A man went on a journey and came to a communist country. In the main square of every town and city in the country were statues of Marx, and his bearded face looked down from walls at every side, one or two or twenty stories high. Tall red banners billowed wherever the man looked, and the stirring strains of the ‘Internationale’ blared from loudspeakers on every major intersection. The newspapers of the state incessantly proclaimed the wisdom of Marx, the perfection of his insights, and the excellence of the system he had devised. His image and his writings were treated almost as sacred things, as if they were the idols and sacred texts of some deity of the Age of Ignorance.
But in this country the man saw riding past rich men in golden limousines, men of the Party, or the army, or of any one of a thousand corporations which the state allowed to flourish there, and he saw that it was these few men who controlled the means of production. This man also saw men begging in the streets, and women forced into prostitution, and children who went hungry while food rotted in the storehouses. He saw men who had no work, and starved because of it, and men who did no work, and feasted like Elagabalus. Everywhere were the splendid buildings of a vast and relentless bureaucracy, as officious and protocol-ridden as the bureaucracy of the bygone tyrants, and in quiet corners remained the churches and temples of the old times, where parasites fed off the superstitions of the people.
The man journeyed on, and crossed a river and a range of mountains, and came to another country where the name of Marx was unknown. There were no statues, and no murals, of any leader or teacher of the past. The banners of this nation were of green and violet, and the songs that played on the radios of its towns were simple songs of love and death.
But in this country the man saw neither rich nor poor: all men had a sufficiency of work to occupy their talents, and a sufficiency of goods to meet their needs. He saw that the workers controlled the means of production, not through a few chosen representatives, but collectively. In this nation the man saw no government buildings, save the odd post office, for the state had withered away almost to nothing. Neither were there any temples or churches that preserved the baleful superstitions of the past, only here and there a museum of atheism.
Now, which of these countries do you suppose did the will of Marx?
Monday, March 24, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Spero: All the Other Bits
Well, not quite all the other bits. I have gotten cold feet and left something out.
"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” - William Blake
Or should that be:
"He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void." – From That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. (Is that Wither? Or Frost? I can’t find the passage in my copy.)
I think I had reached as far as ‘What to do next?’ on my originally foreshadowed plan. This is of course *the* big question of Life the Universe and Everything.
And I’ve said that before, so I’m repeating myself.
I shall therefore sum up my Spero document, with a few extra things that have occurred to me along the way.
I. “I have entrusted the writing of these words to a common man;
they will never be what I want to say but only their shadow.” – Jorge Luis Borges
Science is the faith that the universe is rational and comprehensible.
Why should we hold this irrational faith rather than an irrational faith in magic, Scientology, astrology, or fundamentalist Christianity? Ultimately, we have to point at the fruits of this faith. What has holding this faith enabled us to do? What has it produced? How does this compare with the fruits of other faiths? Here the scientific worldview easily stomps over all the others as far as its ability to materially improve the well-being of real human beings and other creatures in a measurable way.
‘Think of the worm Bilharzia, which is one of the plagues of Egypt. It bores its way into the urinary bladder or the rectum, and there often sets up a peculiarly unpleasant form of cancer. For thousands of years men and women had prayed to Osiris, to Jesus, and to Allah, for deliverance from this agony. Bilharzia carried on. In 1917 Christopherson discovered that this disease, provided cancer had not developed, can invariably be cured with antimony tartrate.’ – J. B. S. Haldane
Religion is the faith that the universe is good.
We have a duty to be optimistic. We should not believe that the universe is, in its essence, just a mass of suffering and futility. We should hold an irrational faith that the criminal horrors of the universe can be harmonised into a system in which the universe is in essence a good thing. Why should we hold this irrational faith? Again, the only real excuse is that it is justified by its fruits. How much of lasting value has been created by people who held the faith that the universe was basically bad? That nothing was worth doing? I assert, not very much.
II. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless.’ – Steven Weinberg
If this were true, would it be so bad? Wouldn’t it be much worse if the universe had a point, and it was a point that we didn’t think much of? A point that sucked. I can’t think of anything that would crush our spirits more.
My discussion of absolute morality in terms of ‘upness’ might have suggested that there is ultimately just one outcome that is ‘most good’, one ‘point’ for the universe. But this is an accident arising from my use of an insufficiently good metaphor. Similarly, my analogy of the history of life as a role-playing game with God as the GM might have suggested, to those more familiar with campaigns in the style of ‘DM of the Rings’ than ‘Darth and Droids’, that God is hustling us along towards one ideal universe. But this is not really what I believe. Someone (probably Chesterton) has observed that all tyrants are boringly the same, while the Saints are gloriously different: and the more saintly, the more different. There are an infinite number of ‘best’ universes. Which one we end up in depends on what we do. In metagame theodicy, as its pretentious name suggests, the actions of the players in playing the game not only create the universe, but determine the point of the game.
This suggests three new definitions of Good:
Good1 is the ability of an entity to play the game. The more freedom an entity has, the greater capacity it has to act and influence its environment, the better.
Good2 is the aggregate ability of all entities in the universe to play the game. We should not trample on Good2 to increase Good1. Maybe we need to strive towards a Loftingesque universe where everything is a player, where everything is sentient, and somehow come up with an ethics that will work in this universe.
Good3 is whatever contributes to the point which the players and God eventually come up with.
Maybe we are late in the game, and the universe does have a point. But I think we are early, and it doesn’t. But maybe one day, it will. Glory be to God, Lord of the Worlds!
"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” - William Blake
Or should that be:
"He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void." – From That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. (Is that Wither? Or Frost? I can’t find the passage in my copy.)
I think I had reached as far as ‘What to do next?’ on my originally foreshadowed plan. This is of course *the* big question of Life the Universe and Everything.
And I’ve said that before, so I’m repeating myself.
I shall therefore sum up my Spero document, with a few extra things that have occurred to me along the way.
I. “I have entrusted the writing of these words to a common man;
they will never be what I want to say but only their shadow.” – Jorge Luis Borges
Science is the faith that the universe is rational and comprehensible.
Why should we hold this irrational faith rather than an irrational faith in magic, Scientology, astrology, or fundamentalist Christianity? Ultimately, we have to point at the fruits of this faith. What has holding this faith enabled us to do? What has it produced? How does this compare with the fruits of other faiths? Here the scientific worldview easily stomps over all the others as far as its ability to materially improve the well-being of real human beings and other creatures in a measurable way.
‘Think of the worm Bilharzia, which is one of the plagues of Egypt. It bores its way into the urinary bladder or the rectum, and there often sets up a peculiarly unpleasant form of cancer. For thousands of years men and women had prayed to Osiris, to Jesus, and to Allah, for deliverance from this agony. Bilharzia carried on. In 1917 Christopherson discovered that this disease, provided cancer had not developed, can invariably be cured with antimony tartrate.’ – J. B. S. Haldane
Religion is the faith that the universe is good.
We have a duty to be optimistic. We should not believe that the universe is, in its essence, just a mass of suffering and futility. We should hold an irrational faith that the criminal horrors of the universe can be harmonised into a system in which the universe is in essence a good thing. Why should we hold this irrational faith? Again, the only real excuse is that it is justified by its fruits. How much of lasting value has been created by people who held the faith that the universe was basically bad? That nothing was worth doing? I assert, not very much.
II. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless.’ – Steven Weinberg
If this were true, would it be so bad? Wouldn’t it be much worse if the universe had a point, and it was a point that we didn’t think much of? A point that sucked. I can’t think of anything that would crush our spirits more.
My discussion of absolute morality in terms of ‘upness’ might have suggested that there is ultimately just one outcome that is ‘most good’, one ‘point’ for the universe. But this is an accident arising from my use of an insufficiently good metaphor. Similarly, my analogy of the history of life as a role-playing game with God as the GM might have suggested, to those more familiar with campaigns in the style of ‘DM of the Rings’ than ‘Darth and Droids’, that God is hustling us along towards one ideal universe. But this is not really what I believe. Someone (probably Chesterton) has observed that all tyrants are boringly the same, while the Saints are gloriously different: and the more saintly, the more different. There are an infinite number of ‘best’ universes. Which one we end up in depends on what we do. In metagame theodicy, as its pretentious name suggests, the actions of the players in playing the game not only create the universe, but determine the point of the game.
This suggests three new definitions of Good:
Good1 is the ability of an entity to play the game. The more freedom an entity has, the greater capacity it has to act and influence its environment, the better.
Good2 is the aggregate ability of all entities in the universe to play the game. We should not trample on Good2 to increase Good1. Maybe we need to strive towards a Loftingesque universe where everything is a player, where everything is sentient, and somehow come up with an ethics that will work in this universe.
Good3 is whatever contributes to the point which the players and God eventually come up with.
Maybe we are late in the game, and the universe does have a point. But I think we are early, and it doesn’t. But maybe one day, it will. Glory be to God, Lord of the Worlds!
Monday, March 10, 2008
T really ought to be for Twain
But Twain I have mostly covered already, except for the terrifying dialogue in ‘What is Man?’ which I plan to somehow work in today. And I have, by a shabby trick, already covered Tolkien as well. So where shall I go from here?
Were the Angel of the Lord to appear and say to me: ‘Dr Clam, the wrath of the Lord waxes great against the works of American fantasy authors of the second half of the 20th century, and before a night has passed and a day it is His will that they be destroyed utterly, and expunged from the memory of Mankind, as though they had never been,’ then, perhaps I might say, at first: ‘Bully for You, Lord.’ But then I think I would reconsider, and I would say: ‘Please, might the Marianne books be spared?’ And were the Angel of the Lord, being rational and analytical in manner - as angels are - to ask me to justify my presumption in making such a request, what would I say?
I would then be struck dumb, for I cannot justify my presumption. I cannot justify such a request. I can emote, that is all. I have been sitting here for a few minutes already with ill-formed thoughts cascading through my head trying to figure out what I would say. Perhaps after a few minutes I might be able to say: ‘I am not in love with Marianne, O Angel of the Lord, but I would love to be Marianne. If I could be any character in the works of these fantasy authors of which you speak, Angel of the Lord, how could I chose to be anyone but Marianne, who is so plucky, and so bookish, and so wanting in cant and artifice, and so much the archetype- for I would have had plenty of time to think of big words like ‘archetype’ to throw in- of the Handmaiden of the Lord? Marianne is the type of every hopeful battler on the side of the Culture of Life in a World Gone MadTM, don’t you see, Angel of the Lord? Somehow she is different from all those other fantasy heroines. I can get inside her head. I don’t imagine scenes in books like I used to when I was young, Angel of the Lord, now that I am grown, but I can see so clearly the faces hungry for justice pressed outside the windows of the library, and Buttercup’s room lined with little drawers.’
I am writing this without the Net, so I will be putting in the links to books I can’t remember the titles of later. I am also writing this without a recent memory of the books I am writing about, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them for a long time. You see, I discovered that their author was a Gauleiter in the Planned Parenthood organisation, with responsibility for part of their network of murder camps in Colorado or New Mexico or someplace like that. It’s a funny place, this world of ours.
For I don’t reckon there’s a militantly anti-choice author who could have written a more ghastly pro-life image than Tepper has in that book about the flying white creatures with the teeth who rape human women and dismember their children in utero. These creatures are welcomed into human societies by patriarchal oppressors, of course, who make a stupid bargain of their own immortality- in the form of flying white toothy creatures- in return for the lives of their own children. As in our own world the patriarchal oppressors of the Culture of Death wage systematic war against women in the Renegade Mainland Provinces. That book is a forceful and effective pro-life book, despite the fact that the author is still, as far as I know, proud of her anti-life work.
Then there is Beauty. The psychopath misogynist from the overpopulated future world who rapes the narrator, and the hedonist nitwit faerie-folk, there are the two halves of the Culture of Death in a nutshell. No militantly anti-choice author could have done it better. Beauty is one of those books that made me miserable. It was all so bleak and hopeless and awful. The spirit of Marianne is still there in the narrator, seen through a glass darkly, but crushed almost to nothingness by the end. I should quickly mention some of those other books. Brave New World, when I first read it, for the ironclad arguments against everything I believe in that send the Savage over the edge at the end. That dialogue in What is Man? which demolishes morality and free-will. Walking on Glass, by Iain Banks, before I figured out that it actually had a happy ending. Then something called- I think- Lamia, which I borrowed from a girl named Jackie (Morrisey?) in my year 10 home economics class. Gosh, that was a horrible book for making one’s soul feel slimy and acrid.
I never got to the end of ‘Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’. Though at the moment I am reading Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’, which first got me thinking about Sheri S. Tepper again. I remember thinking that all of the five choices offered by the Goddess to the women of Earth would lead to the extinction of mankind in a very few thousand years.
T is for Tepper because the book is not the author. Your work does not have the meaning (only) that you wish it to have. The work goes on and on, writing itself anew in the mind of each reader, long after the moving finger is still.
Were the Angel of the Lord to appear and say to me: ‘Dr Clam, the wrath of the Lord waxes great against the works of American fantasy authors of the second half of the 20th century, and before a night has passed and a day it is His will that they be destroyed utterly, and expunged from the memory of Mankind, as though they had never been,’ then, perhaps I might say, at first: ‘Bully for You, Lord.’ But then I think I would reconsider, and I would say: ‘Please, might the Marianne books be spared?’ And were the Angel of the Lord, being rational and analytical in manner - as angels are - to ask me to justify my presumption in making such a request, what would I say?
I would then be struck dumb, for I cannot justify my presumption. I cannot justify such a request. I can emote, that is all. I have been sitting here for a few minutes already with ill-formed thoughts cascading through my head trying to figure out what I would say. Perhaps after a few minutes I might be able to say: ‘I am not in love with Marianne, O Angel of the Lord, but I would love to be Marianne. If I could be any character in the works of these fantasy authors of which you speak, Angel of the Lord, how could I chose to be anyone but Marianne, who is so plucky, and so bookish, and so wanting in cant and artifice, and so much the archetype- for I would have had plenty of time to think of big words like ‘archetype’ to throw in- of the Handmaiden of the Lord? Marianne is the type of every hopeful battler on the side of the Culture of Life in a World Gone MadTM, don’t you see, Angel of the Lord? Somehow she is different from all those other fantasy heroines. I can get inside her head. I don’t imagine scenes in books like I used to when I was young, Angel of the Lord, now that I am grown, but I can see so clearly the faces hungry for justice pressed outside the windows of the library, and Buttercup’s room lined with little drawers.’
I am writing this without the Net, so I will be putting in the links to books I can’t remember the titles of later. I am also writing this without a recent memory of the books I am writing about, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them for a long time. You see, I discovered that their author was a Gauleiter in the Planned Parenthood organisation, with responsibility for part of their network of murder camps in Colorado or New Mexico or someplace like that. It’s a funny place, this world of ours.
For I don’t reckon there’s a militantly anti-choice author who could have written a more ghastly pro-life image than Tepper has in that book about the flying white creatures with the teeth who rape human women and dismember their children in utero. These creatures are welcomed into human societies by patriarchal oppressors, of course, who make a stupid bargain of their own immortality- in the form of flying white toothy creatures- in return for the lives of their own children. As in our own world the patriarchal oppressors of the Culture of Death wage systematic war against women in the Renegade Mainland Provinces. That book is a forceful and effective pro-life book, despite the fact that the author is still, as far as I know, proud of her anti-life work.
Then there is Beauty. The psychopath misogynist from the overpopulated future world who rapes the narrator, and the hedonist nitwit faerie-folk, there are the two halves of the Culture of Death in a nutshell. No militantly anti-choice author could have done it better. Beauty is one of those books that made me miserable. It was all so bleak and hopeless and awful. The spirit of Marianne is still there in the narrator, seen through a glass darkly, but crushed almost to nothingness by the end. I should quickly mention some of those other books. Brave New World, when I first read it, for the ironclad arguments against everything I believe in that send the Savage over the edge at the end. That dialogue in What is Man? which demolishes morality and free-will. Walking on Glass, by Iain Banks, before I figured out that it actually had a happy ending. Then something called- I think- Lamia, which I borrowed from a girl named Jackie (Morrisey?) in my year 10 home economics class. Gosh, that was a horrible book for making one’s soul feel slimy and acrid.
I never got to the end of ‘Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’. Though at the moment I am reading Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’, which first got me thinking about Sheri S. Tepper again. I remember thinking that all of the five choices offered by the Goddess to the women of Earth would lead to the extinction of mankind in a very few thousand years.
T is for Tepper because the book is not the author. Your work does not have the meaning (only) that you wish it to have. The work goes on and on, writing itself anew in the mind of each reader, long after the moving finger is still.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Middle-of-the-Road Clam
Or else, I have broken another test. I tried the questionnaire of these guys, which claims to move beyond the left/right continuum and plot your political beliefs on a two-dimensional surface. I have ended up very near the centre... in the 'Left-Libertarian' quadrant. Muahahaha! There is obviously a z-axis they haven't put in that I am out on the end of.
My nearest neighbours in idea-space appear to be Romano Prodi and the Dalai Lama. It seems like a nice quiet neighbourhood.
So, is anyone out there even more centrist than me? I am keen to find out...
My nearest neighbours in idea-space appear to be Romano Prodi and the Dalai Lama. It seems like a nice quiet neighbourhood.
So, is anyone out there even more centrist than me? I am keen to find out...
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Crux of the Matter
The line of comments is getting too long, so I thought I would pull things together again.
(1) I agree with Marco that it is plausible that there be unexpressed genetic ‘subroutines’ that might be expressed under particular environmental stresses, leading to changes of phenotype that mimic Lamarckian evolution.
(2) I agree with Marco that is plausible that there be control mechanisms that under the pressure of particular environmental stresses allow increased levels of mutation in particular ‘subroutines’ that correlate with responses to the particular stress.
(3) I agree with Marco that a filter can plausibly be applied to these randomly mutated subroutines to allow only some to be expressed.
(4) I further agree with Marco that gametes containing selectively expressed altered sub-routines could possibly be tested with respect to some parameter *correlated* with fitness to survive a particular environmental stress, before they are used.
So what are we still arguing about?
I think all this amounts to a plausible model for something which is tolerably close to Lamarckian evolution, but does not amount to *directed* mutation towards a phenotype that will provide better fitness under specific environmental conditions. And Marco still seems to be pressing for classical *directed* mutations. He says:
However this really opens up a door to: a theory that postulates selective 'good' mutations in the direction of better fitness ...
But it doesn’t. And 'it really opens up a door to' is not an argument. There is no physical way you can selectively mutate a particular gene such that the organism will be better able to cope with a particular condition. How can you selectively let through mutations that *will be* useful? How can an organism’s control systems have any foreknowledge of how a change in the gene will alter the fitness of the phenotype? My answer is, it can’t. To find out what the ‘program’ does, you have to ‘run the code’.
That's where we're up to. Anyone else want to join in? It really is good fun :)
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Principia Marconomica
Marco claims that Marconomic Principle 4 is incompatible with some aspects of my philosophy. ‘Contradicts [my axioms] heavily’ in fact. Here is Marconomic Principle 4:
Complex design and creation - Complex artefacts of any description or purpose always have precedents that are complex. A lineage must always be assumed to exist to a less complex precedent with either trial and error pathway for any additional complexity, or a lineage with an added component that has extensive precedent in itself. Whether the pathway to the antecedent is directed or undirected is immaterial to this principle. "Creation" of a complex artefact without precedent does not exist under Marconomic principles. "The design process" is also a complex "artefact" under this concept and thus itself necessarily has precedents and lineage that can be traced back. This Paradigm of code generation demonstrates creation/design as a unified concept (nearly)
Quoth he: ‘I believe this principle to be Universal (with a capital U) This makes my views quite incompatible with your concept of God.’
I can’t see it.
Perhaps Marco, like Dawkins and Haldane and so very many disputatious atheists, is under the misapprehension that my concept of God is of an entity that is complex? If it was, then it would clearly be vulnerable to principle 4. I would equally clearly be a nitwit. However- like Spinoza, and in agreement with the doctors of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, I conceive of God to be an entity that is simple.
As St. Augustine says, God is truly and absolutely simple.
Complex design and creation - Complex artefacts of any description or purpose always have precedents that are complex. A lineage must always be assumed to exist to a less complex precedent with either trial and error pathway for any additional complexity, or a lineage with an added component that has extensive precedent in itself. Whether the pathway to the antecedent is directed or undirected is immaterial to this principle. "Creation" of a complex artefact without precedent does not exist under Marconomic principles. "The design process" is also a complex "artefact" under this concept and thus itself necessarily has precedents and lineage that can be traced back. This Paradigm of code generation demonstrates creation/design as a unified concept (nearly)
Quoth he: ‘I believe this principle to be Universal (with a capital U) This makes my views quite incompatible with your concept of God.’
I can’t see it.
Perhaps Marco, like Dawkins and Haldane and so very many disputatious atheists, is under the misapprehension that my concept of God is of an entity that is complex? If it was, then it would clearly be vulnerable to principle 4. I would equally clearly be a nitwit. However- like Spinoza, and in agreement with the doctors of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, I conceive of God to be an entity that is simple.
As St. Augustine says, God is truly and absolutely simple.
Time enough to verb
I was browsing through 'Teach Yourself Swahili' this morning, and felt inspired to dig out my folder on Tsiolkovskian to have another go at making up the verb, and what do I find in the back of one of the lesser notebooks in the folder but this poem-like object, thought long-lost many years ago:
When I went to Fairfield
I did not seek my doom.
I did not hunt for goblin gold
or seek to follow fairy feet
through the dewy gloom.
When I went to Fairfield
I sought a cask of red;
I sought to buy a carton cold
and some Australian sparkling wine.
Home I went instead.
When I came to Fairfield,
to buy some liquor there,
it made my blood run cold to see
The door beneath the tavern sign
was shuttered, dark and bare.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
An Invitation Reiterated
I wrote this a little while ago, tucked away as a comment. The ever-alert Lexifab picked it up, but otherwise there was the grim waiting-room silence of the outer suburbs of the blogosphere. Here it again:
I get so tired of batting ineffectively at the air... Obviously I disagree with other people, and obviously I don't want to believe anything that's not true, so I feel depressed that nobody ever seems to try and change my mind about anything. So, do you fancy making an attempt to logically outline your position- the what and why of it, starting from foundation axioms- sometime? Consider this an open invitation on all topics... for anyone who is out there. If you believe there is such a thing as truth... if you don't want to see me sunk in hopeless error... please, please, refute what I have written. Give me a more self-consistent, more logical worldview that is more consistent with experimental observations. I haven't got much longer to figure things out. Maybe fifty years max.
I get so tired of batting ineffectively at the air... Obviously I disagree with other people, and obviously I don't want to believe anything that's not true, so I feel depressed that nobody ever seems to try and change my mind about anything. So, do you fancy making an attempt to logically outline your position- the what and why of it, starting from foundation axioms- sometime? Consider this an open invitation on all topics... for anyone who is out there. If you believe there is such a thing as truth... if you don't want to see me sunk in hopeless error... please, please, refute what I have written. Give me a more self-consistent, more logical worldview that is more consistent with experimental observations. I haven't got much longer to figure things out. Maybe fifty years max.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
More Motes, more Beams
Some years ago I was riding home on the train back in Devil Bunny City, standing up squashed in among a bunch of other people in the way that can either induce a Whitman-esque enthusiasm for the energy and drive of the denizens of the great metropolis- or claustrophobia. Just to my left a young lady of Middle-Eastern appearance was cheerfully talking to a friend, and she had a little silvery pendant shaped like a dagger on a chain around her neck. It was a kind of misshapen, amateurish-looking dagger, I remember thinking, and then it hit me with a thwack that it was not a dagger at all, but a map of mandatory Palestine, like so:
Now, there was a much less justifiable pre-emptive war fought 161 years ago, rather than 41 years ago, after which the victors embarked on a much more enthusiastic program of settlement building. And they annexed a vastly larger territory. If you wanted to show your support for your ancestral homeland by wearing a pendant showing its historical boundaries, on the same scale you would have to be one of those ganger types given to extravagantly vast medallions, like so:
“Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was
consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed
to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the
most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance
of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not
considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
-Ulysses S Grant
“The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the
arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is a singular fact, that if any one should declare the President sent the
army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people, who had never submited,
by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United States, and
that there, and thereby, the first blood of the war was shed, there is not one
word in all the President has said, which would either admit or deny the
declaration. This strange omission, it does seem to me, could not have occurred
but by design.”
-Abraham Lincoln
The American ‘Apartheid Wall’ in Alta California:
An illegal American settlement on the West Bank of the Colorado:
I wonder if there is any statute of limitations on these things? If it was right for the French to get out of Algeria, and for the Russians to get out of Kazakhstan, it can't be right for the United States to continue to enjoy the fruits of a aggressive 19th century war of conquest.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Spero: Question Eight, Extra Bonus Bit
This is that observation of Mark Twain’s from The Innocents Abroad which I was going to get on to:
My thesis is that this ranking is entirely proper. This ranking is a useful and appropriate order to list the Holy Personages. This is how things ought to be, for any theology which defines ‘Jesus Christ the Saviour’ as ‘God from God, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.’
Let’s say I wanted to take the train from Mombasa to Kampala. Ultimately, and trivially, this is only possible because somebody built a railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. This was a tremendously expensive engineering project. It was technically very impressive. I understand many of the workers were eaten by lions. It was an uneconomic move in the imperialist Great Game, where Britain needed to control Egypt to guard the sea-route to India, and needed to control the sources of the Nile so no one else could use them to put pressure on Egypt, and needed some decent way to get to the sources of the Nile in less than a long time. But do I need to know any of this stuff? No. I just need to know where to buy my ticket, and have enough cash and the appropriate stamps in my passport. It would be a petty and bizarre bureaucracy that forced me to pass a test on the history of the railway before letting me ride on it.
In the same way: let’s say we grant that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a vitally important and necessary part of God reaching out to man that has transformed the relation between us and made it possible for us to reach God. Does this mean we have to know the name of Jesus? Or pay any attention to him at all? I think, no. No, in direct proportion to how worthy God is actually worthy of our worship. If He is outside of time and space, if He is omnibenevolent and omniscient with respect to the universe, He will make it possible for us to reach out to Him wherever and whoever we are. God’s reaching out to us is a fait accompli: what matters now is our reaching out to God.
Now, if you accept an orthodox Christology, you cannot possibly use the life of Jesus Christ as a model for your own response to God. Sure, we can listen to what he said, and we can throw ourselves on his mercy, but imitate him? All of our discussion here so far about the nature of God, all of C. S. Lewis’ metaphors about oysters and Mark Twain’s metaphors about microbes, all the careful refinements of the definition of the Incarnation in which any common-sense simplification we try to make invariably dumps us into heresy- and I endorse all of those refinements, I see why they are there, I agree with their purpose- all of these things raise an insurmountable barrier between our understanding of Jesus the man and our understanding of ourselves. I don’t think there is any way to think ourselves through that barrier.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus may be the ultimate myth and symbol and case study of God reaching out to man, but the people we ought to remember most, the ones that ought to appear to rank highly in any ranking of ‘Holy Personages’, should be those who have responded heroically in reaching out to God. These are people we can be expected to imitate, whose lives will have lessons for us.
The first and greatest exemplar of man reaching out to God in the Christian story is obviously the maid Mary, saying ‘thy will be done’ and casting her whole life on the mercy of a divine messenger only she could see. There were no other Christians for her to imitate. There was no Christ she could see. It was a pure leap of faith. So, why not put her first?
The proper study of man is man, so Mary ought to be first. But it is entirely proper that after this first and greatest example of man reaching out to God, we should fix our attention next on the God revealed to us, who is not only Spinoza’s creator and sustainer of the universe, but a person, described to us as a Father.
Then, we come to other important exemplars of man reaching out to God:
The rash disciple who was the first to recognise Jesus as the Christ, and was crucified upside down.
Those twelve or fifteen Popes and Martyrs who also spent their lives in reaching out to God.
And then, only then, Jesus Christ the Saviour, at an age when his humanity is not overwhelmed and made incomprehensible by his divinity.
Here's that article by celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach that I couldn't find before. The important bit is this bit:
I state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have
heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:
First- “The Mother of God” – otherwise the Virgin Mary.
Second- The Deity.
Third- Peter.
Fourth- Some twelve or fifteen canonized popes and martyrs.
Fifth- Jesus Christ the Saviour- (but always as an infant in arms)
My thesis is that this ranking is entirely proper. This ranking is a useful and appropriate order to list the Holy Personages. This is how things ought to be, for any theology which defines ‘Jesus Christ the Saviour’ as ‘God from God, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.’
Let’s say I wanted to take the train from Mombasa to Kampala. Ultimately, and trivially, this is only possible because somebody built a railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. This was a tremendously expensive engineering project. It was technically very impressive. I understand many of the workers were eaten by lions. It was an uneconomic move in the imperialist Great Game, where Britain needed to control Egypt to guard the sea-route to India, and needed to control the sources of the Nile so no one else could use them to put pressure on Egypt, and needed some decent way to get to the sources of the Nile in less than a long time. But do I need to know any of this stuff? No. I just need to know where to buy my ticket, and have enough cash and the appropriate stamps in my passport. It would be a petty and bizarre bureaucracy that forced me to pass a test on the history of the railway before letting me ride on it.
In the same way: let’s say we grant that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a vitally important and necessary part of God reaching out to man that has transformed the relation between us and made it possible for us to reach God. Does this mean we have to know the name of Jesus? Or pay any attention to him at all? I think, no. No, in direct proportion to how worthy God is actually worthy of our worship. If He is outside of time and space, if He is omnibenevolent and omniscient with respect to the universe, He will make it possible for us to reach out to Him wherever and whoever we are. God’s reaching out to us is a fait accompli: what matters now is our reaching out to God.
Now, if you accept an orthodox Christology, you cannot possibly use the life of Jesus Christ as a model for your own response to God. Sure, we can listen to what he said, and we can throw ourselves on his mercy, but imitate him? All of our discussion here so far about the nature of God, all of C. S. Lewis’ metaphors about oysters and Mark Twain’s metaphors about microbes, all the careful refinements of the definition of the Incarnation in which any common-sense simplification we try to make invariably dumps us into heresy- and I endorse all of those refinements, I see why they are there, I agree with their purpose- all of these things raise an insurmountable barrier between our understanding of Jesus the man and our understanding of ourselves. I don’t think there is any way to think ourselves through that barrier.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus may be the ultimate myth and symbol and case study of God reaching out to man, but the people we ought to remember most, the ones that ought to appear to rank highly in any ranking of ‘Holy Personages’, should be those who have responded heroically in reaching out to God. These are people we can be expected to imitate, whose lives will have lessons for us.
The first and greatest exemplar of man reaching out to God in the Christian story is obviously the maid Mary, saying ‘thy will be done’ and casting her whole life on the mercy of a divine messenger only she could see. There were no other Christians for her to imitate. There was no Christ she could see. It was a pure leap of faith. So, why not put her first?
The proper study of man is man, so Mary ought to be first. But it is entirely proper that after this first and greatest example of man reaching out to God, we should fix our attention next on the God revealed to us, who is not only Spinoza’s creator and sustainer of the universe, but a person, described to us as a Father.
Then, we come to other important exemplars of man reaching out to God:
The rash disciple who was the first to recognise Jesus as the Christ, and was crucified upside down.
Those twelve or fifteen Popes and Martyrs who also spent their lives in reaching out to God.
And then, only then, Jesus Christ the Saviour, at an age when his humanity is not overwhelmed and made incomprehensible by his divinity.
Here's that article by celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach that I couldn't find before. The important bit is this bit:
Yishayahu Leibowitz once said that the quintessential symbol of Christianity
is God dying on a cross for the sake of man, thereby making humans the center of
the faith. But the essential symbol of Judaism is Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son for God, thereby establishing God at the epicenter of human endeavor to which all action must be directed.
Man must be prepared to give up his life for God, not the reverse.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da … yet again
Of course, it is also possible to mislead with the absence of words.
Here is a picture from the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald showing some protesters in Israel a few days back at the time of George Bush the Greater’s visit, with placards calling him an accomplice to terrorism. The caption is banal and uninformative, and I am sure that most readers of the paper would have breezily assumed that the protesters were people like themselves, calling the American and Israeli leaders terror-friends from a point of view on the ‘left’ which sees military action in places like Jenin and Fallujah as terrorism. But... I am sure that is not who the protesters are at all. In the pictures Bush and Olmert are wearing Palestinian-style headdresses. They are being called terror-friends from a point of view on the ‘right’ which sees establishing a Hamas-led state that lobs missiles at Sderot as complicity in terrorism.
It is always an interesting exercise, when listening to a report on the radio that mentions Palestinian deaths due to Israeli military action, trying to figure out how many of them were people who were shooting back. There always seems to be an effort to blur the difference between ‘militant’ and ‘civilian’. My estimate is 15 out of 18 were militants for day-before-yesterday’s Israeli incursion into Gaza. The report I heard last night said that Hamas had ‘taken responsibility’ for rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel. Surely part of ‘taking responsibility’ for attacking someone is being prepared to say ‘it’s a fair cop’ when they attack you back?
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