Of course, this whole blog is what I think, so that isn’t a very good title. But in the comments to the post just below about the problem of radiation poisoning in the 25th century I have ended up in the position of more or less defending the Catholic party line on contraception, which is not precisely what I think. This runs the risk that I will go on exchanging comments at cross purposes in an unproductive way. And as what I think on this issue is one of those things that I have never been game to set down on virtual paper, it is probably overdue for me to write what I think.
The Orthodox position of the Churches of the East is self-consistent and logical within its postulates in rejecting all forms of birth control. It is also unworkable, and universally ignored, as the only traditionally Orthodox nation not in demographic free-fall that I can think of is Ethiopia.
Humanae vitae departs from this logical and traditional position of all historical Christian churches by allowing- hedged about with various caveats- the use of temporal barriers to conception. It rightly condemns strongly the ‘direct interruption of the generative process already begun’, as well as deliberate sterilization. However, this message is blurred because it condemns without making any distinction (‘Similarly excluded…’) the use of spatial barriers to conception.
I do not see any fundamental meaningful difference between a barrier method in time and a barrier method in space. I do not think the distinction drawn between them in Humanae vitae is very clear or particularly valid. If both forms of barrier method were lawful, hedged about with various caveats, then the line in the sand could be clearly drawn at conception and defended with vigour on the basis of the very clear commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’.
Is that clear? I am saying that it would be more logical, within the shared postulates of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic thought, to have made the compromise with modernity at such a point that a very clear distinction was made between grudgingly allowed methods such as natural family planning and condoms on the one hand and absolutely forbidden methods such as ‘the pill’ – which may interrupt the generative process already begun, even if such is not their main intent- on the other.
I am not entirely convinced that what I think is right, but all my doubts are in the direction of tradition, not away from it.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Lest we remember
Over at Klaus Rohde’s blog, he has mentioned the Phillipine-American War.
You might know of this war in connection with this work.
It was also the inspiration for The War Prayer by Mark Twain.
While concurring entirely with Mark Twain, I observe that what he wrote can readily be tweaked, just a little, to make another document that I also concur with entirely.
You might know of this war in connection with this work.
It was also the inspiration for The War Prayer by Mark Twain.
While concurring entirely with Mark Twain, I observe that what he wrote can readily be tweaked, just a little, to make another document that I also concur with entirely.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Fragments from the 25th Century
Far be it from me to grudge the Farseer and his entourage a warm welcome to K’toomba Dome, still less refrain from extending our legendary hospitality to the hundreds of pilgrims who have crossed many leagues of blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland to come here. Even without the infectious enthusiasm of these dusty, maimed fanatics, there are few among us who do not recognise the spiritual power of the Farseer, or respect his principled stand, for instance, against the Emperor’s war on the cannibal mutants. Yet, we should remember the darker side of what the Farseer stands for. All over the continent, at this very moment, thousands of men, women, children, and sentient quoll-people are suffering from radiation sickness. Many will die agonising deaths. Why? Because the Farseer forbids his followers from wearing lead-lined garments. Because of this irrational religious mania, a simple and effective safeguard against radiation is neglected, and countless wretched victims are condemned to a horrible existence. Vomiting, weakness, hair loss, bleeding, recurrent infections, anemia. It is an unspeakable and ghastly malady. Some will survive, only to be stricken down with cancers in later life. Many will not survive. Remember this, next week, when you see the joyous crowds of worshippers throwing garlands of flowers at the Farseer. Remember this.
* * *
[Our reporter caught up with Cassowary Jorj T’eepot, leader of the Farseer’s followers in the Blue Mountains and organiser of the Sacred Festivities. After making inquiries as to the Farseer’s health after his arduous journey from Wee Waa, and congratulating the Cassowary on his preparation for the Farseer’s visit, our reporter raised the contentious issue of the Faith’s anti-lead stance.]
Was the Farseer taken aback by the protests? I understand he looked rather bemused.
The protests? Oh, yes. Handing out lead loincloths to passers-by. Very childish, really. Actually, I don’t think he was taken aback. One might think that this sort of thing is only something that the Faithful have to put up with in a cosmopolitan, secular place like K’toomba Dome, but even in the sacred city of Wee Waa there are people who resent the Farseer’s condemnation of lead, there are protests from time to time.
I suppose it is not surprising that the Faith’s lead ban is resented, with the problem of radiation sickness.
Well, as you know, radioactivity is associated exclusively with the ruins of the ancients. The Faith teaches that the ruins of the ancients are cursed by God, and strictly forbids any of the Faithful to enter them. The signs of dangerous levels of radioactivity are very obvious- sickly plants, sand melted into glassy slag, twisted ruins, malformed animals covered with lesions...
But you can’t just expect people to stay out ancient ruins, can you? It goes against human nature. There is all sorts of neat loot in those places. You have to admit that whatever you say, people are still going to go into radioactive ruins. If they do, shouldn’t they be wearing lead clothing?
Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is that, as you know, lead is not 100% effective against radiation. People have ventured into ancient ruins wearing lead clothing and died from radiation sickness. The second is that, lead is itself toxic: there are illnesses associated with being exposed to lead. And most importantly, what lead clothing does is, it normalises entering radioactive zones. If it is seen as something that is safe, something that is fun, then there will be pressure for everyone to do it. Some of them will be exposed to unsafe levels of radiation. And radiation is not the only danger in the ruins: there are cannibal mutants, we hear of people coming across still-functioning killer robots with laser eyes, for example.
Let me pose you another question, Cassowary. What about the ‘innocents’? People who have never ventured into radioactive zones themselves but are exposed, say, when someone else in their dome goes into a ruin and comes out with an artifact that gives out radioactive rays of death? Wouldn’t lead clothing protect them in that situation?
I think, anyone untrustworthy enough to bring a radioactive artifact into a dome like that, they’re hardly going to tell the others in the dome that they should wear lead garments, will they? They’re not the sort of person who is going to be swayed by what you or the Farseer or anyone tells them about ethical conduct. In the old days- and I’m not saying that we should go back to the old ways, mind you- but in the old days, someone like that would have been staked out in the desert for the death toads.
But if everyone in the dome wore lead clothing as a matter of course, that wouldn’t be an issue, would it?
No, it wouldn’t. But there would be a much graver issue. It would show that no one in that dome trusted one another, that they didn’t think they could rely on each other. And a dome like that is not going to last. The next time that bandits attack, the next plague of flesh-eating locusts- a dome like that is going to fall.
Well… I’m afraid that’s all we have time for, Cassowary. I hope the Sacred Festivities go off without a hitch for you.
Thank you.
Was the Farseer taken aback by the protests? I understand he looked rather bemused.
The protests? Oh, yes. Handing out lead loincloths to passers-by. Very childish, really. Actually, I don’t think he was taken aback. One might think that this sort of thing is only something that the Faithful have to put up with in a cosmopolitan, secular place like K’toomba Dome, but even in the sacred city of Wee Waa there are people who resent the Farseer’s condemnation of lead, there are protests from time to time.
I suppose it is not surprising that the Faith’s lead ban is resented, with the problem of radiation sickness.
Well, as you know, radioactivity is associated exclusively with the ruins of the ancients. The Faith teaches that the ruins of the ancients are cursed by God, and strictly forbids any of the Faithful to enter them. The signs of dangerous levels of radioactivity are very obvious- sickly plants, sand melted into glassy slag, twisted ruins, malformed animals covered with lesions...
But you can’t just expect people to stay out ancient ruins, can you? It goes against human nature. There is all sorts of neat loot in those places. You have to admit that whatever you say, people are still going to go into radioactive ruins. If they do, shouldn’t they be wearing lead clothing?
Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is that, as you know, lead is not 100% effective against radiation. People have ventured into ancient ruins wearing lead clothing and died from radiation sickness. The second is that, lead is itself toxic: there are illnesses associated with being exposed to lead. And most importantly, what lead clothing does is, it normalises entering radioactive zones. If it is seen as something that is safe, something that is fun, then there will be pressure for everyone to do it. Some of them will be exposed to unsafe levels of radiation. And radiation is not the only danger in the ruins: there are cannibal mutants, we hear of people coming across still-functioning killer robots with laser eyes, for example.
Let me pose you another question, Cassowary. What about the ‘innocents’? People who have never ventured into radioactive zones themselves but are exposed, say, when someone else in their dome goes into a ruin and comes out with an artifact that gives out radioactive rays of death? Wouldn’t lead clothing protect them in that situation?
I think, anyone untrustworthy enough to bring a radioactive artifact into a dome like that, they’re hardly going to tell the others in the dome that they should wear lead garments, will they? They’re not the sort of person who is going to be swayed by what you or the Farseer or anyone tells them about ethical conduct. In the old days- and I’m not saying that we should go back to the old ways, mind you- but in the old days, someone like that would have been staked out in the desert for the death toads.
But if everyone in the dome wore lead clothing as a matter of course, that wouldn’t be an issue, would it?
No, it wouldn’t. But there would be a much graver issue. It would show that no one in that dome trusted one another, that they didn’t think they could rely on each other. And a dome like that is not going to last. The next time that bandits attack, the next plague of flesh-eating locusts- a dome like that is going to fall.
Well… I’m afraid that’s all we have time for, Cassowary. I hope the Sacred Festivities go off without a hitch for you.
Thank you.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
The Hidden Cost of Global Warming
Here is some data- which was very hard to find- giving the average monthly death rate in Australia:
And just to show that 1999 was not a fluke:
If, like me, you subscribe to the germ theory of disease popularised by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century, the obvious explanation for this trend is an annual celestial event- perhaps the Earth passing through the cloud of comet debris associated with Comet 96P/Machholz, causing a rain of deadly space bacteria to Earth.
But... in the Northern Hemisphere, these same months are associated with lower mortality rates! The winter months seem to be more unhealthy if you live in a developed country in the temperate zone, despite the fact that they are less conducive for microbial growth. Go figure. Here are some data for Germany, New Zealand, and Macedonia. (Note that if you are not a developed country, the germ theory holds up just fine: a hundred years ago, our death rate was highest in summer, due to juvenile diarrhea. Actually the figures I saw on this are only for Perth c.1900 and Bangladesh today, but I am going out on a limb and generalising.)
Now, we could try mounting a complicated ad hoc rescue of the germ theory where clouds of space bacteria lurk a little above and below the plane of the ecliptic, or need to strike the atmosphere at a shallow angle to avoid burning up... but it seems that there are a whole slew of disorders, comprising the bulk of mortality, for which even small reductions in temperature give an increase in mortality. Maybe some of this mortality difference is true seasonality, but it looks like- for whatever reason- it is related to cold weather.
So who are these people who are dying? This paper from New Zealand suggests that this increase is accounted for almost entirely by deaths of people over 65. It seems logical that they will be disproportionately the ones who are sick already, and the ones who are poorer. Though I don’t have any data for this.
Thus, these excess deaths are accounted for by people, who statistically:
(1) Contribute much less to the economy than the average.
(2) Consume much more health care than the average.
Thus, cold weather clearly has an economic benefit by removing an unproductive population who are a burden on the economy. I remember that Ross Garnaut always used to write articles in the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald about the economic challenges posed by an aging population, so it is no surprise he is worried about global warming.
I believe he points out that some of this shortfall in deaths of the weak and aged might be made up for by heat-related deaths in summer, but the statistics we've looked at on seasonality of mortality in the developed world show that this is very unlikely. Unless, perhaps, we mount a crash program of not building power plants and letting electricity infrastructure decay, to increase the probability that old folks will be trapped at home without functional air-conditioning during episodes of extreme hot weather.
A serious study is required to determine if the economic cost of maintaining all these unhealthy old people will be outweighed by some of the economic benefits of global warming- such as longer dry-periods in southern Australia forcing an end to uneconomic uses of marginal land, or increased first-world mosquito-borne disease giving drug companies a greater incentive to develop treatments for these endemic third world problems.
So what is the moral of this?
It could be that a ‘cost/benefit’ analysis is never value-neutral. One person’s cost is another person’s benefit. And a short-term cost might turn out to be a long-term benefit, and vice versa. Dollars in cost/benefit analyses are not like milligrams in chemical analyses. They are more rubbery, subjective, and flamboyant entities.
It could be that it is snarky and dishonest to talk about the likely negative health effects of global warming and ignore the likely positive ones. There is this trivial point which you should verify for yourselves, not trusting me, and that you should then bring up in conversation often, that death rates in the developed world correlate overall with cold weather, not with hot weather.
Or, the moral could be that I am nothing but a contrarian sophist. Maybe I am just being silly. It guess there's a good chance that this excess seasonal mortality has nothing to do with climate, and its really all due to those weirdly gyrating clouds of space bacteria.
And just to show that 1999 was not a fluke:
If, like me, you subscribe to the germ theory of disease popularised by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century, the obvious explanation for this trend is an annual celestial event- perhaps the Earth passing through the cloud of comet debris associated with Comet 96P/Machholz, causing a rain of deadly space bacteria to Earth.
But... in the Northern Hemisphere, these same months are associated with lower mortality rates! The winter months seem to be more unhealthy if you live in a developed country in the temperate zone, despite the fact that they are less conducive for microbial growth. Go figure. Here are some data for Germany, New Zealand, and Macedonia. (Note that if you are not a developed country, the germ theory holds up just fine: a hundred years ago, our death rate was highest in summer, due to juvenile diarrhea. Actually the figures I saw on this are only for Perth c.1900 and Bangladesh today, but I am going out on a limb and generalising.)
Now, we could try mounting a complicated ad hoc rescue of the germ theory where clouds of space bacteria lurk a little above and below the plane of the ecliptic, or need to strike the atmosphere at a shallow angle to avoid burning up... but it seems that there are a whole slew of disorders, comprising the bulk of mortality, for which even small reductions in temperature give an increase in mortality. Maybe some of this mortality difference is true seasonality, but it looks like- for whatever reason- it is related to cold weather.
So who are these people who are dying? This paper from New Zealand suggests that this increase is accounted for almost entirely by deaths of people over 65. It seems logical that they will be disproportionately the ones who are sick already, and the ones who are poorer. Though I don’t have any data for this.
Thus, these excess deaths are accounted for by people, who statistically:
(1) Contribute much less to the economy than the average.
(2) Consume much more health care than the average.
Thus, cold weather clearly has an economic benefit by removing an unproductive population who are a burden on the economy. I remember that Ross Garnaut always used to write articles in the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald about the economic challenges posed by an aging population, so it is no surprise he is worried about global warming.
I believe he points out that some of this shortfall in deaths of the weak and aged might be made up for by heat-related deaths in summer, but the statistics we've looked at on seasonality of mortality in the developed world show that this is very unlikely. Unless, perhaps, we mount a crash program of not building power plants and letting electricity infrastructure decay, to increase the probability that old folks will be trapped at home without functional air-conditioning during episodes of extreme hot weather.
A serious study is required to determine if the economic cost of maintaining all these unhealthy old people will be outweighed by some of the economic benefits of global warming- such as longer dry-periods in southern Australia forcing an end to uneconomic uses of marginal land, or increased first-world mosquito-borne disease giving drug companies a greater incentive to develop treatments for these endemic third world problems.
So what is the moral of this?
It could be that a ‘cost/benefit’ analysis is never value-neutral. One person’s cost is another person’s benefit. And a short-term cost might turn out to be a long-term benefit, and vice versa. Dollars in cost/benefit analyses are not like milligrams in chemical analyses. They are more rubbery, subjective, and flamboyant entities.
It could be that it is snarky and dishonest to talk about the likely negative health effects of global warming and ignore the likely positive ones. There is this trivial point which you should verify for yourselves, not trusting me, and that you should then bring up in conversation often, that death rates in the developed world correlate overall with cold weather, not with hot weather.
Or, the moral could be that I am nothing but a contrarian sophist. Maybe I am just being silly. It guess there's a good chance that this excess seasonal mortality has nothing to do with climate, and its really all due to those weirdly gyrating clouds of space bacteria.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
V is for van Vogt
Or more accurately, V is for Voyage of the Space Beagle.
I have never managed to get through much of anything else written by A. E. van Vogt, but Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of those books that changed my life.
It was one of the first science fiction books I read- along with Decision at Doona by Anne McAffrey- and so every standard sci-fi trope hit me as something new and fresh.
My copy seems to have crumbled away- at least, I can’t find it anywhere, and it was looking pretty shabby last time I saw it. It had a picture of the coeurl on the cover. What this means is that I won't be checking any of my facts in what follows. Or putting any quotes in.
One appealing thing about Voyage of the Space Beagle is that the direction of the narrative is quintessentially Clamly - outwards, outwards, ever outward, on, on, on, into the unexplored intergalactic vastness, onwards and outwards! I can think of few more fitting ends to a story than to an endless journey through empty space in order to lead a planet-killing black cloud to its doom in the void.
I mentioned before how Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle provided one fine role-model for my professional life. Voyage of the Space Beagle provided two more: the smart-arse nexialist who makes it his business to know more than everybody else does in their particular specialty, and the empire-building chemist who takes over said nexialist’s lab space.I see my subsequent career* as an attempt to harmonise these two competing visions of the scientist.
I immediately went off and started writing a story with a similar spaceship on a similar expedition. As you do, I crewed it with all the people I knew. This was partly so I could kill off all the people I didn’t like in gruesome ways on alien planets. As you do.
I didn’t make myself the nexialist- I made my know-it-all friend Steven Mathiesen the nexialist. I gave myself a role that I made up, which I think I called ‘environmental engineer’. Or ‘ecosystem engineer’. Something like that. As these stories work out, I think we got halfway through our first planet before I moved on to another project.
Sometime around then I was hanging around school after school because my Mum, who was a volunteer teacher person, had to do some after school thing. I think I was boooooooored. I can’t remember. But I do remember my english teacher pointing to one of these seedpods and saying: ‘That looks like an alien creature. Why don’t you write about that?’
*: Collins Essential English Dictionary: verb. to rush in an uncontrolled way.
The picture of the Devil's Claw seedpod is lifted from evil-nature.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html. I don't know anything about that website except it had this picture sitting there for me to nick, so can't recommend you go there.
I have never managed to get through much of anything else written by A. E. van Vogt, but Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of those books that changed my life.
It was one of the first science fiction books I read- along with Decision at Doona by Anne McAffrey- and so every standard sci-fi trope hit me as something new and fresh.
My copy seems to have crumbled away- at least, I can’t find it anywhere, and it was looking pretty shabby last time I saw it. It had a picture of the coeurl on the cover. What this means is that I won't be checking any of my facts in what follows. Or putting any quotes in.
One appealing thing about Voyage of the Space Beagle is that the direction of the narrative is quintessentially Clamly - outwards, outwards, ever outward, on, on, on, into the unexplored intergalactic vastness, onwards and outwards! I can think of few more fitting ends to a story than to an endless journey through empty space in order to lead a planet-killing black cloud to its doom in the void.
I mentioned before how Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle provided one fine role-model for my professional life. Voyage of the Space Beagle provided two more: the smart-arse nexialist who makes it his business to know more than everybody else does in their particular specialty, and the empire-building chemist who takes over said nexialist’s lab space.
I immediately went off and started writing a story with a similar spaceship on a similar expedition. As you do, I crewed it with all the people I knew. This was partly so I could kill off all the people I didn’t like in gruesome ways on alien planets. As you do.
I didn’t make myself the nexialist- I made my know-it-all friend Steven Mathiesen the nexialist. I gave myself a role that I made up, which I think I called ‘environmental engineer’. Or ‘ecosystem engineer’. Something like that. As these stories work out, I think we got halfway through our first planet before I moved on to another project.
Sometime around then I was hanging around school after school because my Mum, who was a volunteer teacher person, had to do some after school thing. I think I was boooooooored. I can’t remember. But I do remember my english teacher pointing to one of these seedpods and saying: ‘That looks like an alien creature. Why don’t you write about that?’
So I did. They are about twice as high a person (I think) and live in endless sand deserts, where they filter tiny things out of the sand to eat- sort of funneling them towards their maws with those long arms of theirs. They were intelligent. I think only one of them had ever been brought back to Earth, and it did not survive long because of our high gravity.
The only other thing I remember writing about them was a list of the emotions they could experience. Something like Type 2 Joy, Type 1a Despair, and an emotion with no common English name, characterised by parameters X = 2.3 and Y = 7.0 on the Pfitzer-Gloschburg scale. Something like that.
My English teacher was horrified. ‘You can’t do that,’ I remember her saying.
‘What?’
‘Here- this is all scientific, about what they eat and such, and then here you’re talking about emotions. You can’t talk about emotions scientifically like that.’
‘Why?’
I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I’m sure we ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.
*: Collins Essential English Dictionary: verb. to rush in an uncontrolled way.
The picture of the Devil's Claw seedpod is lifted from evil-nature.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html. I don't know anything about that website except it had this picture sitting there for me to nick, so can't recommend you go there.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
U is for Unfinished Business
I would like to offer the following spoiler for The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
The narrator loses consciousness on page 298.
At the close of the novel, on page 449, he is still unconscious.
I humbly tips me lid to this impressive display of authorial chutzpah.
The narrator loses consciousness on page 298.
At the close of the novel, on page 449, he is still unconscious.
I humbly tips me lid to this impressive display of authorial chutzpah.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Abulia Day
In 1986, I owned a 'One New Word a Day' desk calendar. May 27th was 'abulia: an abnormal lack of ability to act or make decisions.' I felt that my life had a lot of applications for this word, and tacked it up on the wall. I usually remember each May 27th.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Er... why?
I turned on the radio this morning and happened to hear some minister in Mahmoud Abbas' government talking about some reforms they were planning with the police- this is part of what he said:
'We support the private security industry and we believe as a government that you need both a strong public security system and a strong private security system.'
Nicholas Raqsani, I think his name was. Actually, I just made him up. Who I really heard was our health minister, and what she said was this:
'We support the private health insurance industry and we believe as a government that you need both a strong public health system and a strong private health system.'
But... is it really true that we need a private health insurance industry? This private health system is currently complaining that if legislation is changed so that the government no longer bullies people into buying their product, no one will buy it. I would be embarassed to be associated with a product that was as crummy as that. And in my rare lucid moments, I would ask myself, do people really need our product?
'We support the private security industry and we believe as a government that you need both a strong public security system and a strong private security system.'
Nicholas Raqsani, I think his name was. Actually, I just made him up. Who I really heard was our health minister, and what she said was this:
'We support the private health insurance industry and we believe as a government that you need both a strong public health system and a strong private health system.'
But... is it really true that we need a private health insurance industry? This private health system is currently complaining that if legislation is changed so that the government no longer bullies people into buying their product, no one will buy it. I would be embarassed to be associated with a product that was as crummy as that. And in my rare lucid moments, I would ask myself, do people really need our product?
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Crazy Ape Bonkers Physical Chemistry Metaphor Weekend, Day Two
in which Dr Clam gets out of a bind that has been worrying him dreadfully for a long time
Another thing I have been waiting on for a long time is an outline and defence of the orthodox Islamo-Christian doctrine of ‘Hell’. I had gone on at length in the very early days of the Accidental Blog about how, as I understood it, this was a pernicious doctrine that led logically to the conclusion that the human race should be exterminated. This was because of the introduction of an ‘infinite’ amount of suffering into any calculation of the consequences of our actions throws the whole thing out of whack. More generally, how can an ‘infinite’ amount of punishment be logically applied to a finite creature?
Infinity is the problem.So long as the sufferings of Hell can be understood in such a way as to be finite, there is no intrinsic reason why the existence of Hell cannot be reconciled with a perfectly just and merciful God. Like so:
Justice is served if the sum total of the punishment of the finite creature is exactly as much as it deserves.
Mercy is served in that the finite creature is given exactly what it most truly desires – separation from God – and is not punished one jot or tittle more than is just.
I have realised that the answer was there all the time in C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’. The denizens of the ‘suburbs of Hell’ in this book are finite creatures who are insubstantial phantoms. The appear to be evaporating away, fading, over the course of the story. Why can’t they do this forever? Shrink away, but never reach pure nothingness. If they do this, than their total suffering will be finite, although they are infinitely extended in time.
This will make more sense with an equation. Take this one, which I came across the other day while deriving the Equipartition Theorem:
Another thing I have been waiting on for a long time is an outline and defence of the orthodox Islamo-Christian doctrine of ‘Hell’. I had gone on at length in the very early days of the Accidental Blog about how, as I understood it, this was a pernicious doctrine that led logically to the conclusion that the human race should be exterminated. This was because of the introduction of an ‘infinite’ amount of suffering into any calculation of the consequences of our actions throws the whole thing out of whack. More generally, how can an ‘infinite’ amount of punishment be logically applied to a finite creature?
Infinity is the problem.So long as the sufferings of Hell can be understood in such a way as to be finite, there is no intrinsic reason why the existence of Hell cannot be reconciled with a perfectly just and merciful God. Like so:
Justice is served if the sum total of the punishment of the finite creature is exactly as much as it deserves.
Mercy is served in that the finite creature is given exactly what it most truly desires – separation from God – and is not punished one jot or tittle more than is just.
I have realised that the answer was there all the time in C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’. The denizens of the ‘suburbs of Hell’ in this book are finite creatures who are insubstantial phantoms. The appear to be evaporating away, fading, over the course of the story. Why can’t they do this forever? Shrink away, but never reach pure nothingness. If they do this, than their total suffering will be finite, although they are infinitely extended in time.
This will make more sense with an equation. Take this one, which I came across the other day while deriving the Equipartition Theorem:
The area under this function, from x = 0 to infinity, is not infinite, just π1/2/4. So we can get any finite amount of suffering that is necessary out of the infinitely-prolonged existence of a finite creature.
So we have not really introduced infinities into the moral equation.
And it does not logically follow that a belief in Hell implies the human race should be destroyed.
Which is good.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Crazy Ape Bonkers Physical Chemistry Metaphor Weekend, Day One
I have been hanging out for a lucid counter-narrative to my narrative for the Iraq War(s) for some time now. As you may recall, my problem is not there aren’t any reasonably consistent counter-narratives, it’s just that none I can think of can possibly be the informing counter-narrative of the omnipresent anti-war establishment I see around me.
Here are the counter-narratives I have thought of:
1. The Ground is the Image. This is just how my narrative appears if you think human rights are bollocks and you might be next on the regime-change to-do list. As my long-long-ago post about Darfur suggests, this to-do list logically expands to encompass Russia and the RMP, so it is not surprising that they would not be onside. This worldview will also to a very large extend determine the position of the United Nations, as the higher ideals many nations may want to express through that body will tend to be dragged down to the level of the unrepresentative swill. I have no sympathy with this counter-narrative, as might be expected.
2. They’re hopeless. Hopeless! GWB et al are so incompetent that there is no chance that their Napoleonic project will come off. As a pragmatist, I can see the sense in this counter-narrative. But as outlined in the Hillel Halkin piece that I circulated to kick off our ‘warblogging by email’ so many years ago, this logically suggests that once the war is underway, anyone who shares the view that human rights are not bollocks should chip in and help. And anyone in the United States who does not want to see their country take a serious hit to their prestige and influence ought to chip in and help. It could be argued that the war would still fail, even with our help; or as Andrew did in 2003, that if we make it too easy, GWB et al will just try it again. But once it becomes evident that the project will probably come off, but with a great deal of difficulty, these arguments no longer apply. I think this is basically the counter-narrative of McCain. This narrative also applies much more to Afghanistan than to Iraq. Iraq is flat, urbanised, educated, close to allied states, strategically important, and has a track record of being successfully conquered. Afghanistan is not any of these things.
3. The US is the Great Satan. If you are Noam Chomsky or John Pilger, you believe in human rights and the rule of law (I think) but you see the world through a lens that magnifies all the transgressions of the United States and makes it *the* great evil in the world. You can select your data, I think, so that you could honestly hold this view. But if you are one of these people, you will have no strong feelings on whether Obama or McCain should be president. You know what Kennedy and Johnson got up to. You wrote articles saying that Clinton was a Nazi when he was president. You protested against the war on Serbia, and you know that a Democratic victory is still a victory for the Military-Industrial complex. As a contrarian, I have some admiration for those who cleave honestly to this narrative. Opposing someone who is stronger than you and could crush you like a bug *because* they are stronger than you and could crush you like a bug is stirring and noble and appeals to the small fraction of Irishness in my blood.
4. My Kingdom is Not of this World. The transcendent moral law prohibits war. There is a greater spiritual universe compared to which this mortal world is an insignificant mote, and the disfiguring effect of war on just one soul outweighs any temporal benefit. It is better to be butchered with a clear conscience than to take up arms. To hold this position, you need to believe in moral absolutes, like Tolstoy or Gandhi or Pope Benedict. And if you do, you will have protested just as loudly when the war machine rolled out over Serbia and Afghanistan. As an idealist, I admire this narrative. This is the narrative that sometimes gives me pause.
But my problem remains. These counter-narratives are not the counter-narratives of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald or of Nancy Pelosi. I believe that the apparent consensus view of educated people in the West is not a coherent counter-narrative to my narrative at all, but a muddled superposition of all these counter-narratives. Like a molecular orbital can be represented as a linear combination of orthogonal atomic orbitals, this counter-narrative is a linear combination of orthogonal counter-narratives. It does not form a consistent structure that can be described by classical narrative theory, but is a decoherent quantum superposition of narratives.
Here are the counter-narratives I have thought of:
1. The Ground is the Image. This is just how my narrative appears if you think human rights are bollocks and you might be next on the regime-change to-do list. As my long-long-ago post about Darfur suggests, this to-do list logically expands to encompass Russia and the RMP, so it is not surprising that they would not be onside. This worldview will also to a very large extend determine the position of the United Nations, as the higher ideals many nations may want to express through that body will tend to be dragged down to the level of the unrepresentative swill. I have no sympathy with this counter-narrative, as might be expected.
2. They’re hopeless. Hopeless! GWB et al are so incompetent that there is no chance that their Napoleonic project will come off. As a pragmatist, I can see the sense in this counter-narrative. But as outlined in the Hillel Halkin piece that I circulated to kick off our ‘warblogging by email’ so many years ago, this logically suggests that once the war is underway, anyone who shares the view that human rights are not bollocks should chip in and help. And anyone in the United States who does not want to see their country take a serious hit to their prestige and influence ought to chip in and help. It could be argued that the war would still fail, even with our help; or as Andrew did in 2003, that if we make it too easy, GWB et al will just try it again. But once it becomes evident that the project will probably come off, but with a great deal of difficulty, these arguments no longer apply. I think this is basically the counter-narrative of McCain. This narrative also applies much more to Afghanistan than to Iraq. Iraq is flat, urbanised, educated, close to allied states, strategically important, and has a track record of being successfully conquered. Afghanistan is not any of these things.
3. The US is the Great Satan. If you are Noam Chomsky or John Pilger, you believe in human rights and the rule of law (I think) but you see the world through a lens that magnifies all the transgressions of the United States and makes it *the* great evil in the world. You can select your data, I think, so that you could honestly hold this view. But if you are one of these people, you will have no strong feelings on whether Obama or McCain should be president. You know what Kennedy and Johnson got up to. You wrote articles saying that Clinton was a Nazi when he was president. You protested against the war on Serbia, and you know that a Democratic victory is still a victory for the Military-Industrial complex. As a contrarian, I have some admiration for those who cleave honestly to this narrative. Opposing someone who is stronger than you and could crush you like a bug *because* they are stronger than you and could crush you like a bug is stirring and noble and appeals to the small fraction of Irishness in my blood.
4. My Kingdom is Not of this World. The transcendent moral law prohibits war. There is a greater spiritual universe compared to which this mortal world is an insignificant mote, and the disfiguring effect of war on just one soul outweighs any temporal benefit. It is better to be butchered with a clear conscience than to take up arms. To hold this position, you need to believe in moral absolutes, like Tolstoy or Gandhi or Pope Benedict. And if you do, you will have protested just as loudly when the war machine rolled out over Serbia and Afghanistan. As an idealist, I admire this narrative. This is the narrative that sometimes gives me pause.
But my problem remains. These counter-narratives are not the counter-narratives of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald or of Nancy Pelosi. I believe that the apparent consensus view of educated people in the West is not a coherent counter-narrative to my narrative at all, but a muddled superposition of all these counter-narratives. Like a molecular orbital can be represented as a linear combination of orthogonal atomic orbitals, this counter-narrative is a linear combination of orthogonal counter-narratives. It does not form a consistent structure that can be described by classical narrative theory, but is a decoherent quantum superposition of narratives.
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