes I wonder whether I did not lose something on the way. And that's when the figure of the defiant, solitary scorpion who does not even need the outside world is strangely attractive.

Looking for nuance between evolution and ID

2008-02-26T11:06:00.001-08:00

I'm proud to say that I was a child dinosaur expert before it became fashionable - before what Stephen Jay Gould described as "the great dinosaur rip-off" with Spielberg films, colouring books, plushy animals, etc. I had to satisfy my curiosity with adult reading material and the fossil collection at the local zoo. It began when my father bought me a book about prehistoric animals when I was six or seven or so, and by the end of the year I knew the main facts of about 200 species by heart. I'm not sure what attracted me to it so. Perhaps the classificationary system for the sake of it - the geological timespans, the family tree of animals branching out, etc. I've always liked orderly systems like that. The sheer scariness of some prehistoric animals also contributed to it, no doubt. The lure of a different, primordial world where even the plants are all different, volcanoes going off in the background, etc. But also the beauty of all the different forms involved, such as lithe, graceful Coelophysis, with neck and tail almost too long for its body, built for speed:

I didn't end up a palaeontologist like I intended to when I was little. But I guess there is something of the similar fascination which made me interested in historical linguistics: we are dealing with fossils and layers of fossils of words, which may suggest past stages of language, and part of their social and cultural backgrounds, which we are to reconstruct.

I just came upon this nuanced piece on the evolution/creation struggle (HT: Quintessence of Dust. The article makes a number of points dear to my heart:

In a curious way, Dawkins and his fellow scientific atheists espouse the same notion of God that drives their sworn enemies, the creationists who oppose teaching evolution in public schools. For both camps, the only God who makes sense is one who designed all life with exquisite attention to detail. Scientific atheists disavow such a religion; creationists embrace it.

The point is stark, but it has merit. "Scientific creationism" and such ideas seem to me to a strong degree a relatively recent backlash against Enlightenment secular ideals of science, rooted in perhaps the natural theology of the 18th century but certainly not very much farther back in Christianity. Authors such as Augustine were well-known for being very leery of basing scientific conclusions on Scripture.

The article also mentions the alternative view on creation proposed by John Haught:

Don't think of God as a meticulous designer of life, Haught urges. A detailed design would have limited the paths that living things could take. Instead, he says, God's love led to a world that's always open to new directions for life, without the need for overpowering divine supervision. The chance-fueled nature of evolution doesn't disprove God's existence, Haught believes. It's what God wanted.

"Love persuades, it doesn't force," Haught says. "God doesn't compel the world to be a certain way, and that's because of how love works. God lets things be, and lets the weeds grow up with the wheat."

The Biblical foundation for Haught's view of evolution goes back to St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, which describes how Jesus "emptied himself" to become human. It's a crucial image, Haught believes. That idea of divine emptying--"kenosis" in Greek--offers a way of understanding all of creation. Instead of a mighty autocrat, it portrays God as a self-humbling servant, content to let the universe evolve and novelty emerge.

The notion is very similar to that of process theology, which proposes a panentheistic vision in which God is both primordial and eternal, the necessary being of classical theology, and at the same time unfolding and constantly developing within the unfolding universe. It's an enticing picture (though not without theological problems. Especially notions of sin, fallenness, etc may be difficult to account for within it).

I don't find the controversy between ID and Darwinian models of evolution particularly interesting. I suppose I accept evolution, if evolution is meant to signify that modern forms of life have over a long period of time evolved from one or a few very primitive ones. I guess I'd also assent to variation and natural selection playing a strong role in evolution. I would probably protest if random mutation and natural selection are raised as the only operative mechanisms in evolution, because I think that would be where we step from scientific hypothesis to metaphysical research program. The randomness basically being a negative concept (absence of teleology).

I suppose I am dead against "universal Darwinism": trying to generalize the models of random mutation/variation within a population and natural selection to domains where it is clearly not appropriate, i.e. cultural history or indeed linguistics. Dawkins carries some of the blame here.

As far as ID is concerned, the idea is fascinating, though potentially theologically troubling for the reasons mentioned in the article:

Intelligent design's shortcomings as science are immense, but its theological problems may be just as profound. The God of intelligent design is a master craftsman who leaves virtually nothing to chance. That's unsatisfying to Cambridge University paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who says many of his objections to intelligent design stem from his Christian faith. "It's theology for control freaks, with God as an engineer."

The image of God as a micro-managing autocrat leads to some awkward paradoxes. For example, supporters of intelligent design often point to the flagellum, the complex molecular motor that allows bacteria to move, as an example of something that evolution could not have produced. Yet if God designed even the tiny flagellum, why stop there? Intelligent design implies that the creator's blueprint knows no limits. And if God designed every last element of life, that makes him minutely responsible for nature's cruelty and failures as well as its beauty.

If more subtle models than God-as-cosmic-tinkerer are proposed, the question arises as to what extent is design a scientifically useful concept. ID would move from science into philosophy, or metaphysics. That, as a matter of fact, may not be a bad place to be. However, ID would then merge into pre-existing theological and philosophical models concerning God's omnipresence and activity.

I have no reason to be committed to naturalism, methodological or otherwise. I'm not even sure whether the concept of naturalism makes sense. If it is defined as the striving to uncover natural (spatiotemporally isolable) causes for natural event operating under general laws, then naturalism (at least methodological n-) seems pretty much irrelevant to most of the human sciences. I guess one may even ask to what extent physics is really a naturalistic science, if indeed conscious observation is a causal factor in quantum physics.

I've grown gradually more sympathetic to Peirce's notion of matter (and the laws governing it) as "effete mind" or Sheldrake's closely related idea of natural laws as ingrained "habits". Which ends up turning on its head the conventional picture of the human sciences as somehow an exceptional subdomain of (and, perhaps, ultimately reducible to) a more general natural science. Instead, the naturalistic domain of matter is an exception to the much more general case of teleological, agentive mind. Which fits nicely with some kind of panentheism as mentioned above.

And I guess that the ID vs. evolution controversy ultimately comes down to whether a metascientific viewpoints borrowed from the natural sciences (covering-law model) or one borrowed from the human sciences (rational agency) is most appropriate to interpret the evidence concerning the evolution of life. Which, perhaps, is a philosophical rather than a scientific question.

But in terms of a cultural phenomenon or movement rather than a philosophical idea, what troubles me about ID is, I guess, that it seems to me to be a reactive phenomenon, at the same time trying to subvert naturalism and playing by its rules in attempting to provide a scientific case for a Designer. If indeed the designer is God, the attempt seems to be almost irreverent, turning a mystery (the continuous sustaining and creative presence of God) into a problem of science. In that sense, if ID is indeed non-science or anti-science as charged by its detractors, it's ironically not non-science or anti-science enough.

Piecemeal destruction

2008-02-26T08:54:00.000-08:00

I was reminded today of my love/hate relationship with my home country. Which I will define as the part of the Dutch province of Groningen centered around the canal towns of Oude and Nieuwe Pekela, Stadskanaal, Veendam, Borgercompagnie and Kiel-Windeweer reaching all the way to the outskirts of Groningen city, and north of that, the countryside around Winschoten, Finsterwolde up to the sea. South, the landscape changes radically, with forests and heathlands and winding little rivers - pretty, but not my home country. So my home country is pretty small: I could bicycle around it, with some efforts, in a single day.

It's also beautiful. One of the few places in the Netherlands where you would walk or bicycle for hours on end without meeting another person. There's the scarcely inhabited no-man's land on the border where it's hard to say where the Netherlands end and Germany begins. And the spaciousness: there are very few trees, and the land is flat as can be, so there is this enormous and sometimes menacing sky hovering above you, sometimes making you feel small, sometimes comforting, in spring when everything is in bloom.

Then there's the villages. With houses that actually look like houses. Not like the deadeningly functional, characterless suburban monsters they build today, but houses with windows and door straight at the street that smile or gin or scowl at you. The way they used to build before the 1930s or so.

In both the towns and the landscape, there's a strictness, a radicalness if you will: the canal towns easily extend for ten, fifteen kilometres or so along the water with little of a town centre or anything. The fields themselves, black in the wintertime, are pierced by equally straight canals with water that can be grey or black in winter but a warm, dark green when the sun shines upon it.

Religiously, it's the typical countryside Dutch patchwork: my own home town sported a big Roman-Catholic Community, an equally big Dutch protestant community, and smaller Dutch-reformed, Christian-reformed and even Lutheran groups. Everywhere in the countryside, there used to be a sizable Jewish community as well until the Nazis destroyed all that. Politically, aside from places where the small Protestant parties hold sway, it's red territory: power used to be divided between Dutch labour and the Dutch communist party, and after the demise of the Dutch CP and its successor organizations the hard-left Socialist Party is making inroads. I recall that during the eighties, during election time, about half of our street would sport CP posters.

It's a wonderful place. And slowly, bit by bit, it's being fucked up beyond repair.

It's been downhill ever since deindustrialization took off in the 1960s or so, and the factories that had been so important in my home town - bricks, potato starch, but especially paper and cardboard - began to decline. Unemployment was extremely high when I grew up, and there wasn't anything (and still isn't) to keep young people in the area. No jobs. Very little in the way of entertainment: when I went out, I bicycled seventeen kilometres to Stadskanaal. There used to be a post office in the town when I was little but that's gone as well. And public transportation, connections and all that aren't getting any better either.

Can't blame them for leaving. I didn't stick around myself.

There's resentment in Groningen province towards the political elites of the West of the Netherlands. And some of it probably very justified. But the worst enemy, I think, is the layer of local politicians and bureaucrats and developers and the dreadful ideas they come up with. In the Netherlands in general, there's a harebrained idea that decent agricultural land, which our forefathers wrestled from the sea with great effort, should be "given back to nature" - as if there is such a thing as "nature" in the Netherlands. A local variety of it has been the almost-completed submerging of some of the most beautiful countryside in the area in order to build expensive (and, needless to say, pug-ugly) waterfront property - the "Blauwe Stad" project. Personally, I hope no-one will come to live there and it will turn out to be a massive financial disaster.

Though it's too late the undo the destruction that has already been wrought, of course.

Today I read that local politicians in one community have decided that the village of Ganzedijk - one of the smaller villages which has suffered especially from population drain - is to be wholly demolished. Needless to say the people remaining in the village are incensed and determined to resist (and most of them are home-owners). But it's one more symptom of the problem the countryside is dealing with. There's nothing there: the buses are replaced by taxi-buses are replaced by nothing at all; the post-office, the library, and then the schools are leaving; and finally the people themselves are packing up.

And the response by local decision-makers is to demolish or submerge the place.

It's such a waste. Not only of the beautiful, agricultural landscape, or of the unique architecture. Also of the enormous efforts that have gone in to making the country habitable in the first place. But I have little right to complain, seeing as I left like so many of my generation.

I used to think of returning sometimes. But the longer, the less I feel like it. I don't want to see the faceless suburban watery paradises that project developers are raising over what used to be farmhouses and fields. I don't want to see what they're doing to the place. It's not my home country anymore.

More on Kosovo, the muslims, etc.

2008-02-22T12:24:00.000-08:00

Have a very ambivalent relationship to the Marxist blog Lenin's Tomb blog. Particularly as Richard Seymour is so wrong-headed about so many things - Israel, Palestine, etc. This said, he's a clearer thinker than a whole pub full of left-liberals in Euston, so to speak, and his analysis of the Kosovo issue is well worth reading.

Some of the opponents of Kosovan independence on the right see the whole issue through a muslim vs. christian prism. See Taki Theodoracopulos and John Zmirak. Now, I see their point, but the conflict remains primarily national. You want to kick out the other ethnic group so they won't ever come back, you go for their churches and their graveyards (or indeed mosques, as happened when the aggression came from the opposite direction during the Bosnian war).

There's a tendency from the US right and from European "Eurabia" ideologues such as those at the Brussels Journal and the Gates of Vienna blog to see everything through that prism: muslims are coming, having much more babies than procreation-fatigued white Christian Europeans, and if we continue, we'll all bow down in the direction of Mecca and you won't be able to get a decent piece of pork anymore in thirty years or so. To think of it, we may already be there in case of the pork. Try finding a decent bit in any restaurant or eating-stall in suburbs of Stockholm. It's all chicken or godawful Döner kebab or lamb. I want my gyros made of juicy, greasy bits of pork, not chicken. But I digress.

I don't believe that the youth that are rioting in Copenhagen in what is the last of a long series of European suburbs boiling over are motivated to any enormous extent by Islam. But what shocks me far more is the vapid, vacuous reaction from the (white, non-Muslim) political class. In the Netherlands, there has been something close to panic over a supposed short anti-Muslim film that a right-wing populist MP is reportedly making, as well as about aforementioned MP (Geert Wilders) in general, in a way that merely shows the impotence and aimlessness of the ruling coalition in the face of an Islamic threat that hasn't even materialized. In Denmark, a socialist MP has made headlines by responding to the islamist Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the following words:

Therefore let us together send them a clear message: Your benighted state of idiocy has no place on earth, because in the long run nobody wants to live in captivity, ignorance and your pathetic clumsiness (...) To those who feel attracted by HuT and who meet resistance in their life — as every human meets resistance in life: Get out of the role of victim. Get out of the Middle Ages. Have the courage to use your common sense. Acknowledge the historic superiority of democracy, acknowledge the authority and equality of women, acknowledge sensibility and knowledge as the foundation to meet other people. Then, everything is going to be all right.

Which may have given them a hard-on at Gates of Vienna but sounds like a combination of chest-thumping and hollow platitudes to me. What it does not pronounce is any serious ideological alternative to islamism. "Democracy" and "equality of women" do not amount to such a thing. Mind you, I sort of agree with the equality of women part (I'm not sure about democracy) but all of the values mentioned are merely rules of the game to make the fight between ideologies and viewpoints go smoothly. As an ideology itself, it's hollow.

And then there is the tiresome hubbub about the Danish cartoons again. Which weren't even particularly funny the first time they appeared. And, let's call the thing by it's name, racist. That does not mean their publication should have been forbidden. But, for goodness' sake, if someone publishes a crude caricature of your ethnicity's stereotypical features - complete with turban, hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, and scimitar at the ready - you have the right to take offense.

What I'm wondering is why the West's answer to somewhat-religiously motivated rioters seems to be confined to unfunny cartoons, incoherent populist politicians, egomaniacal ex-muslims, culturally semiliterate secularists, and, oh, panic panic panic? Is this how Europe should meet its own discontents? We ask our immigrant populations to assimilate - to what?

In the end, people will gravitate to something that grants them dignity. That gives them the idea that they are part of something much bigger than themselves. The thing about Western liberal secularism is precisely that it cannot do that. That it's by its very nature atomizing, individualistic, hostile to any transcendent ideals and meaning. Islam however seems to be able to do it just nicely. What are the "Eurabia" ideologues going to confront it with? Christianity? Christians are a small minority in West European countries. Nation, fatherland? But that's all been hollowed out by the EU project - and there are good reasons why precisely these concepts have been suspect in the minds of generations of Europeans. Socialism or other messianic ideologies? Dead as the druids. On the political spectrum, there are no serious alternatives to some moldy Blairite social-democrat nannyism, from Sweden to London. We're a continent without a heart.

So if those on the far right worrying about "Eurabia" are right, "Eurabia" will become a reality because Islam as a motivating ideology, as a centre of gravity, will prove to be more vibrant and forceful than anything the secular West can confront it with. And that would be that.

US embassy in Belgrade stormed

2008-02-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

So after weeks of Western media speculation that the Serbs would "understand political realities", "forego nationalism", in other words, bend over and take it like a man, it seems that they are getting tired of being kicked around while the EU membership carrot is being dangled in front of their faces. Mark Ames at the Exile is pleased at the redecoration of the US embassy in Belgrade:

What's particularly gratifying in watching the Serbs protest and burn is that it shows the Serbs haven't been completely coapted and turned into harmless little Washington bootlickers like the rest of Europe. They have international law on their side, and they have history on their side, but the real question is whether or not they still have their souls. The protests of the past few days, and the burning of the embassy, show that they do.

I think he may be too optimistic. Serbs have often made impressive and protracted shows of defiance which turned out to be ultimately futile. I can't say I'm dismayed at the storming of the US embassy, though. After all, the US and NATO have been bombing embassies with much less reason and what's more, in countries which didn't even belong to them (for example, a Chinese one, in Belgrade). And the shocked, shocked reactions from the West at the Serbs being a tad excited over their historical heartland being snatched away from them (patriotism being very much passe over here in Europe) are rather funny. To me, anything which displeases the colourless bureaucrats and satraps of the EU, or the haughty overlords from Washington, is.

This said, I don't see any alternative but independence for Kosovo. The only way the Serbs can get it back is through enormous bloodshed and a civil war which may last forever. The Albanians own the place now, after the remaining Serbs, Roma, Jews, slavic muslims and just about anybody else left - wholly voluntarily, of course. And it's time they get to rule the place as well - they can't hardly do worse than the UN and EU have been doing so far.

Unfortunately, that would be relevant if Kosovo would actually become independent. Instead, it'll turn into another Balkans EU protectorate.

I wonder what will happen now. I don't think this is a situation that the EU and NATO are actually pleased with - my guess is that they would have preferred to have Kosovo hang in the limbo it's been in for the past ten years forever, but that delaying Kosovar self-determination would have eventually resulted in an insurrection. European states seem much more divided about recognition than was speculated at least in the Swedish media (which expected only Cyprus not to go along, and who cares about Cyprus, anyway). Russia has taken pretty high risks with regards to the Balkans before, and maybe they'll do something interesting again.

My guess is, though, that nothing will change; that the Serbs will eventually calm down in the face of some vapid promises from Brussels; and that Kosovo will remain in the limbo of de-facto independent states together with South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transdniestria, etc. In the real world, the little guy doesn't win from the schoolyard bully. And until nations at the centre of Europe actually get tired of the EU nightmare and start reasserting themselves again, that's what's going to happen.

Psalm 19

2008-02-21T13:18:00.001-08:00

Tuesday at the Bible group we read Psalm 19, the one that starts with the famous

The heavens declare the glory of God,
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

It's one of the Biblical passages which I jotted down a small post-it note about when first reading it, as the psalm immediately appealed to me. It's a lyrical but wonderfully tight, coherent call for humility and reverence in our dealings with creation.

Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.

There was a bit of discussion in the group about the exact translation of that last verse (Psalm 19:3), as my Dutch bible went for what the NIV mentions as an alternative reading in a footnote:

They have no speech, there are no words;
no sound is heard from them.

I do not know the text-critical background of the passage. From a theological point of view, I can see a point behind either. On the one hand, the order of nature, its beauty, and the mystery of its very existence does speak to us humans of God by virtue of us being human, created in God's image, and endowed with an inexplicable and puzzling capability to comprehend nature. On the other hand, nature's comprehensibility is restricted: we'll never understand the mystery of existence itself, the ways God created (or continuously creates) something out of nothing. And where physical science deals marvellously well with the relational and quantitative aspects of matter, the "inner life" of atoms (if there is such a thing) remains beyond its purview. We can intimate the presence of God in creation, but we can never wholly comprehend it. We hear the words, and understand them, but we cannot conceptualize, manipulate them as if they were of our own language.

What is the language, what are the words in which the heavens express the glory? "There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard." And yet, "Their radiation goes out to all the earth, and their words to the end of the world" (Psalm 19: 4-5). The song of the heavens is ineffable. (Abraham Joshua Heschel: God in Search of Man, p. 80-81).

Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is hidden from its heat.

Wonderful and apt metaphor for the sunrise: a bridegroom, who, invigorated and facing his future with eagerness and confidence, comes forth from his pavilion. There is a sense of joyous vigour in this passage.

The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul.
The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy,
making wise the simple

The psalm turns from God's revelation in nature to God's law (or does it? Can "law" and "statutes" also refer, at the same time perhaps, to the miraculously trustwortht regularities that govern nature?). But there is a continuity with the previous passage in that the law is reviving, invigorating, bringing life, as the sun is in the heavens; and that the law grants knowledge just as God's revelation in nature is mentioned to do.

The precepts of the LORD are right,
giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the LORD are radiant,
giving light to the eyes.

Appreciation for the wonder of nature is not enough: the impossible comprehensibility of nature can eventually turn to a manipulative and exploitative relationship with our environment. So we turn finally to God's special revelation, which is depicted here as a wonderfully light and joyous burden.

The fear of the LORD is pure,
enduring forever;
The ordinances of the LORD are sure
and altogether righteous.

They are more precious than gold,
than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
than honey from the comb.

The desirability of doing God's will is striking. So much of the Bible is a story of estrangement - of man abandoning and disobeying God, or desperately trusting in God in the face of an overwhelmingly indifferent universe. Culminating in God's own momentous descent and sacrifice in the New Testament. The simplicity and joy of the above verses is somehow very refreshing.

The mention of the fear of God reminds me of a passage I just read from Joshua Heschel's God in search of Man, where fear (as distancing, estranging, shirking) is contrasted with awe:

According to the Bible the principal religious virtue is "yirah". What is the nature of "yirah"? The word has two meanings: fear and awe. There is the man who fears the Lord lest he be punished in his body, family, or in his possessions. Another man fears the Lord because he is afraid of the punishment in the life to come. Both types are considered inferior in the Jewish tradition. Job, who said: "Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him," was not motivated in his piety by fear but rather by awe, by the realization of the grandeur of His eternal love. (p. 76-77).

By them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.
Who can discern his errors?
Forgive my hidden faults.
Keep your servants also from willful sins;
may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
innocent of great transgression.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be pleasing in your sight;
O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Another translation problem: my Dutch bible has pride for willful sins. But in the face of the beauty and richness of nature, pride is precisely the sin to avoid - the ignorance of our hidden faults, belief in our own perfectability and mastery over our environment. In that sense, the last passage calls us to humility and reverence in front of the heavens that declare the glory of God.

Men, women, and all that (part 2)

2008-02-08T12:20:00.000-08:00

CLEO: So... About that last post of yours...

MERLIJN: Why do you always come to bother me after the fact?

CLEO: I'm the angel of history, remember? Face turned backward in horror, wings flapping, propelled into the future. Forgot Walter Benjamin? But I need not account for my comings and goings with you. I wanted to talk about that mess of a post with you. First of all, why start off with that link to that godawful Boyd Rice article? I clicked on it and had to hide my face in my wings.

MERLIJN: Part of the point was that it was a godawful article. Here you have someone answering Valerie Solanas, and armed with millenia in which men kicked women around, and what do you get? This. No conviction. Way too low joke-to-word ratio. I'd have done better.

CLEO: But you would not have been serious about it, would you?

MERLIJN: No. And neither is Boyd Rice. It shows. Solanas, on the other hand, carries real conviction. This does affect the force of their writing. Beauty is a pretty reliable guide to truth. I suspect, and it's no more than a vague hunch, really, that the misogyny of say Sade, Boyd Rice, and so forth is ultimately self-defeating. Men cannot in the end but define themselves in relationship with and in opposition to women. With a writer like Solanas, this is very different.

CLEO: So Solanas is right?

MERLIJN: I don't know. But it is an interesting thought, is it?

CLEO: What would you do if she is?

MERLIJN: You mean if my gender would be obsolescent, parasitical, ripe for annihilation? I'd do nothing. I'd just plod on as I've always done. See if I care.

CLEO: You haven't yet explained to me why you believe all this is relevant in a post on sexuality and love.

MERLIJN: Because neither of these are simple things. You start reflecting seriously on these issues, start digging deeper, and things see the light which you did not expect. I dug so deep I'm afraid of awaking the Balrogs.

CLEO: Bit late for that, isn't it? Balrogs not only awake and knocking on the door, but making themselves comfortable in the living room. But we'll get back to that. I'm vaguely disturbed by your notions about misogyny. You're dealing with an attitude which leads to killing people, all over the world. Not some interesting artistic perspective.

MERLIJN: Of course. But then, how is that relevant? I'm trying to sort out my own thoughts and actions, so I'm necessarily taking some kind of ideal, subjective perspective.

CLEO: Fine. What, then, of your glib dismissal of "puritanical" left-wing feminists as standing on somehow the same slope as the Taliban?

MERLIJN: Wasn't being glib. They really stand there.

CLEO: Now, hang on. You speak elsewhere about the commodification of sexuality and all that, so why would you dismiss protests about, say, the objectification of women in pornography?

MERLIJN: Well, sure, porn objectifies women - but what of it? Perhaps it's the objectification part that turns me on.

CLEO: But how can you harmonize that with what you write elsewhere?

MERLIJN: Perhaps I can't. Although, watch me. But there's protest against objectification, the depiction of people as sexual objects, as a matter of principle, and protest against concrete situations and instances of exploitation. Just as there is protest against prostitution as an issue of principle and against the concrete circumstances surrounding concrete instances of prostitution. It's perfectly possible to agree with the latter while disagreeing with the former. And my point is that the puritanical feminist wing in the radical left at least is all about the former, not the latter. And in that sense they position themselves against sexuality as such. And not just straight male sexuality either. I'll stand by that.

CLEO: My final issue. In all of what you've written, I see not a single mention of sin. Why is that?

MERLIJN: What is sin?

CLEO: You tell me. I think you know sin rather better than I do.

MERLIJN: Allright then. I'm unhappy with simply listing morally objectionable actions as "sin". Such as this is sin, that is sin. Sin is something relational, right? It's always a sin against God, right?

CLEO: Go on.

MERLIJN: Likewise, identifying sin with our animal nature, our reptilian brain and all that it whispers, and all that misses the point to me as well. Too static.

CLEO: Right.

MERLIJN: So to me, sin is an infraction against the two commandments: Love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul and all your strength; and love your neighbour just like yourself. It's primarily an infraction against love, a focussing on other things. And I sometimes think that the love of God and the love of the Other is highly interrelated. That it is precisely in the love between people where God likes to dwell. Though one should be wary of reducing one to the other as well...

CLEO: Hmmmm... Where does fallenness, original sin come in?

MERLIJN: I believe the first chapters of Genesis deal precisely with alienation - an alienation brought about by the growing self-consciousness, the growing maturity of man. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil - and one of the first emotions they encounter is shame. Which is precisely the product of our alienation from one another, of our awareness of that unbridgeable gulf between oneself and the other. And I believe that a perfect love - between us and God, or between us each other - is unattainable. For us, that is. There's always a level on which we remain cold and locked in and alone. There's the mortally necessary hope of that alienation being finally resolved at the end of time, there is that.

There's also morality. The normative rules by which we guide our conduct. It is wrong to steal, to lie, to kill. All that. But it's a different thing. Normative moral codes, and at least the presupposition of moral universalism, are deadly necessary to get by. But they do not replace the commandments of love, which in a way transcend them. And the nature of God is precisely love.

CLEO: So no loving relationship can be sinful? Very touchy-feely. Are you some kind of hippie now?

MERLIJN: That does not follow from the argument. Depends on your notion of love. I believe I could be an inquisitor, and get out the thumbscrews and the rack, and go about my business still sincerely convinced I'm acting out of love. Love need not be soft or consoling. Not when the stakes are the fate of immortal souls. Mind you, I have no inclination to start acting in such a manner. I'm just clarifying my argument.

CLEO: Right.

MERLIJN: But there's a catch. If these notions are correct, we might be terribly bad at knowing when we sin and when we do not. Sin is what waylays us, what misleads us - but it does so most effectively when we think we are doing the right thing. Think of Jesus tempted in the desert, the devil promising him all the kingdoms and principalities of the earth. Think of what a temptation that must have been - to rid the world of injustice, to feed the widow, to institute His Kingdom through earthly power!

CLEO: The socialists.

MERLIJN: I was primarily thinking about the Church, which after Constantine happily fell for the temptation that Jesus rejected. But you are right about the socialists as well. And the tragedy is, that no matter how corrupted the Church became, it still remained the Church, the vessel for the heights of human civilization, the heights of theological thought. And the terrible thing about the Soviet Communists is precisely not that they betrayed their ideals, but that they were sincerely convinced they were actualizing them on earth. It's too easy to think in dichotomies here. To see the Church as betraying Christianity. Or to see the Soviet Union as betraying the ideals of socialism. They did, and they did not. The problem with simply regarding them as wholly corrupted, or perfect opposites to the ideals one adheres to, is that there's always the thought that "we can do better". The fiercest critics of Stalinism are the Trotskyists. Atheist condemnation of institutionalized Christianity is mild compared to that of various Christian sects. And that's a very dangerous thought.

CLEO: That's a very pessimistic statement.

MERLIJN: But I think it's correct. Ultimately, we cannot escape sin by ourselves.

CLEO: Is lust a sin?

MERLIJN: If it diverts our attention from loving the other, and loving God, yes. But sexual attraction, as such? I don't think so. I believe it may be very usefully and pleasurably put in service of love.

CLEO: Aren't you privileging sexual love here, to the exclusion of familial love, friendship, and all that?

MERLIJN: Yes, I am. And with good reason. Familial love kind of depends on it. I don't believe any other kind of love between human beings has the potential to go as deep as sexually oriented love. Note that I am speaking about love here. Not casual sex.

But I may be wrong here. It's not that important. In the end, I guess I believe love to be some kind of "merging" without loss of self - to the contrary. To overcome our alienation from the other by entering into a relationship where the other is strange, yet familiar. Intertwined pasts, intertwined futures. What am I?

CLEO: A confused guy at a computer screen.

MERLIJN: No! You of all people. You disappoint me. I am a past! In an ideal fashion, a remembered past. And where we may be able to never share our most private pains and joys, we can share pasts.

There's an element of negativity here which I think is terribly important. Total freedom is meaningless. It is only in the many ways that our past restricts the freedom of our actions, in the way we restrict each other's freedom, that free actions become actually meaningful. So giving space to the other, ending up with some kind of balanced whole of possible (shared) futures, is terribly important here. I think that's one way in which love also means confronting one's own non-being.

CLEO: You still have not answered one of the questions I started with. Where all that stuff about Sade, that Boyd Rice screed, German cannibals, for goodness' sake, where all that fits in with your conception about sexuality and love.

MERLIJN: Well, I think there's very ancient biological connections between the part of the brain responsible for sexuality and that dealing with dominance and power relationships. Just look at how closely intertwined procreation and the struggle for dominance in an animal group are. And...

CLEO: Hang on! Stop right there. You know better than that! Pointing out brain development from the crocodiles to you isn't an explanation. It's a just-so story. Only something in the realm of ideas is.

MERLIJN: Historical explanations aren't explanations? A bit rich, coming from you.

CLEO: Historical ones are, but they are always ideal in nature. Naturalistic ones aren't.

MERLIJN: Well, allright then. Did you go to that fetish party?

CLEO: I peered through the windows. Why?

MERLIJN: What did the clothing, the attire, say to you? The texture of ropes? Metal? Latex - harsh, black, gleaming stuff? What did it suggest?

CLEO: Skin.

MERLIJN: Precisely. Skin with all the opposite attributes. Soft, warm, tender. Beauty is always playing with contrasts. A totally symmetrical face isn't beautiful. It's boring. Punctuated symmetry - that's beautiful. A mole, a slightly assymetrical smile... And I think in this sense often what we are looking for is signified, most of all, by its negation.

CLEO: Where are you going with this?

MERLIJN: To fall in love, to love, does entail in some sense a stepping out of oneself, losing oneself in a sense in the other. Religious mystics, mystery cults, and all those have looked for the same. Breaking those walls, being for a moment one with the universe that seems otherwise so indifferent to us. Love precisely allows one to transcend one's loneliness without losing one's individuality. To become a relational being. But that notion of non-being, of death, is never very far away.

CLEO: I'm not sure I see your point. What does this have to do with German cannibals?

MERLIJN: I think that the thought of being food, of being consumed, of being an object so totally and utterly disposed of, is attractive to some people precisely because it entails such an utter, total losing of oneself. It's an extreme case. But I believe most masochists are looking for something like that. And that what they are looking for - pain, humiliation, the imagery of death, whatever - allows them to conquer that sensation, to enter it and come out more alive as a result.

CLEO: Catharsis?

MERLIJN: That's part of it at least, I guess.

CLEO: Except that the German guy who ended up as food didn't conquer anything! Hard to transcend anything while your various parts are frying in a pan.

MERLIJN: Precisely. And that solves my dilemma.

CLEO: How?

MERLIJN: Remember what I wrote about the ethical issues surrounding that case? I ended up stating that one cannot consent to one's death, as consent should entail that it can be withdrawn at some point. But that of course is nonsense. I can consent to being tattooed. Perhaps I'll have regrets, and have the tattoo lasered off, but that does change nothing of the fact that I Have Been Tattooed, in an eternal fashion. However, if we conceptualize sadomasochistic activities as some kind of dramatic, ritualistic enactment of, well, love through precisely the imagery of its opposite, then it becomes too easy to see that actually eating each other cannot be part of the game.

CLEO: Perhaps you are a wishy-washy liberal after all. "Safe, sane and consensual"?

MERLIJN: Hmmm... Perhaps. But that's a slogan, which encapsulates a set of moral principles. I think here it's more about that which is a precondition for and which transcends morality: the integrity of the other person, and his or her freedom.

CLEO: Also, don't you think you are drawing a much too close relationship between sex and love, here?

MERLIJN: How do you mean?

CLEO: Well, your attitudes seem to imply to me that you would regard sex outside a loving relationship as sinful, right?

MERLIJN: I guess that follows. I'm not sure that notion disturbs me.

CLEO: So we're back at the beginning: Merlijn the liberal vs. Merlijn the romantic?

MERLIJN: So it seems.

CLEO: Allright then. Need to be on my way, anyway. Next time, call me for something easy. Argument from evil or something.

Men, women, and all that

2008-02-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

First, a side question:

Why is there no good masculine answer to Valerie Solanas' SCUM manifesto? I'm aware of Boyd Rice's R.A.P.E. manifesto (NSFW, putting it mildly) constitutes an attempt, but I found it somehow tiresome reading. Sophomoric faux politically-incorrect boilerplate. It doesn't, to my mind, have Solanas' certified-insane virtuosity. Russian writer and National-Bolshevik (a masculine political persuasion if any!) revolutionary Edward Limonov's Women's day speech convinced me he has the skills, but perhaps not the temperament. He remains a socialist, even if a surrealist heavy metal nightmare version of socialist. Sade is out, too, I guess. Like Limonov, women are his ultimate concern: Juliette's tormentors, or the four protagonists of 120 Days, are monstruous caricatures, empty, burnt-out shells, whereas his victims are somehow endowed with humanity, inner worlds. Perhaps sadism is ultimately parasitical? In contrast to Solanas' cheerful contempt, neither Sade nor Limonov nor Boyd Rice could proclaim the obsolescence, the needlessness of the opposite sex. Perhaps even in the rawest, bluntest misogyny, men cannot but proclaim their fealty to Graves' White Goddess?

I like feminists. Of a kind. I hearthily despise the feminists of the radical left, who somehow combine adhering to a vision of equality and justice with neo-puritanism. Men and women are equal except women are tender, fragile creatures who need the full force of Mother State to protect them from predatory manhood. Yech. It's not that I despise Puritans, as such. If you feel that pictures of naked bodies are dirty, or that showing a naked ankle is a dangerous provocation to sex-crazed men, or that women should walk around in a burkha, I strongly disagree, but I understand the internal logic of your position. Just don't pretend to be a socialist, and join the Taliban, already.

I'm sort of fond, however, of libertarian feminists of Wendy McElroy's ilk, to the extent that I find nothing to disagree with them, on a rational level. And I respect feminists who are serious about being my enemy (Solanas, maybe Andrea Dworkin? I have to group Nikki Craft with the hateful radical leftists as she is pretty mad but not mad enough). The kind for whom it's war and they mean it. The kind for whom any harmony between the sexes can only arises when one of them (the male) is annihilated. That's something which I can understand.

How did I get there? Basically by thinking about a post about my confused views about sexuality, and how they relate to everything else. I suppose I hold two conflicting positions simultaneously. Which is not a bad thing. It's a precondition for intellectual progress. Many Marxists never get to grasping the Dialectic, but the Dialectic is all of Marxism that I have left.

Merlijn the urbane live-and-let-live libertarian

The one position is basically a libertarianish, sex-positivish version of "Your kink is OK" coupled with a "Safe, Sane and Consensual" ethic for putting kinks into practice. There's some posts on my old blog on this issue, which I might as well revisit. They all deal with pretty extreme issues - but it's the extreme issues that are the most interesting.

In one, I considered the limits of a consent-based ethic by taking up the case of Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal. Because it's such a clear-cut problematical case. Instinctively, you want Armin Meiwes off the street. On the other hand, there's no question that his dinner guest consented to be eaten (or that Meiwes, as a matter of fact, let go a whole series of would-be victims when they found out that Meiwes was serious about it, and not just into some roleplay with cutlery and HP sauce and whatever one roleplays cannibalism with). The notion "Meiwes' victim can't consent to being eaten because his is clearly insane" is circular - why is he insane? Because he wants to be eaten. Alternative solution: one cannot consent to one's own death. Back then, I rejected it:

Yet, I feel the individual himself is solely responsible and sovereign over his life, and his body. I am in favour of legalizing euthanasia if a wish to die is clearly established on the part of the person dying (I am mortally opposed to it when it is not). Assisting suicide of people who are not terminally ill I find ethically extremely dubious. Yet it would constitute a grey area in which I would not want things that I'm highly uncomfortable with from an ethical perspective, outlawed.

But then again, most activities one could "consent" to can be notably ceased anytime one wants. I can decide I'm uncomfortable, don't like what's happening and bail out of whatever is going on. Except dying. If I jump off a roof, safewords aren't going to bring me back on it. It should be possible to make an argument on this basis that it is impossible to establish consent to death. However, such an argument would have possibly consequences for the whole euthanasia issue as well.

I now tend to the second argument, with all of the consequences for euthanasia, assisted suicide, and so on (which I am much more negative towards than I was back then). And, of course, I have serious second thoughts about the whole autonomy thesis I defended back then.

(I guess I could raise a methodological tool called the "Argumentum ad Cannibalum": If your ethics imply Armin Meiwes should go free, reconsider.).

In another post, I considered casting my vote for the PNVD, the Dutch "pedophile party". I should add of course that seeing children as sexual objects is beyond my imagination. I hate children. They go from crying, miserable poo-factories to being unbearably smug know-it-all ten-year olds to being self-destructive fifteen-year olds with an unfailing talent of getting into trouble. Seriously. Give me the choice of painful hemorrhoids or having to spend a trip in a subway carriage with some hyperactive seven-year old monster from Hell, I'll go for the hemorrhoids.

I also believe children cannot consent to sex, and that the state should take measures to protect them against pervs who believe they can. At the same time I feel that those who believe children do have some sort of sexuality, or that the age of consent is not needed, and so forth, should have the freedom to try and convince me otherwise. And I cannot but admire the courage of the three men behind the PNVD. They put their life on the line to defend their opinions, and that's something I respect.

I also think modern western society's attitude towards the pedophilia issue is deeply, deeply warped. Perhaps in a climate where just about everything goes, we need one strong taboo, and pedophilia it is - but the results, with the hysterical reaction towards the PNVD, the occasional outburst of vigilante violence, the media's lurid attention when another poor perv gets snagged, they aren't pretty. There's a dynamic to hysteria and witchhunts. They start with a crime that is so horrible, so unspeakable, that to defend the accused makes oneself suspect. One sees this in discussion forums: the subject of pedophilia comes up, and any response milder than "hang 'em!" gives rise to suspicions about being a bit of a pedo oneself.

So I still stand by that particular position.

The third post, a rather rambling post on everything from pornography to Sade to the nature of freedom, is also one which I can still stand behind.

Except for one thing.

Much as I would want urbane, thoughtful, sex-positive, libertarian Merlijn to be me, it ain't me. Not the whole of it, at least.

In The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer describes Gary Gilmore's political views as somehow emblematic for the American working class: leftist political impulses and rightist overt opinions. With me, it's the other way around. My overt political opinions may be left-libertarian, but my underlying political impulses are deeply conservative. As in "there's something to be said for feudalism" conservative.

Merlijn the Vogon

The Vogons are, to me, the real heroes of Douglas Adam's galaxy. They beat evolution. They crawled out of whatever disgusting slime they crawled out from by sheer bloody-mindedness, in simple defiance of natural selection. And they write bad poetry, which is also something to which I can relate.

In the end, I'm an incurable romantic. Love, to me, is exemplified by Beren and Luthien, Arwen and Aragorn, Tristan and Isolde - it's should be, er..., well, pure, beautiful, all-consuming and ultimately doomed. This is of course related to my general "conservative impulse": one of my favourite historical novels is Felix Dahn's A Struggle for Rome which depicts the superhuman but hopelessly doomed effort of a Roman nobleman, Cethegus, to play out the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines against each other and revive the Western Empire halfway the 6th century. There is also Arthurian legend, with its last flowering of Celtic and pagan culture before the inevitable victory of the Anglo-Saxons and Christianity; and of course Tolkien and his elves; or indeed the replicants from Blade Runner and their useless struggle to gain a lifespan of more than four years. Or the Consul in Dan Simmons' Hyperion and his vengeance in the name of cultures, species and ecologies that have been killed by an expansionist human society:

On Whirl we stalked the elusive zeplen through their cloud towers. It is possible that they were not sapient by human or Core standards. But they were beautiful. When they died, rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of their death agony was beyond words. We sold their photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to worlds like Heaven's Gate, and ground their bones to powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and superstitious on a score of other colony worlds.
("Hyperion", p. 338)

I guess that part of me getting there was being an uncool fourteen-year old. And fifteen-year old. And sixteen-year old. Uncool with a serious sense of pathos, that is. Though it's easy to look down on one's feelings at that age. They were real enough. Mind you, I got through high school well enough, all things considered. I had some close friends, became a metalhead which fitted my temperament exactly, wrote dreadful love poetry in between typing manifestoes extolling the virtues of Comrade Stalin, and was content to just fantasize about suicidal shoot-outs rather than putting them into practice.

This said, my girlfriendlessness combined with my taste for historical and fantasy novels warped my ideas about love and sexuality a bit.

And no matter how much I would like to assent to the theses of the one part of me above, the other part knows very well that the kink-friendly, tolerant, happy-go-lucky, yet responsible attitude towards sexuality - exemplified perhaps best by the very readable and occasionally hilarious Dan Savage's sex advice colums - that all that is something for the Cool People. And whatever they are, I ain't it. I am, in the end, a Vogon. Descendant of what must be a long line of clumsy, clueless, hopelessly romantic amoebas, early multicellular creatures, primitive fish who all succeeded in somehow procreating by accident. I stand here in spite of the impossibility of me standing here. And my occasional successes in love and in romance and in sex merely underscore that impossibility.

Putting it all together

"I don't think a man ever gets over that first sight of the naked woman," he said. "I think that's Eve standing over him, that's the morning and the dew on the skin. And I think that's the major content of every man's imagination. All the sad adventures in pornography and love and song are just steps on the path towards that holy vision."
An Interview with Leonard Cohen

I guess there is a reason why I am attracted to some of the figures that I started this post with - Sade, Solanas, Limonov, maybe even Boyd Rice. They're still countercultural in a society which has wholly succeeded in assimilating and commodifying the 60s counterculture which spawned the sexual revolution. No matter where your hard limits lie, Sade is not okay, Solanas is not okay - they stand there, inapproachable, at the very end of the field. There's a recent film on Sade called Quills which unfortunately turns Sade in some kind of clownish, basically harmless pornographer. It's brilliantly played by Geoffrey Rush, mind you, but I don't think it does justice to the man. Who, on the one hand, wrote the 120 Days which is such an obsessive catalogue of horrors that it would scare the devils from Hell and who, for all the bloodthirstiness of his writings, refused to execute his own worst enemies at the height of the Terror and whose Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man pretty much sets the height of secular humanist ethics. Whatever he was, he wasn't the clown Geoffrey Rush makes him out to be. And he was definitely not harmless.

Figures like Sade and Solanas are the suicide terrorists of love. They explode all you are comfortable with, until, alone and naked in the rubble, you're not so comfortable anymore because you have a sinking feeling that what Sade says about cruelty and enjoying the torment of others and what Solanas says about the nature of manhood might actually be true, even though it should not be.

My agreement with (some) feminist politics is instrumental only. I'm a strong believer in individual freedom, even if it means the freedom to do stupid things, which puts me in the libertarian Wendy McElroy camp. I obviously believe in equal rights before the law. But I no longer share the socialist pipe-dream that harmonious relationships between the two sexes are ultimately attainable. Or perhaps even desirable. Because I believe that they would take what Houellebecq and C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity sketched for the future: an abolishment of sexuality. Barring that, our infinite capacity to hurt one another combined with the basic impossibility of love (a desire to merge with the other, feel what he or she feels) guarantees that it's going to be conflict all the way down to the second coming.

Which I am fine with. Nothing more boring than utopias.

I just spoke of the impossibility of love. I must correct myself. It was fatalistic, romantic Merlijn speaking again. Ultimately, to open oneself up wholly to the other is impossible - no matter how much I try and want to, I cannot literally share another person's pain, or joy, and there's always dark recesses of the mind which remain forever private and a core of individuality which we cannot transcend. Religiously, I believe, however, that one day we will: that our alienation (from each other, from creation as a whole, from God) will be transcended in the Kingdom of God. There are times when I want nothing more than this, and there are times I dread the prospect. But the impossibility of reaching this ultimate goal by ourselves alone does not make the process itself meaningless.

Sometimes I think the main drivers of sexuality and religious mysticism point at something similar: the desire to break down, for a moment, all the barriers between oneself and the other, to negate one's own ultimate loneliness by negating oneselves, and finding oneself strangely and joyously confirmed in the embrace of another.

And whatever bedroom acrobatics it takes a consenting couple to get there, I couldn't care less.

I'll continue this post some other time.

King of Swords

2008-01-26T09:36:00.001-08:00

A long time ago I read a book about the Tarot deck of cards. What struck me at the time, and remained with me ever since, was a description ascribed, I think, to Aleister Crowley about the King of Swords. If I recall, the King of Swords represents a character who "makes precise plans", but "advances only by accident". It hit very close to home, and still does. I am so taken up into wrestling with creations of my own mind, and so oblivious to the reactions to those around me, that I get ahead only by stumbling and falling, face turned backwards.

This is one of those days when I am none too pleased with that. I do not strike dead. I do not steal. And I tell the truth. But none of these are exactly virtuous. I don't have the temperament for hatred or anger - but not much for tenderness or love, either. The stealing part is valid only when applied to material objects or indeed intellectual property, but perhaps not in a more abstract sense. And I am incapable of lying when it comes down to it even when I ought to. My attempts at dissimulation are reminiscent of a snake's attempts to swallow down an egg much too big for its head.

So for all the weighing of possibilities in my head, the rehearsing of conversations, dialogues, potential situations which goes on to the point of nausea, all this jiving around within the confines of my own world, my own mind, only very occasionally punctuated by genuine concern for others - when I it comes down to it, I move predictably, instinctively, and helplessly. With a high likelihood of causing others to suffer. Much like the scorpion of the story.

Some atheists see religion as wishful thinking, a way to seek some illusionary comfort in a universe that is utterly indifferent to us. Ha. I was a lot more comfortable when I was an atheist. I was more pleased with myself. I feared death, surely - but at the same time I knew that death all by itself doesn't hurt. I now have an unease which goes much more deeply.

I have been reading the Finnish sermons of the 19th-century Lutheran revivalist preacher of Lapland, Lars Levi Laestadius. Basically as an object of linguistic analysis, but I cannot ignore the theological import. I don't like it. Laestadius proclaims an austere, joyless faith for an austere, radical land. For all Laestadius' brilliance - and he is a brilliant preacher - the religious spirit of Laestadianism is not what I am looking for. This said, Laestadius wasn't wrong about everything.

Laestadius reserves a lot of rhetorical venom for two alternative positions of justification and redemption, which he names as those of the "thieves of mercy" and those of the "decent folk", respectively. The "thieves of mercy" are somewhat like modern-day theological liberals and universalists. Everyone will be saved. No sins are so great that they cannot be forgiven. The "decent folk" are the moralists. I will be saved because I haven't killed, haven't whored around (at least not some much as the others), I haven't lied (no real big lies, anyway), etc.

I know damn well that I can never live up to the standards of the "decent folk". I know what I am, and decent it ain't.

And as much as I would want it to be true, I cannot intellectually accept universalism. I believe in, or I hope for, or perhaps I both believe in and hope for a forgiving, merciful Deity. But mercy and forgiveness are meaningless if they are given by default, if they are not ultimately an act of will on the part of God. They are also meaningless if God cannot be hurt and grieved by our actions, and if he cannot at least potentially be wrathful and angry. Hell exists, at least as a potentiality. My hope that no one will end up there is a hope for a contingent, not a necessary, state of affairs.

Also, God's forgiveness is conditioned upon the capability of the individual to accept that forgiveness. Which requires a thorough, complete understanding of one's own failings. I am not sure whether I find this an appealing prospect.

It used to be easier when all I believed an afterlife to be was a notion of "social immortality": whatever remained of you was whatever the world would remember of you, with pain or with hatred or with love and with tenderness, and however, in a myriad of small ways, you would affect the world. I was convinced that, on balance, I would end up OK. I also convinced myself that this was a particular noble and selfless way of conceiving of an afterlife, being able of giving up when the call comes, not egotistically clinging on to personal survival, and all that.

So my fear of death, or at least of the physical pain that may accompany death, and the horror of being at one point cut off from any possibilities of self-realization, any possibility of finishing the many things that I left undone, all that fear has been replaced by fear of God, and perhaps also fear of myself. My previous fears were innocent and simple compared to my new ones. The new ones are very complex and twisted and would be food for a shrink if I did not believe them to be perfectly justified, too. I do not of course seriously regret the change. But it was a step in a process of growing up, in a spiritual and religious fashion, involving also, as growing up does, a loss of childhood innocence.

(Stop right there, Merlijn. Unbearable smugness speaking again. This was not something you actually chose, did you? For all your rationalizing, do not pretend that this was the result of some careful, dispassionate weighing of alternatives. You knew whom you were looking for, and whom you would find, when you first picked up that book. You had this sense of being stared at, remember? Someone looking at you, in stony silence, as if to say: 'Here I am. What are you going to do? You know what you should. But will you? You've been dithering there for a long time, pretending there's this and that you still have to look into. Makes me wonder whether you have the guts after all'. Then suddenly you caught a glimpse of what you look like through those eyes. And you started to shiver and went looking for a place to hide and you didn't feel good at all.)

I am not at all pleased with myself at the moment. I am still that scorpion looking for a ride across the river, while knowing full well how it is all going to end up. And the excuse that it's "in my nature" sounds increasingly hollow.

So, when it comes down to it - whenever, and however, could be my penchant for greasy food causing a heart attack at fifty, or lung cancer a bit later (perversely, some of the things I can control) or a traffic accident tomorrow - when it comes down to it, am I ready to strip of all that I armour myself with in daily life, all that wilful looking-away with which I shield my all-too introverted self, that blissful incapability to feel the pain of others - am I ready to lose all that and look myself in the eye?

No way.

My New Year resolutions...

2007-12-31T06:18:00.000-08:00

1. Do not stop smoking. I'll call off my regular encounters with the business end of a cigarette when the government calls off it's killjoy anti-smoker bullying campaigns, allows us back into the pubs, ceases to extort us with ever-increasing VAT taxes, relents on its second-hand smoke emotional blackmail based on highly dubious evidence, and stops insulting my intelligence with plans to place pictures of burnt-out lungs on cig packages (I can read, thank you). Until then, it's war. From my cold, dead fingers...

2. Make work of joining a Church. Which is likely going to be the lutheran Church of Sweden.

3. Get my academic research back to some empirical meat-and-gravy stuff. Try to get at least one paper dealing with corpus-based historical linguistics issues done by the end of the year. If current research proposal falls through, develop a new and exciting one. Look for some hard-to-get material that no one ever took a close look at before.

4. Take up writing poetry again. I'm inspired, the ideas are there - but I simply haven't taken the time to write them down. It'd be a good way to pass the time on the train to and from work.

5. Eat more healthily. Meaning: buy less ready-made salads with stuff I do not know the name of and skip the leaves, and eat more red meat with yellow sauce, beans with brown sauce, and brown meat with red sauce.

6. Visit another country than Finland, Sweden or The Netherlands. In order of preference:
- Northern England or Scotland
- Cape town, South Africa
- Constantinople

7. Buy a plant and make sure it does not die within three months. If successful, buy other plant to keep first plant company. If nervous, rehearse with plastic plant first.

Sometimes they come back

2007-12-28T07:48:00.000-08:00

One simple but at least superficially compelling argument against an afterlife that I once heard and entertained myself for some time is that no-one ever came back from the dead to report on what they saw. Reading Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel's book on near-death experiences and the nature of consciousness, Eindeloos bewustzijn, I realized the circularity of the argument. Because it is extremely hard to pinpoint exactly when death occurs. When our heart stops beating? When we cease to breathe? When electrical activity in the brain ceases? And, of course, parts of me are dying (and, hopefully, being replaced) all the time. Of course, we could define death as the cessation of personal experience, but this would be question-begging with regards to the issue of an afterlife. Now, a fair number of people appear to have personal experience (of some kind) in a situation when some hallmarks of physical death are already present - van Lommel's research would indicate near-death experiences may occur in some five percent of heart failures, or even a little more. But the very term "near-death experience" suggests that we tend to assume they have not yet "really" died in such cases. In any event, the argument against an afterlife seems to me much more circular and question-begging than it once did.

Pim van Lommel's well-written book combines a survey on the current state of NDE research (with a lot of personal testimonies) with a speculative hypothesis on the nature of consciousness. Van Lommel rejects neurophysiological explanation of NDE's (such as a hallucination in response of hypoxia, etc.) as it is difficult to account for hallucinations with the minimal or absent brain activity some people experiencing NDE's yet have. Van Lommel also mentions the enormous, life-changing impressions these experiences seem to leave. Finally, there may be an argument from the similarities across various NDE's. The cigarette I just lighted and am smoking now may be a hallucination. But the world, including other people, seem to be very much coherent with the notion that I am smoking a cigarette. They act in accordance with it. And ultimately, part of my warrant for believing what I'm seeing comes from other people believing the same (or acting as if they do). They of course may be hallucinations themselves, but let's not go there.

Van Lommel's survey contains many fascinating details. The sensory experiences people report from the other side seem to be not quite sensory, or almost akin to synaesthesia: colours are 'felt', rather than seen, etc. Especially striking is a drawing by a six-year old girl of a near death-experience, depicting her smiling and flying at apparently great speed over an operation table where her not-so-happy looking double is attended upon by two doctors. A curious detail is a little row of angels in the upper right-hand corner of the drawing, complete with aureoles and all. I very much doubt that the child actually saw angels with actual aureoles. Perhaps she gained a notion of "heaven" and drew the angels because, of course, that's where the angels are; or alternatively, she may have met people or beings who she interpreted as being angels. The latter possibility points to a problem in interpreting NDE's. Provided they are genuine experiences of a genuine reality, this reality may be so numinous or so alien that it becomes extremely difficult to describe without resorting to more familiar notions.

Van Lommel's speculative notions of consciousness are based, unsurprisingly, on quantum mechanics. I have no real problem with that, though I am of course aware that a lot of ideas concerning consciousness and quantum mechanics are a bit fuzzy, to say the least. But part of this surely results from the fact that quantum mechanics does genuinely point to a relationship between consciousness and matter which sits ill with more causally-based, materialist notions. Van Lommel is careful enough to point out that the interpretation of QM he chooses to follow is controversial, and bases himself on the work of such researchers as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, Henry Stapp, etc. I'm aware of a lot of his sources and his treatment seems pretty competent to me - nonetheless, the sections on QM and consciousness are very, very dense at times. The problem here is precisely that experiments such as the double-slit experiment, or Alain Aspect's work on entangled pairs, do point to an underlying reality that is very, very weird. Books do not come in unlimited sizes, and Van Lommel's is hefty enough as it is, but this is one part where perhaps a little more time should be spent on making clear precisely why the picture of reality Van Lommel presents is so shocking.

This said, I find the picture in broad outline not unbelievable. Van Lommel defends a largely panpsychistic (or panprotopsychistic) idea of mind and matter in accordance with Chalmer's type-F monism: matter and mind are double aspects of the same underlying reality. As for NDE's, Van Lommel believes they tap into some kind of "non-local" underlying realm of spirit - perhaps akin to Whitehead's notion of the consequent nature of God (where possibilities or eternal objects are perpetually entertained, and which at the same time functions as the "memory" of the universe, to which every single event that has ever happened remains for ever present and manifest). Through intermediaries such as Sheldrake, Henry Stapp, Ervin Laszlo and the like, the influence of such figures as Whitehead, Peirce, Bergson and William James is accounted for.

No singular scientific observation can falsify philosophical materialism (or any other metaphysical notion of mind and matter). It's certainly possible that accounts of NDE's are indeed based on hallucinations, dreams, imperfect recollection, etc. On the other hand, metaphysical notions are certainly not impervious to empirical science. NDE's are just another part of a body of largely anecdotical and some statistical evidence that is hard to account for within a physicalist world-view (Van Lommel refers to quite a bit of it near the end of his book). Taking all of it together, there is a case for taking things exactly as they seem to be: that NDE's are indeed experiences of some kind of reality that awaits us all after death; that instances of extrasensory perception are indeed instances of extrasensory perception, etc. The task then becomes to propose a coherent world-view which is able to account for these notions. Van Lommel's valiant attempt is highly speculative and probably wrong in the honourable way that grand, speculative visions tend to end up being. But I think there's a chance that parts of it, and perhaps even big parts, may actually be correct.

I have very few set beliefs on an afterlife. I would tend to reject notions of an afterlife as "everlasting" rather than "eternal": as a temporal sequence which never ends. The idea seems at times even horrible to me. When I started to take the possibility of God's existence seriously some years ago, I refused to mentally touch the issue because I was afraid that my very vivid and very present fear of death would prejudice me. For quite some time, I entertained a Whiteheadian notion of "objective immortality": my life, and my thoughts, sensory impressions, etc. would remain forever present to God, though there would be no personal survival of consciousness in the works. At the same time, I began to entertain more eschatological notions (the resurrection, etc.) at least as an object of hope.

Currently, I don't know what to think. Van Lommel tends to reject the notion of reincarnation in favour of the notion that "remembered" past lives may be the remembered lives of others, and I would agree with that. I suppose I am torn between the "prophetic" pole of Christianity with its promise of a Kingdom of God and a perhaps very physical resurrection at the end of times; and the more "mystical" pole of philosophical idealisms, Whitehead's notions of process philosophy, etc. For this reason, I am not sure how to take Van Lommel's book. Perhaps for the moment I'll take it as a compelling argument that we, as centres of experience, feeling, consciousness, are after all quite at home in the universe.

A happy Christmas

2007-12-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

To whoever reads this.

Spiked Online has put up a review, by Michael Fitzpatrick, of a new book by Terry Eagleton on Christ and the gospels. As I figured out it might be fruitful for an ex-Marxist-turning-Christian to read an ex-Christian-turned-Marxist, I did some reading on Eagleton recently - After Theory and most of his study on tragedy, Sweet Violence. His writing style is brilliant and infuriating at the same time - brilliant because I think he's one of the sharpest polemicists in the Anglophone world, infuriating because he tends to hop from subject to subject in a way I occasionally find hard too follow. Especially with Sweet Violence, I am of course handicapped by literary theory being not my own subject.

The Spiked review points out Eagleton's new book is about the same kind of theme that more than occasionally occurs in his other writings as well: that of Christ and political radicalism:

The presentation of Jesus as ‘homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful’ has ‘an obvious popular resonance’. Eagleton explains Jesus’ austere lifestyle – and his celibacy – not as asceticism or Puritanism, but as sacrifices made in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God.

I'm not at all unsympathetic to the idea, though (from a religious viewpoint) I think it's important to not try too hard to fit Jesus into categories of zealot, or revolutionary, or moral teacher - as they all seem to miss something essential. My own interest in Christianity was kindled by the notion that, taking the New Testament on the face of it, Jesus was not a Spartacus or a Seneca, but someone quite... different. In some kind of dialectical fashion, Jesus seems to me to encapsulate the notion of political liberation within the higher notion of the Kingdom of God, which is somehow already here, intermittently, in the solidarity between human beings - yet still infinitely far away at the same time. Or the notion of morality within a higher notion of God's love and mercy. In the same way that Jesus indeed did not abolish death but conquered it.

I'm curious as to Eagleton's treatment of these matters, and will look to pick up the book at some point.

Michael Fitzpatrick's review ends, somewhat predictably and anti-climactically, with Spiked's usual humanist pep-talk:

The fact that past attempts to realise the dreams of reason and freedom through the quest for social progress have ended in failure indicates the need to deepen the humanist project – rather than surrendering to the baleful doctrines of original sin promulgated with renewed fervour in the void of the new millennium by Pope Benedict. While Benedict insists that hope depends on faith in transcendental redemption, Eagleton rightly insists that our source of hope lies in the ‘open-ended nature of humanity’.

There's my usual gripe with Spiked. They remind me at times too much of the International Socialist meetings I occasionally attended. They always ended the same. A discussion about, well, whatever - Palestine, peace in Northern Ireland, the education system - would meander on for a little until an obviously planted IS cadre member would stand up from the crowd and spontaneously elucidate the need for a genuine socialist revolution to solve the problem at hand, with joining the IS or at least buying a subscription to their newspaper being a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for aforementioned event to occur. Likewise, with Spiked, for all their refreshing optimism, their disdain for political correctness and their willingness to slaughter the sacred cows of environmentalism, the animal rights movement, etc. always end up with a starry-eyed vision of tough self-reliant humans, liberated from their infantile fears of technology, progress, disease and death, and guided by the light of reason, marching off into libertarian socialist utopia. Can't they hire some appropriately curmudgeonly rightist, say an Anthony Dalrymple, as a guest columnist?

This said, they're more readable than just about anything else on the political Left.

Incidentally, I think Michael Fitzpatrick draws a false dichotomy in his conclusions - that between hope depending on "faith in transcendental redemption" and lying in the "in the ‘open-ended nature of humanity’". Though I am ever more sceptical of the latter - not so much of the potential of humans to evolve towards the better as of attempts to help that evolution along - I do not think the two hopes exclude one another. The big thing for me about the Christian narrative lies precisely in the way the universal and the symbolic (the reconciliation between God and man, the redemption of the latter) is played out in the very particular and concrete (a specific historical event concerning some specific people in Palestine). The transcendental, it seems to me, envelops and frames the particular, the historical, the here-and-now, without denying it. Likewise with the religious hope for some kind of reconciliation at the end of history and the here-and-now need for social justice, political freedom, etc.

Paul Davies on science and faith

2007-12-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

Physicist Paul Davies published an interesting piece in the NYT about science and faith (HT: Telic Thoughts). Paul Davies points out that:

(...) science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

Claims like these have the tendency to have atheists reach for their guns, and this one does not disappoint in that regard. And they do have something of a point. Because the "faith" ascribed to scientists, or atheists in general, often comes down to believing in the existence of an external reality, the existence of other minds, etc. - both prerequisites for the scientific methods that cannot be proven within the domain of science itself. There's a host of subsidiary, tacit knowledge we rely on to make our way in the world but scarcely reflect on, and which would leave us lost for words when challenged to furnish them with rational argument.

However, this kind of "faith" is very different from faith in the religious sense, which deals not so much with tacit, operational knowledge or prerequisite philosophical claims but with trust and hope in an omnipresent, transcendent You. My faith in some kind of ultimate redemption and reconciliation with God is mainly a matter of precisely hope - nothing close to the operational, practical near-certainty with which I deal with the existence of an external world, other minds, etc.

This said, the difference alluded to above does, in fact, shatter the popular conception of faith as "belief without evidence" on a par with fairies at the bottom of the garden, teapots around Saturn, etc.

And Paul Davies' claim is also more subtle and more interesting than the strawman I fought above. I'm not a natural scientist, I'm easily intimidated by mathematical formula, and for some reason the parts in Roger Penrose's books about imaginary and complex numbers and their importance in quantum mechanics disturbed me deeply. But many other mathematicians and natural scientists than Paul Davies have commented on the strange understandability of the physical world, the effectiveness of mathematics in describing it, and the remarkable beauty of those formula. Paul Davies writes:

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

The issue here is the distance between having "faith" in the rational intelligibility of the cosmos, and faith in the cosmos as the expression of rational intelligence, and whether the first might not easily cross over in the second and then result to something much more akin to faith in the religious sense. A question which arises here is then whether the relationship between the scientist and the natural world can become a relationship between an "I" and a "You" without the scientist realizing that herself.

Paul Davies sharpens the point by referring to the anthropic coincidences - the notion that if the fundamental constants of nature differed just slightly from their actual values, life would become impossible. Theistic answers to that conundrum - the "fine-tuning argument" has been often answered with various kinds of multiverse proposals. Perhaps the laws of physics are vastly different in unobservable regions of the universe - it is hardly an interesting coincidence that we happened to evolve in a region of space where the local laws of nature allowed for our evolution. According to Paul Davies, this answer leaves the existence of physical laws itself unexplained:

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

However, immediately afterward, Paul Davies makes a fascinating move problematizing the notion of disembodied laws of nature in the first place:

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency.

One way to think about such a possibility, I assume, it to think of physical laws as emergent regularities in the behaviour of singular events. There is something sympathetically Peircean or Whiteheadian about such a proposal, and it does vitiate the need for a "hard" Platonic view on mathematics and physical laws, together with a deistic or classical theistic view to which it would obviously point.

Indeed, theologically I would strongly prefer "emergentist" viewpoints. Because I believe the notion of God as the designer and fine-tuner of transcendent physical laws is often accompanied by possibly misleading metaphors: God as the Divine watchmaker. Which may lead one often to some kind of Deism: God as wholly transcendent with regards to the universe, but not in any way immanent in the universe (I don't even want to start on how a view on God-as-divine-lawmaker can be reconciled with belief in at least that one infinitely important miraculous event).

Compare this with St. Paul's vision of the Son as transcendent and immanent in creation at the same time:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, in that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross (through him), whether those on earth or those in heaven.
(Coloss. 1:15-20).

Here we have a notion of the Son as the agent in the creation, sustainment and redemption of the world. A watch, once assembled, will exist without the continuous presence of its specific assembler - but the world cannot continue to exist without the immanent presence of God. An alternative analogy to God and creation might be one between a poet and a poem (of course, the poem may be written down - but this is not when it is created. It is wholly created in the consciousness of the poet). Of course, there may be many flaws with this particular analogy as well, but as an alternative to mechanistic designer analogies, it may be nevertheless useful to ponder.

To a process philosopher like Peirce, laws of nature were regularities emerging from the behaviour of singular events (which did not necessarily obey these regularities in a precise and automatic matter). The laws of nature are habits. I think the same kind of notion could be applied to Whitehead's philosophy of process as well (in his notion of "societies" of events, those that exhibit regularities in the actualization of the same "eternal objects" or Platonic forms - and thus exhibit a certain continuity of existence not ascribable to atomic events themselves). And a similar notion on physical laws has been recently proposed by Sheldrake - which is why I don't believe Sheldrake is the crackpot he is made out to be. He stands in a very venerable and respectable philosophical tradition.

The infallibilist naturally thinks that everything always was substantially as it is now. Laws at any rate being absolute could not grow. They either always were, or they sprang instantaneously into being by a sudden fiat like the drill of a company of soldiers. This makes the laws of nature absolutely blind and inexplicable. Their why and wherefore can't be asked. This absolutely blocks the road of inquiry. The fallibilist won't do this. He asks may these forces of nature not be somehow amenable to reason? May they not have naturally grown up? After all, there is no reason to think they are absolute. If all things are continuous, the universe must be undergoing a continuous growth from non-existence to existence. There is no difficulty in conceiving existence as a matter of degree. The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing themselves upon our recognition. If a thing has no such persistence, it is a mere dream. Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity. In the original chaos, where there was no regularity, there was no existence. It was all a confused dream. This we may suppose was in the infinitely distant past. But as things are getting more regular, more persistent, they are getting less dreamy and more real.
Peirce, CP 1:175

Now, importantly, Peirce and Whitehead were both idealists and theists (as is, for that matter, Sheldrake). The ultimate stuff of the universe is in itself mental, experiential, and amenable to final causes, and their exhibitions of regularities perhaps comparable to the way that human beings obey or disobey the norms of language so that language as a normative, regular system emerges from the communicative behaviour of individual speakers.

Paul Davies' notion of physical laws in similar fashion draws the question away from the origin of Platonic, disembodied physical laws to the nature of events themselves. If we do not suppose that the concrete, the actual can be exhaustively described by quantitative and relational physical laws and mathematics, but that these rather may rest in some fashion upon regularities in the behaviour of the concrete and the actual, then the question is about the nature of the concrete and the actual.

And the basic question about the rational intelligibility of the universe remains. Where reformulating the question does indeed provide a possible answer to the fine-tuning argument, it may end up scaring away the Deist cat with the Panentheist dog.

EDIT: I just leafed through the responses to Paul Davies' post at edge.org. Most of them leap like terriers on the comparison Davies makes between scientific and religious faith without really getting his point about the status of scientific laws. Exceptions are responses by Scott Atran and especially Lee Smolin, who I'm glad to see quotes Peirce.