Blogimus Maximus

A bad impression

2006-05-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

A lot of traditionalists and sometimes non-trad conservatives will complain that the American bishops only crack down on dissent that, well, isn't liberal. They conclude simply that a lot of American bishops don't like Catholic tradition.

But this doesn't explain the exact character of these "crack-downs". Take, for instance, the word "schismatic". Bracketing the question of the actual ecclesiastical state of the SSPX and people who attend their masses, isn't it odd that these are apparently the only schismatics left? I've heard the Old Catholics and Polish Catholics occasionally referred to as schismatics, but Eastern Orthodox and Protestants? They're our separated brethren, doncha know.

Likewise, here's an example, not from a bishop (or an American) but exemplifying the same phenomenon: 'Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, told his flock in a recent church bulletin.'

Again, words like "grave disobedience", "mortal sin", they tend to have fallen from the limelight in the last few decades...except when it's time to take care of those weirdo trads.

If someone simply decides to abandon the old, honest language of Christians then he is following the logical implications of his theological opinions; they may be wrong opinions, but this is completely different from abandoning words like "mortal sin" or "schism" or "obedience" except as a tool for dealing with those people who still believe in that stuff. I am not a mind reader and I don't know if that's what bishops and priests are really thinking when they do this sudden switch to "pre-V2-speak", but it certainly gives the impression of such an appallingly cynical way of thinking.

Can I speak to the manager?

2006-05-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

I can't remember when and how my opinion of the Iraq war changed, but it wasn't helped when I dug up a statistic that should not exist. I was reminded of it by a blogger who noted the first Canadian woman to die in Afghanistan.

Occasionally I hear about people who take to reading the news regularly (a horrible habit) and become obsessed with the endless suffering that pervades the world. But the world has been this way for a long time. What overwhelms me is the sheer lunacy of the witch's brew we've stewed for ourselves, a lunacy that consists not so much of extravagant wildness, as quiet disconnection from reality. When I consider the idea of women in combat, or men marrying men, or Catholics singing Marty Haugen music, or the existence of Wal-Mart, I just shake my head in wonder.

But when the mere shock is over, the question that follows in my mind is: "who's giving the orders here?" To go through it one by one: who decided that women should don uniforms and die in battle, who decided that marriage was not what we all used to think it was, who decided that the Children of God should sing the spiritually-degrading outpourings of liberal Protestants, who decided that all general stores should be owned by the same plutocrats and pervaded with the same psychotic mentality? Whose idea was all that?

So far as I can tell, the conspiracy theorist is unique to our age. What I mean is this: paranoia is not new, conspiracy theories are not new, but conspiracy theory as a hobby is not something for which I can find a parallel. The curious fellow full of facts about the assassination of JFK or the activities of 33rd degree Masons simply does not call to mind any antique predecessor; his particular strain of thought has its origins in John Robison and Fr. Augustin Barruel, who published their pertinent works around 1800, and the attitude is reminiscent of a Baconian (or any anti-Stratfordian), but I can't see anything further back. Since the possibilities for collecting relevant information were vastly more limited in olden times, I suspect that conspiracy theory as a serious hobby has not even been possible for very long.

But I also think that the impetus has not always been present. The old conspiracy theories that I can call to mind, are all rather straightforward in character. In the old Roman empire it was apparently a standard proceeding to accuse an enemy of eating babies, practicing black magic and so forth (the Arians charged St. Athanasius with these things, for instance). In the Medieval period I gather there was much fear that prominent personages were secretly atheists or Muslims (I do not even say these suspicions were without foundation), and of course there was the witch craze later. The common thread to all these theories, is that certain well-known things are not what they seem. The reputable-seeming bishop has really just got back from a dinner of roasted children, the king or the scholar who professed his faith in a cathedral had in fact no faith at all (I must re-iterate the frequent plausibility of this particular theory), the harmless-seeming old lady has really been putting the hex on fellow-villagers, inflicting mysterious diseases upon them, etc.

Whereas the problem today is, we cannot even say how things seem. Once we realize that fundamental truth that the newspapers are a pack of lies, we find ourselves unsure even as to appearances, much less realities. The thing about modern conspiracy theories is that instead of suspecting malfeasance of certain public agents, they suspect public agency of certain malfeasants - that is, the question is not so much about secret evils, as secret power. And the thing that follows from this, is that conspiracy theories are thereby firmly grounded in reality.
They may be wrong about this or that point, they may generally be the product of overheated imaginations, but when we are constantly deluged with artificial phenomena that are as inexplicable as the weather, it is merely common sense to suppose unknown agencies - to feel the force of unseen hands. Why is our art so ugly? Why do we have so many ugly buildings? It may not be a Masonic plot, but it could well be a plot of architects; what it cannot be, is happenstance.

Or suppose you hear a man speaking; you recognize his opinion. It is the repackaged nonsense of a newspaper editorial you have read yourself. But in turn, you recognize the intellectual parentage of that editorial; this particular 20th century writer comes to mind, and in turn his predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries are manifest. Because you happen to know something about the subject in question, you know more about the origin of a man's thought than he himself - only four things are necessary: an organ of public opinion, a man who accepts its authority, a certain trivial knowledge on your part, and a rudimentary ability to notice patterns and affinities of idea. There is nothing of a conspiracy in this, but this sort of thing is the very pattern of modern life: a few central figures - puppet-masters if you wish to be theatrical about it - and millions of people whom they somehow influence, without those millions ever suspecting their existence. The reason that modern conspiracy theories have a "centralizing" tendency - that is, a habit of supposing these obscure, octopus-like organizations with a tentacle in ten thousand pies - is that modern society itself exhibits this centralizing tendency. That tendency may not be evil in itself; that is not the point. The point is that we are unsure, to a degree without historical precedent, who is actually running things. It is not even easy to answer, what it means to "run things." Is it the men who make our laws? Well, just what are the laws, now that you mention it? I had a student job in the law library once, and I can tell you the United States Code is a huge nasty mess - and that's all I can tell you about it. The leaders of big business? And just what are the big businesses, never mind who is leading them where? Is it the government educators - well if it comes to that, just what are they teaching the young folk anyway? Even a lot of parents are a bit unclear on this score.

Indeed, my problem with a lot of conspiracy theories is not their radicalism, but their lack of it; for instance, it seems rather pedestrian to be terribly worked up over who shot JFK. To take for granted that the assassination of a mere president is an important historical event, is a greater manifestation of gullibility than any mere trust in the Warren Report (or whatever Report it was, concluding that Oswald acted alone). We have to know what it means to rule such a society as ours, before we can talk about its rulers.

Squirming theology

2006-05-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

"There are fashionable objections that would try to talk us out of this silence at the Consecration. The showing of the Gifts, it is said, is a medieval error, which disturbs the structure of the Eucharistic Prayer, the expression of a false and too grossly materialistic piety. The argument is that the elevation is out of keeping with the essential direction of the Eucharist. At this moment, so it is claimed, we should not be worshipping Christ - the whole Canon addresses the Father, to whom we pray through Christ. We do not need to go into these criticisms in detail[...]It is correct to say that the Canon has a trinitarian structure and consequently as a totality moves "thorugh Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to the Father". But the liturgy in this respect knows nothing of rigidity and fixation." (from The Spirit of the Liturgy by Cdl. Joseph Ratzinger)

What I find more exasperating than flatly dissenting theologians, are those who
raise all such nitpicky objections. I confess that the Orthodox often drive me to distraction in this way, when they inform us of all our subtle mistakes in emphasis - but at least when the Orthodox say such things, they are avowedly not Catholic and are attacking Catholicism. When Catholic theologians make these ever-so-subtle criticisms of medieval piety and so forth, it is different - especially as their nitpickings always seem to favor impiety and skepticism, or else a Protestantized piety (which often amounts to the same thing). Never do they nitpick the old Mass for being insufficiently Catholic; never do their objections have, say, a Thomistic feel to them. After a while it starts to seem like more than a coincidence that their criticisms all cut in one direction.

Ah, work

2006-05-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

One of those things of which one may say, "can't live with it, can't live without it" - alas, I am once more "experimenting" with the second half of that antithesis; in other words, my temp job is over. Search for actual job still continues.

But life has its pleasantries. Consider these things from What's Wrong With The World by G.K. Chesterton:

"Eighteenth century tyranny meant that you could say "The K__of Br__rd is a profligate." Twentieth century liberty really means that you are allowed to say "The King of Brentford is a model family man.""

"Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf[...]It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed."

"We told our wives that Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it."

"Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all nations have been ashamed of them."

"I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice."

He had style, that one did.

The Unstable System?

2006-05-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

Hilaire Belloc's book "The Servile State" turns upon the idea that capitalism is an unstable system, and that capitalist states will resolve (in all probability) into what he calls the Servile State - that is, a state in which the masses are enslaved. Now he was particular in saying that "slavery" cannot be stretched to mean anything but this: the bondage of one person to labour for another. And it is clear, then, that his prediction has not been borne out by events. I phrase it thus advisedly, for I cannot say that events will not bear them out - yet the continued survival of capitalism, suggests we should at least ask ourselves: "is capitalism in fact stable? Was Belloc simply wrong to think otherwise? What made him think that it was unsustainable?"

Well, as far as enslavement is concerned, in comparison to our current system, who would benefit from the transition, and how? Of course it is the wealthy who should benefit, but what would be the character of such benefits? I believe they would consist of the following:

1. Saving money. If corporations could in fact own people instead of employing them, it would not be necessary to spend as much money on them.

2. Improving productivity. Employees may quit, and they cannot be threatened with anything more severe than dismissal. If they could neither quit, nor obtain legal recourse - as a rule - for punishment inflicted by their superiors (two necessary features of slavery), then they would work harder.

But the problem here is that we cannot simply have such a simple transition from a current, capitalist model to something like the old Roman. The reason for this is that the capitalist is selling something. That is, a corporation makes a product, which people buy. They need a spending populace. First this means that the populace must be encouraged to live beyond its means, but secondly this means that they must have some means to live beyond. In the old days, a slave would usually have performed work that directly benefited his master (cultivating his fields and pastures, in the main); today, a worker performs work that benefits his master indirectly, by facilitating (in whatever way) the sale of some product or products. To reduce him to bare subsistence (if he is not there already), is ultimately counter-productive, for if everyone is like this, then what does one sell to whom? You may say that companies would not be so far-sighted, and would wreck the economic structure that sustains them just to save a buck...perhaps, but in that case, would they be so far-sighted as to think of enslaving the bulk of the populace? Grant them imagination enough for one, and it is hard not to grant them enough for the other.

Furthermore, when we realize that a widespread habit of extravagant purchase, is the very pillar of modern capitalism, then we realize that they benefit not only from a degree of mere material prosperity on our part, but also from a certain frame of mind. More specifically, they want us to be more or less content. Not content with our possessions, or ourselves, but rather with the structure of society. Perhaps "distracted" is a better word than content, but in any case enslaving the populace, could well lead to a loss of enthusiasm in that quarter, for all the stuff that they ought to be buying. The threat is not so much active resistance from the populace, as that slavery can have a sobering effect on its subjects (which would be disaster). Can people be reduced to a state of slavery, without affecting their concern for useless frivolities? And it is more important that we keep on buying such things, than that we perform the greatest possible amount of work for the least possible amount of money.

I am not sure that Belloc sufficiently appreciated the difference between the old rich and the new rich, created by the mercantile character of our modern ruling class. He was aware of it no doubt, but I believe that in this way (that is, the necessity of producing consumers) the natural character of a mercantile plutocracy differs from that of, say, an agrarian plutocracy. It may be that the hypocrisies of modern capitalism, the lip-service it pays to freedom (and the real freedoms that we possess) are not a transitory feature, but is simply the flattering, "customer-is-always-right" ethos of the merchant, writ large.

In other respects - his rejection of collectivism or communism, and his advocacy of Property, or distributivism, or whatever you wish to call it - I concur with his thinking, but it may be that in the very thesis of the book he erred.

Of course, it may be that a mercantile plutocracy is not itself stable, but I cannot see why its instability would resolve into the Servile State by any natural and obvious way - for what, exactly, will the merchant become? What will his slaves do for him? It seems to me that if capitalism is unstable, the capitalist will not benefit from its collapse. Yet the various reasons put forth for its instability, do not seem to have ruined it yet. Perhaps it is really unsustainable because of what Chesterton described, as the transition from "the Good" to "the goods". That is, when commerce becomes not a part of society, but its very rule - when things are made to be sold, not to be used - the result is absurdity and chaos, which only multiplies with time. There, perhaps, he eclipsed the insight of his friend - he was a truly deep thinker, and those who find him a mere peddler of paradox are but placing their own superficiality on display.

Also

2006-05-07T19:30:00.000-07:00

Incidentally: while I have almost no opinion about the SSPX (maybe I'm not cut out for blogging, since I don't feel compelled to have opinions about things that I don't know much about), but it's interesting to see bloggers who unhesitatingly refer to them as "schismatics", suddenly saying "well, it's complicated" when a Chinese bishop is illicitly consecrated. So you mean, an illicit consecration doesn't automatically throw everyone who attends a Mass said by the consecrating or consecrated bishop or anyone subject to these bishops into a state of schism? I admit that the cases are different - but I have to wonder just how much of the attitude towards Abp. Lefebvre's society is due to an "ick" factor: traditionalists are weird creepy crabby people; if they're obedient then we'll just have to put up with them, but one false move puts them beyond the pale.

No, I don't really have a coherent argument here; like I said, I know very little about this. I just find it hard to believe that these people are using the same thought processes to evaluate "illicit Chinese consecrations" and "illicit SSPX consecrations"; it looks remarkably like what they call a double standard.

Busy, busy, busy

2006-05-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

The temp job has gone on longer than I expected, which is good, but doesn't leave me with so much free time/energy.

Anyhow, one of the standard things you hear about the Tridentine Rite nowadays, is that it has all these "accretions" that the Novus Ordo simply removed. Which is funny, because when I actually go to the local (somewhat-local) TLM, it's not quite obvious to me just what these are. Looking through the Missal doesn't help me a lot, I'm afraid. Is it the repetitions of "dominus vociscum," "et cum spiritu tuo"? Well you know, even if you have some odd objection to that, it hardly seems worth going to so much effort just to get rid of it.

But I should really say, that I was confused at first. Then I learned what an "accretion" is. Some combox poster was running down the Tridentine Mass and referred to the Last Gospel as an "accretion" - at this point, it all fell into place. Reading the great hymn to the Word at the end of every Mass is what they mean by "an accretion". Likewise everything else in the old Mass, however beautiful and appropriate it may seem to us plebes, is known to expert liturgists as "an accretion" if it resembles something else in the old Mass. If you have a Psalm or part of a Psalm in one part of the Mass, and a Psalm or part of a Psalm later in the Mass, then that's an accretion. If you end a prayer with, "per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen" and then end another prayer in the same manner, that's an accretion. If the priest makes the sign of the cross here and also there, that's an accretion.

I think I get it now. Well, good thing they changed all that. A shame the way some people don't want to get with the program.

Palate cleansing

2006-04-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

Incidentally, the temp job on which I'm working, consists largely of staying on hold, and since you never know when the line will be picked up, you have to listen to the hold music.

Trust me, there is no surer way of withering the romance in one's soul, than listening to several hundred cloying love songs from all musical genres, from the last four decades (I begin to have a new appreciation for bands that actually wrote non-love-songs, like the Beatles. Still nothing to write home about musically, but at least there's a little variety). As music it is awful, but the telephone tinniness somewhat obscures the sound (while worsening it further), and focuses your attention on the mind-numbing lyrics. You would think that nobody with good taste ever fell in love...though it's occasionally interesting to play the game of sympathy-reversal. I always liked doing that in stories where the good guys annoyed me, or the bad guys didn't seem so terrible. Later I discovered that this is somehow postmodern or deconstructivist or something, but I like doing it anyway. So for instance, in Rob Roy I took great delight in thinking of Frank Osbaldistone's father as a likely swindler who made his fortune by loan-sharking and shady business operations...look carefully at some of the opening passages, and it's not really hard to credit. And in these love songs where a guy is whining about the girl who don't treat him right, it's usually easier for me to sympathize with the girl than with him. Unfortunately it's rather thin entertainment when you have eight hours of this to go through.

By the way, say what you like about present-day pop music, but the abandonment of flutes was a huge step forward. Do you know what a flute sounds like in a 70's pop song? I never was partial to woodwinds (Brahms and Mozart both seemed to like the clarinet, but I don't know what they saw in the thing - it has a wimpy sound), but right now I never want to hear a flute again. Ugh.

Fortunately, at least I can come home and listen to some of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte - like a cleansing bath for the ear.

Oh, and...

2006-04-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

The story of the Galileo controversy bores me to tears, and the fact that Robert Sungenis is trying to resurrect heliocentrism is, well, sad and funny. But it's sort of an interesting fact, perhaps not really relevant to anything, that while Galileo may have been right about the interpretation of Scripture, his opponents seem to have been correct about the actual facts of the case.

Now I can't say that for sure, because I am not a physicist, and I have no idea as to whether Einstein's general theory of relativity is really and completely true. But if it is - then the correct evaluation of things is this: that either geocentrism, or heliocentrism, or in fact anything-centrism are all valid interpretations of the world, and the only thing to choose between them (so far as physics is concerned) is convenience. In other words, heliocentrism makes the math much easier, but that's all you can really say - which is just what Cdl. Bellarmine said, not that he was thinking of Einstein's theory.

To be sure, it makes the math a LOT easier. To think of the world in geocentric terms, you would have to suppose that the entire universe is subjected to an extremely weird gravitational field, which allows it to whirl around the earth. Or something like that; I can't say I fathom the details. But the basic idea of the general theory is that any frame of reference can be taken as "at rest" - including what we would think of as "accelerating" frames of reference. These latter, can instead be interpreted as subject to a gravitational field. Likewise an object in a gravitational field, can instead be interpreted as accelerating. The special theory only supposed that frames of reference in constant motion were all equally valid.

On the other hand, I keep hearing that quantum theory in one or another of its branches, predicts that the gravitational force is mediated by a "graviton", which seems to suggest that some things are really and truly accelerating, while others are really and truly in a gravitational field. Maybe not though.

I just think it's kinda funny. Of course if I were addressing the whole "the Church is the enemy of Science" nonsense I wouldn't mention it, as it only confuses the issue because fools will say "he's advocating geocentrism!" I would just point out that Galileo is all they've got, which is pretty pathetic when you're talking about the oldest and largest institution, uh, ever. Scientists have resisted many more correct scientific theories than Cardinals ever did. That doesn't reflect all that badly on the scientists, as evaluating scientific theories is their business, and everyone makes mistakes - on the other hand, it doesn't reflect so terribly on the Cardinals either.

Okay

2006-04-22T15:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I've been a bit absent this week. Entirely absent, I mean. But on the other hand, I've also been busy - specifically, with a job, which is nice. It's just a temp position however, and the hunt for a real job continues. This one, alas, will not even last long by temp standards.

I've also gone and got hooked on Agatha Christie mysteries. Very fun.

Also picked up Mendelssohn addiction. To think that that Aldous Huxley compared him unfavourably with Chopin, speaking of "the weaker Mendelssohn and worse Schumann" - I won't defend Schumann, but as far as Mendelssohn goes, it's one of those remarks that annoy like something stuck in the teeth, by being so thoroughly and exactly wrong. Chopin had fire or passion or whatever you like, but strength was exactly what he lacked. His music is one long flinch - the rhythm, the harmony, the phrasing, they are all one long dodge of the obvious and straightforward. And worse yet, strength was exactly what Mendelssohn possessed - for a strong artist is direct. You might say that there is a kind of subtlety that does not contradict strength (though the crude think otherwise) but rather compliments it - and another sort of twisty, roundabout quality that goes by the same name "subtlety", but is in this case the invariable companion of weakness. Chopin suffered from the latter; Mendelssohn certainly not.

In any case, he had great powers of invention, though little originality. I mean that he was neither an innovator, nor possessed of a very individual touch - unlike say, Brahms - but he had terrific facility at what he did. Perhaps this is why he is rather underrated.

One more thing

2006-04-08T21:35:00.000-07:00

This wouldn't be Blogimus Maximus without the occasional irrelevant musical commentary, so:

One of the stranger features of music is that a piece can be almost ruined, you might say, by beauty.

What I mean is, a composer will hit on something so exquisite that it puts the whole rest of his piece into the shade. You feel for the poor fellow, because it's hard to see what else he could have done. The beauty of it is so dependent on specifics, on being exactly right so to speak, that variations on the idea tend to just invite unfavorable comparisons with the main thing. Repetitions, on the other hand, can only be taken so far. But to excise the thing is unthinkable! It would be a crime - so there you are, it has to go in there, and make everybody else look bad.

This can go either for a small element in a single movement, or for a whole movement. For instance, Mozart's string quintet K. 593 would be almost intolerable on account of its 1st movement - which is unbelievable - were it not for an impressive finale that provides a little aesthetic balance. There is a simple little idea in the finale of Schubert's violin sonata in A minor, D385, which almost seems too plain and straightforward to be any good, yet it dominates the piece. And while the slow movement to his "Death and the Maiden" quartet is much better, everything after the "fast variation" in it, is somewhat of a letdown I think...though I may think too highly of it out of envy; I had invented a similar (but naturally inferior) idea myself, and then I listened to the quartet and realized I had been robbed....

Holy Week

2006-04-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

I'm obviously not one of those give-up-blogging-for-Lent types, perhaps because blogging has never been a high-blood-pressure activity for me...no working myself up over the latest news item, no wars in combox (largely because of the fewness of readers, but due also to the excellent manners of those that I have) - yes, blogging is a nice relaxful activity. But I figure Holy Week is another matter; there's only one Holy Week a year, after all. So I'll see you after Easter - in the meantime, so long!

In summation

2006-04-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

While thinking along these lines and writing such long, unreadable & disorganized blog posts, I realized something that (thankfully) can be put into much fewer words: that the basic human conviction that life has to have meaning and purpose, is simply a conclusion of the reason - it is the ground of all knowledge, manifested in its broadest form, demanding an explanation not for particular things, but for all things. And since fashionable thinkers do not understand the connection between this need for an explanation of everything, and the need for explanations of lesser things which leads us to all lesser knowledge, it is clear that a thirst for dialectic obscures the reason rather than reveals it. This is not so surprising, since dialectic is inseparable from various systems of thought, and even those systems constructed with a clear view of reality in mind, cannot be received perfectly by men who lack themselves such clarity, or the patience and wit to connect their own knowledge to the received system. Thus induction into some system of thought, can really create a substitution for thought, a mere evaluation according to some arbitrary set of rules.

Second postscript

2006-04-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

I suppose what I didn't say, but was more or less getting at, was that our attempts to explain the world around us cannot succeed unless we explain the existence of everything, and to say that some things exist simply because they are logically necessary consequences of certain other things, is not sufficient. For this is only an ersatz answer, akin to asking "why is John in Kentucky?" and answering "because he got in his car and drove there." Nor can we say that we have arrived at a first cause, unless it is the cause of everything, not just of some things which in turn led to others. For it would remain unexplained, why this first cause acted so as to bring about certain things unintentionally; the question arises, "what disposed this cause to act this way, such that without its intention, it brought such-and-such into being?" At which point it becomes obvious that we are not really talking about the first cause at all, but there is another preceeding. Which then, would seem to answer my passing question, whether the arguments for a first cause not only prove that God exists, but that His creation was made according to a plan, that is, Providence. For if not only the original things, but their consequences were intended by the Cause of all things, then Providence is evident.

Well, enough of that. I had merely set down to say why I considered Intelligent Design theory a very inadequate concept, and now I've typed several thousand words. Anyone can find better philosophy on this subject, but there were a few modern ideas (the sole reality of the elements, and also ID theory) that I had never seen treated in this context, and I thought that however insufficient my reasonings, at least they might be an improvement on nothing at all.

Postscript

2006-04-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

I added, at the end, the completion of my little essay which I did not have time to finish last night.

Yes it really matters that everybody is a nominalist

2006-04-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

Except that we're not. And I don't just mean all us Catholics, but hardly anybody really is: we believe very firmly in the categorical reality of the elements. Electrons are real; protons are real; hydrogen, helium and all the rest of it is real - these categories are so sharply-defined (even if you start asking bothersome questions about isotopes or ions) that nobody really views these in a nominalist manner. Rather there is a bizarre idea about that all those neat, tidy little things are real, but big messy things like "man" or "star" are just man-made categories. The basis for this is a sort of philosophical perfectionism - if the boundaries of a concept cannot be defined exactly (or if an exact definition of same is open to dispute - as if we should say that sunset is at 7:03 today, though there is a time between contact with the horizon and complete obscuration - to say nothing of messy horizons), then the concept is supposedly "not real". Only if we can define it exactly - whether it be a mathematical formula or a particle - is it "really" a distinct type of thing.

This principle is invariably destructive and silly when put into practice, so people tend to fare the better nowadays, the less they look to their philosophy. It is also irrational of course; there is no reason that a very slightly ambiguous concept is "unreal" where a mathematically precise one is "real", and in fact there is no reason that considerable ambiguity must make the concept unreal. The point at which ambiguity washes away the concept entirely, is a matter of judgment, just as the extent of ambiguity in a given concept is a matter of judgment. To quote Belloc's "The Servile State":

"...I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a wage of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that contract make me for that week a slave?

Obviously not[...]

What of a month, a year, ten years, a lifetime? Suppose an extreme case[...]

As undoubtebly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case, it would be making him a slave in the second.

One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties of this kind, that the sense of men establishes for itself the true limits of any object, as of freedom[...]

This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a type of verbal difficulty apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant, but of no effect upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business is not dialectic but truth.

It is always possible by establishing a cross-section in a set of definitions to pose the unanswerable question of degree, but that will never effect the realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what is meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws, and when it is forbidden. No imaginary difficulties of degree between pulling a man's hair and scalping him, between warming him and burning him alive, will disturb a reformer whose business it is to expunge torture from the penal code."

Thus, our problem is not so much adherence to a positive and false philosophical doctrine, as a sort of mental laziness by which we refuse to rise against age-old sophistries of the kind he describes, and indeed believe that "education" or "learning to think" consists of inculcating oneself with the terrible habit of practicing such sophistries instinctively.

And by a sort of natural selection, only those concepts are left wholly intact, which are difficult to attack by this "unanswerable question of degree".

Among the many consequences of such degrading practice, is a subjective collapse of the Argument from Design - and in some cases, a false substitution of something called "Intelligent Design theory". The argument from design, to the existence of God and to His Intellect (for a distinction between arguments for a first Cause, and arguments from design, is that the second argument obviously proves that God is Spirit and not a mindless substance - for nothing mindless can design; that is the whole meaning of design - while the first argument is less obvious a proof of this, if indeed it proves this at all [I would scarcely know; I am not a philosopher]) can be drawn from every level of substance in the universe; the elements of the universe are organized in distinct categories, and possess constant attributes, whereas chance or spontaneity is conducive neither to order nor to constancy. But if you believe that only these elements are real, then the argument from design can be drawn from these and these only. And because the more primitive elements of the universe are less obviously-designed than the more sophisticated ones, the argument is thus weakened - in practice it is gravely weakened, even if sufficient in theory. One could make an analogy with architecture: a building is obviously a design, a brick less so. I could argue conclusively, perhaps, that a brick is man-made but it's much easier to make the case for the building.

Now here is the important part. If you argue from the design of the human intellect, the animal kingdom, the solar system, the galaxy, or in short, from all the astonishing organization of the universe, its regularity and equilibrium, to the existence of a creating Intellect, the skeptic will tell you that if he can explain the existence of mere elements, and demonstrate that said organizations will arise naturally from these elements, then you have nothing to say to him; he has won. Of course his explanation of even the elements, will not be adequate but it may at least be convincing.

He does not realize that his denial of design rests entirely on the idea, that particles alone exist, and things composed of these do not exist except as a humanly-defined set of particles, their existence as things in their own right, being a figment of the human intellect. If he did realize it, he would think only that his argument rests on an evident truth.

It is distasteful to treat some of these skeptics, so much baser than their skeptical forefathers, as if their childish ideas were serious philosophy, but that said: one of their number, named Richard Dawkins, is apparently fond of a concept he calls the "designoid" - the thing, composed of the elementary particles, which appears designed but is really the product of natural forces. Now in the sense of human construction, there are obviously "designoids" - things that look man-made but aren't - but abstracting to a complete denial of design for any ordered form, requires that principle of "reality in the elements alone."

Here it is important to realize what an element is. It is not really "matter" in an absolute sense. A proton is a form, just as a chair is a form. If the Aristotelean term "form" is offensive to any, say that a proton is a "pattern" imposed on matter, just as "man" is (partly) a pattern imposed on matter. This pattern can be manifested variously - in a computer simulation, for instance. As every deep thinker of age ten or so realizes, the entire universe could be a computer simulation for all that our senses tell us - we only know that there are certain primitive patterns, manifested throughout the universe, called "particles" or "waves" or "waveforms" or whatever the physicists take to calling them next. Of these primitive patterns are composed more sophisticated ones - first atoms, then molecules, then super-molecular structures of varying complexity (from a mere liquid or crystal, to say, a cell). None of these patterns are logically dependent on their more primitive components. One could imagine two worlds made entirely of water (to pick a simple example), where in one case the water was composed of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen, in turn composed of electrons, protons and neutrons as in our own universe, and in another case the water molecules were indivisible units, displaying nevertheless the same capacity for "hydrogen bonds" (though without the hydrogen), surface tension, etc. - as if "water" were an elementary particle.

It is only by contingency, that most patterns in our universe are composed of simpler patterns, until we reach patterns of "energy" that are thought to have no simpler components (if indeed this is so). Of course, if we were to consider that hypothesis of universe-as-computer-simulation, then these "elementary" things would in fact be comprised of other things.

In asking just why the universe exists, and looking for its cause, there is nothing more fundamental or deeper in the question "what is the cause of fermions and bosons?" than "what is the cause of Man?" just because our bodies are made of the former. Of course a materialist assumes that the cause of our universe, was primarily a cause of its elements and only by accident a cause of its higher organizations. But this is, in fact, only an assumption. The fact that the elements are temporally prior to say, life, does not mean that the cause of our universe was a cause of elements and not life - it only means that if the principal effect of Creation was Man, then the cause of Creation must have acted by a plan; for only one who plans, can cause something by causing things that will bring it about. That, after all, is what it means to carry out a plan.

One may of course, say that all questions of "why" are meaningless, that there is no reason to ask "why are things thus, and not some other way - or not at all?" But it is the nature of our intellect to consider things in this manner; if we did not think that facts required an explanation, we would have no concept of the universe at all. To assail this "why" is to assail reason - to which it may be said that Reason, as the product of natural processes, cannot be absolutely trusted. It gave us our current knowledge of the universe (they may say), and our knowledge of this universe informs us of Reason's imperfection. To demand "explanations" for every fact is indeed a useful heuristic for understanding and controlling one's environment, and it has served us well (they inform us), but there is no reason to think that this evolutionary adaptation, when extended beyond its normal realm of operation into considering the fabric of the universe itself, remains valid. It just so happened that for quite some time, we could go demanding these "explanations" and keep on getting them, but there is no reason to expect that this can go on forever - it is mere anthropomorphism that makes us think so. Such is their argument.

Yet again, it presumes that the real things are the elements, not the higher-order patterns of our universe (like our own bodies). Again it presumes what it would prove - that whatever did cause our universe, if anything, caused the elements and we are an accidental growth. But if the universe was caused by One who intended to create us, then the trustworthiness of our reason is scarcely impugned by the fact that natural processes brought us about, for those very processes were initiated with the idea of Man coming out at the end.

So Reason cannot, by uncovering the physical world, uncover evidence against itself. The situation is as it always was: you may accept its conclusions (when they are indeed conclusive, and not mere probabilities), or become an irrationalist. The latter is difficult or impossible to achieve entirely - it is not easy to voluntarily abandon reason - but we can certainly refuse to see what is right in front of us, if we try hard enough.

Thus the false substitution of "Intelligent Design theory" for the argument from design. ID theory is an historical hypothesis (for evolutionary biology is a branch of history, and much trouble comes from pretending otherwise), which basically accounts for the origin of species by separate, supernatural interventions, or by one big suspension of the ordinary laws governing elementary particles, so that one way or another, DNA does not mutate "randomly" (that is, in accordance with the laws of physics). It is an interesting if strange and unproven idea; I can see no reason that it deserves any great attention or promulgation in the scientific community, or in textbooks. But to substitute this twiddling little thing for the Argument from Design is manifestly wrong. This is the evangelical Protestant's knockoff of St. Thomas's fivefold proof - not that its main proponent Dr. Behe is a Protestant (he is a Catholic) but that is who backs the movement as "scientific proof" of the existence of God. We have to do better than that.

Addendum:

What I had meant to add, but did not have time, is that ID theory is only of great importance when one supposes that the universe is fundamentally a thing of elements, and only accidentally of life. In that case, it is only if we show the insufficiency of natural processes to create life, that we have reason to infer a Creator. In fact, one could as well suppose that the universe is fundamentally a thing of life, for which the simpler elements are as it were the building blocks. That only a small fraction of the universe consists of living things, and a smaller one still of men, is beside the point, as I will explain in a moment. And if life is the more fundamental thing in the universe, the fact that natural action of the elements may tend to produce and diversify life, is rather an explanation of why we have elements than why we have life - just as the fact that bricks are hard, is not an explanation of why we have buildings but why we use bricks to make them. A materialist who reduces life to an accidental occurrence is assuming what he would prove.

As I said, the comparitive sizes of the animate and inanimate universes are irrelevant, for to suppose that whatever comprises the bulk of the universe by mass is somehow more important relative to its cause - that is, that whatever brought about the universe, primarily brought about that great inanimate mass, and only accidentally that small animate mass - is mere assertion. We tend to a general notion that the large is more significant than the small, for two reasons: that the larger things tend to have greater effects than smaller things of the same type, and that in human endeavours, it is usually more difficult to make large things than small things of the same type. But the inanimate universe differs in kind from ourselves, and only under one aspect - namely our ability to alter, or be altered by, our physical surroundings by main force - can the inanimate world be compared to us. Only if one supposes that the first cause was primarily one of elements, whose actions are simple and physical, can one say that we are insignificant because of our small mass, volume & motive power. Again the assumption of the conclusion.

This also invalidates in general, the bizarre accusation of "anthropocentrism" by skeptics who believe that God would have no reason to concern Himself with our tiny little world. It is truly bizarre, because even from a crude physical standpoint the earth is a very strange place; unless there is life somewhere else, the polymers and super-molecular structures that comprise living bodies, are like nothing else that ever existed; the fact that they reproduce themselves with such great regularity is equally unparalleled. This is to say nothing of what we have done in the last century - on our planet we now find: copious emission of radio waves, fissious nuclear chain reactions (while heavy elements decay everywhere, I suppose that the chain reaction of uranium or plutonium is unique in the universe; I could be wrong), fusion explosions (the reactions themselves are ubiquitous, but brief fusion reactions on the surface of a small planet are another matter), and all sorts of chemical compounds that exist nowhere else, to say nothing of certain extreme conditions as produced by particle accelerators, or on the other end phenomena like superfluid helium, or other liquids and solids that so nearly approach absolute zero.

Lastly I should point out, that any claim to explain the universe by "chance" is presupposing some existing universe that itself requires explanation. The popular idea nowadays, that the Big Bang arose from a sort of cosmic chaos that spits out universes every now and then, "by chance", supposes that there is a nonzero chance of such occurrences. Chance cannot exist outside of extant circumstances; this is obvious enough if we ask, "what is the probability of a table with five nickels on it?" You can only give an answer, if you know something of the circumstances: where this table is supposed to be, who might or might not put it there, etc. Any attempt to assign an abstract probability to something, to say that there is a "small but finite probability" of some occurrence under any circumstances, is illusory. Why some cosmic chaos should occasionally spit out universes, rather than never at all, is another circumstance that requires another explanation, just as the universe itself did. So you cannot say, in defense of this "priority of the elements" that I have been discussing, that the appearance of the elements is "probable" simpliciter and that the more complicated structures, arise inevitably from those "probable" elements. If there is indeed this hypothetical cosmic universe-spitter, that says nothing as to why there is a universe-spitter, and whether it exists so as to eventually create - for instance - us.

There

2006-04-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Eliminated blogger anonymity. I had dispensed with it in the comboxes anyway, so why be inconsistent and confusing? The pseudonym was not just a childish whim (not that I am immune to same) - I had reasons for not wanting to show up on a google search for my name, but I don't really care anymore, so there you are. Besides, I think a googler would mostly just pull up a football player and one of those sad little CSICOP/James Randi types. In fact he would pull up a lot of folks; it's a surprisingly common name, given that I've never actually met a Wynn who wasn't related. Then again, I live in Minnesota which was largely populated by Germans and Finns; but the home of my ancestors is the South (for the benefit of my European readers this is really the Southeast - used to be the South when we were smaller), to which many Welshmen immigrated; maybe there I would have met more Wynns, as the name is Welsh.

The Ancient Gnostics - Actually Smarter than the New Ones?

2006-04-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

Lately there's been a fuss about this "Gospel of Judas" business. I skimmed the thing myself, and I realized that the Gnostics seem to have a pattern in their propaganda:

1. Brief & sketchy narratives. People who think the canonical Gospels are ahistorical should see what a real fake Gospel looks like - rather disjointed and bare-bones, which makes sense because their Gnostic authors were attempting something rather difficult: fiction.

2. Mischevious little hooks (the Serpent is really the good guy, Cain is really the good guy, Judas is really the good guy, etc.)

3. Empty mystical platitudes, blasphemously attributed to Our Lord, mixed along with the occasional quote or near-quote of the canonical Gospels.

4. The "welcome to the nuthouse" moment - suddenly all the "aeon" and "emanation" talk starts, and boy is it dense.

Now that last part is important; it's what distinguishes the old Gnostics from modern New Agey types who think the gospel of Thomas is like, way cool *cough cough*, pass me the bong man, *cough cough cough*.

A fellow like William Blake, who liked esoteric and complicated stuff, knew several ancient languages and had studied Greek philosophy, and was sorta nuts, could very well get into the crazy Gnostic geneaologies & mythologies and all the rest of it - making up some stuff of his own while he was at it, very much in the Gnostic tradition. But surely a modern sort would lack the patience and powers of concentration that this silliness demands? I can't believe that the spiritual dilletantes who think of Gnosticism as an oh-so-fascinating alternative to dull Christian orthodoxy are really able to keep their eyes propped open when the Ogdoad and the Demiurge rear their ugly heads. On the surface that seems to speak well for the new Gnostics, as against the old ones.

But I'm not so sure. The ancient Gnostics realized perhaps, that a bunch of dull platitudes, snarky little Biblical role-reversals, and intimations of esoteric knowledge were all rather empty unless you actually delivered the goods. The goods were worthless and boring - a mishmash of forgotten Eastern religion, Babylonian magic (so I've heard), numerology, Greek philosophy (I read in Belloc that the "emanation" was a concept used by the Greeks to explain the creation of a complex world by - or in this case from - a simple God), and home-grown nuttiness (improvisation was one of their hallmarks). But there was something, however disappointing - and I'm sure that if they presented it in the right way, they could get people to convince themselves there was something profound behind its obvious superficiality.

The new Gnostics, on the other hand, you don't even have to provide with any phony esoterica. Just deliver a bunch of obscure sayings, cleverly "transgressive" ideas, and promises of arcane "gnosis" and they'll convince themselves that they've elevated to a higher spiritual plane. A spiritual plane grown in somebody's attic under lamplight, I'm sure....

Ouch!

2006-04-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

A really zinging passage in Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine:

6. In other developments the intellectual character is so prominent that they may even be called logical, as in the Anglican doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, which has been created in the courts of law, not in the cabinet or on the field. Hence it is carried out with a consistency and minute application which the history of constitutions cannot exhibit. It does not only exist in statutes, or in articles, or in oaths, it is realized in details: as in the congé d'élire and letter-missive on appointment of a Bishop;—in the forms observed in Privy Council on the issuing of State Prayers;—in certain arrangements observed in the Prayer-book, where the universal or abstract Church precedes the King, but the national or really existing body follows him; in printing his name in large capitals, while the Holiest Names are in ordinary type, and in fixing his arms in churches instead of the Crucifix: {46} moreover, perhaps, in placing "sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion," before "false doctrine, heresy, and schism" in the Litany.

"in printing his name in large capitals..." everything after that is just brutal. He certainly knew how to twist the knife.....

The Rosary

2006-04-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

I had never thought much about how the mysteries of the Rosary were chosen, but there is an interesting connection in all of the joyful mysteries. Here are a few passages from the Douay version of St. Luke's Gospel:

1:31 Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus.
32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the most High; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever.
33 And of his kingdom there shall be no end.

1:41 And it came to pass, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:
42 And she cried out with a loud voice, and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
44 For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.
45 And blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord.

2:15 And it came to pass, after the angels departed from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another: Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass, which the Lord hath shewed to us.
16 And they came with haste; and they found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger.
17 And seeing, they understood of the word that had been spoken to them concerning this child.

2:27 And he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when his parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the law,
28 He also took him into his arms, and blessed God, and said:
29 Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, according to thy word in peace;
30 Because my eyes have seen thy salvation,
31 Which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples:
32 A light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the story of thy people Israel.
33 And his father and mother were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning him.
34 And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his mother: Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted;

2:46 And it came to pass, that, after three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, hearing them, and asking them questions.
47 And all that heard him were astonished at his wisdom and his answers.

In the first passage the angel Gabriel prophesies the glory of the Incarnation. In the second, St. Elizabeth refers to Our Lord (and indeed calls him "my Lord") but only yet in reference to His Mother. In the third, the shepherds behold Our Lord plainly, but only knew that he was the Saviour, Christ the Lord. In the fourth, Simeon even holds Our Lord, and says that He will be a light to the Gentiles, that He is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted. In the fifth, the doctors in the temple converse with Our Lord, and "all that heard him were astonished at his wisdom and his answers".

So in every case, the joy in the joyful mysteries, is in the Incarnation and the salvation that it promises. And from mystery to mystery, there is a progressive revelation of Our Lord: the Annunciation marks the beginning of the Incarnation, and the angel Gabriel goes before Him. Only the Blessed Virgin herself is present to witness it. Then, Our Lord already incarnate, St. Elizabeth cries out when Our Lady greets her. Thirdly He is born, and a few men gather around to see him - the shepherds, and of course the three magi as we are elsewhere told - but He is in no public place. Fourthly, He appears publicly in the temple, and lastly He not only appears publicly but speaks to the men in it.

That distasteful term

2006-04-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

As with many St. Bloggers, somebody at Jimmy Akin's site has decided to go off on "Rad-Trads". It has taken me awhile to put in words why I find this sort of thing so annoying.

It's not the positions themselves that bother me. Even if I find their definition of "dissent" or of "radicalism" extremely broad (at least when it comes to such disreputable things as tradition), I can at least agree that dissent and extremism do exist in the trad movement.

It's not that I have a vague feeling that these people regard traditionalism as a sort of spiritual poison, though I certainly get that impression.

No, it's that particular term. Let's get this straight: it is a playground taunt. It is stupid. So when traditionalists take umbrage at the phrase, and its employers defend the usage by drawing fine distinctions between "traditionalism" and "Rad-Tradism", they are making themselves look very silly.

Take the word "hick". I like that word; I use it. But it is alien to precise thought; such is its nature. If I were to discourse at length upon who is a hick, who is not a hick, who partakes of borderline hickery, etc., then I would sound very silly. Thus with anyone who treats "Rad-Trad" as a serious concept, rather than a childish insult. Whether you can, in fact, find a logically-coherent definition of Rad-Trad is irrelevant; you could do the same for hick, pansy, dumbass, or any such word. That would not make your discourse any less absurd.

New Furnishings

2006-04-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

Don't know what I was thinking with the puke-beige; maybe I still hadn't gotten over my time as an art student. I'd been planning to go white; black always struck me as silly. But then I made it black by mistake, and suddenly realized "wait a minute, black is beautiful". If readers disapprove, either on aesthetic grounds or because they do not like reading white-on-black, then by all means paraphrase Gandalf and say, "I like white better" - white it shall be.

Well

2006-04-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

Not a day back on the blog, and I can't help posting again. This is just a brief one, a little complaint if you will:

Why does our society so discourage criticism? That is, critical analysis of some idea. Consider that thing called a "textbook". These propose to introduce you to some subject. Do they do this by inducing you, gradually and logically, into a coherent system of knowledge, offering evidence and argument - or caveats acknowledging weakness of same - for various conclusions to the extent that they are merited? For instance, if they state something about the society of 6th century Britain and later something about that of 16th century Britain, do they acknowledge that we know much of the latter and almost nothing of the former? When they tell us about the lifestyle of prehistoric Man, do they tell us about the chains of inference on which these claims are based? When they tell us of some popular medical opinion, do they tell us how it came about?

Very funny. Yet the problem extends beyond textbooks; here is a project I suggest: pick a science, discover its fundamental assertions, and then discover the basis for same. Is it ever impossible? I am sure it is not. Is it, in many cases, ridiculously difficult - far out of proportion to the complexity of the science? Yes.

It is as if we are allergic to first principles, and this allergy, I think, is rather convenient for the rulers of our civlization.

Ahhh

2006-04-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

Well, my children, by which I mean (in all probability) my elders and betters - in any case, my readers:

Do not take up chess. Take up cocaine, even start watching football if you must, but stay away from chess. It will consume your mind.

In the latest little wave of "warm fuzzy Islam" propaganda, somebody wrote a book listing the Islamic contributions to civilization, one being chess. That he thought this a compliment to the Muslims shows the author's ignorance of the game. They can perhaps be forgiven for bringing us chess, but praised! Were it not for them, I would never have heard of a "rook ending". Something called the "French defense" would never have troubled my idle hours. "Contribution" indeed!

I have sworn the thing off for some time now, and for this reason my interest in the rest of the universe has revived. The monkey has been extricated from my back - permanently, I hope.

Thus I return to my little cranny of St. Blog's. What has happened in the interim?

Well, I've gotten pretty well in the habit of going to our local indult Mass. And by "local" I mean 40 miles away or thereabouts. The longer you stay, the harder it is to go back...whenever, through laziness or necessity, I've gone to the local Novus Ordo Mass, it seems to get worse each time - enough that "laziness" has ceased to make a difference, and the conditions of "necessity" have gotten very strict. At the same time, hearing 3 (two, can't remember) sung Masses does make the usual Low Mass a bit unsatisfying! However, there's a difference between "I could hope for more" and "difficult to endure".

I'm starting to feel like a trad (albeit a new one) rather than a fellow-interested-in-traditionalism; it would be hard to go back. There are, I admit, a few points where if anything, I have come to feel less "traddish" over time - I have come to appreciate and admire Chesterton more than I had, and one of the obvious facts about Chesterton is that he was a liberal.

Yes, I mean the old-style and political brand of liberalism (theological liberalism has always meant more or less what it means now, only not quite so much) - but still, there it is. While he abandoned the socialism of his youth, it was emphatically not because he became "less liberal" or embraced conservatism; it was because he realized that private property was in fact a very fine thing, and he was not about to let anger at the millionaires and capitalists drive him to renounce it.

Perhaps Chesterton is a bit more liberal than my own inclinations would make me, yet I find myself more in sympathy with him that I did. So I cannot join those traditionalists, for instance, who find great difficulties in "Dignitatis Humanae", the Declaration on Religious Freedom in the Second Vatican Council - or in "Nostra Aetate", the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. The degree of authority of these documents, I neither know nor am deeply concerned about; the idea of religious tolerance (as a general policy; Dignitatis Humanae provides certain qualifications such as "provided that just public order be observed") does not bother me as it seems to bother some traditionalists (I hasten to say, not all or even a majority; I have no numbers before me). If the declarations had in fact approved (as I've heard suggested) an absolute separation of Church and State, then indeed I would be concerned as to their exact degree of authority, whether a "declaration" is on a par with, say, an anathema of Trent - but they don't say that; you can have an established Church (and indeed ought to, in a Catholic country) without burning any heretics. Of course conciliar approval of religious freedom could be taken as a demand for an absolutely "faith-blind" government, but I cannot even say that this is the most natural interpretation, much less the correct one - unless you have a very violent idea of "freedom" and its conditions.

That the Council was a good idea, I am not about to say; I do not know of any good consequences of it (though I have not looked), unless that the liberal excesses have inspired enthusiasm for the old Rite among people who might otherwise treat the TLM with less reverence...an uninspiring argument. Likewise I can think of many bad things that are hard to imagine without Vatican II. But it's just not something I feel like complaining about, and if St. Thomas Aquinas thought differently from V2 about burning heretics, then just possibly he was wrong. After all, they executed all sorts of people back in the old days; do we really want a return to the old penal approach in toto?

Nor am I sympathetic to the whole agrarian yearning which seems to interest some American trads (I think only a small minority - I would even say, pace Mr. Culbreath, that I hope so). The first thing to be said for farming is that it keeps us from starving, and I believe this is about the last thing to be said for it. From what I have read, only low-density populations who do not need to support a civilization, can live off the land quite comfortably with rather little work - I am thinking of Tacitus on the Germans and Dr. Johnson on the Scottish Highlanders; both authors noted the great indolence of these people, and I suppose they did not lie. Of course the ancient Germans and early-modern Highlanders were also great warriors, and being a tad rusty with the claymore I cannot say that I would care for this type of agrarianism either. But really civilized farming, that sounds just plain unpleasant - certainly my mother does not yearn for the tobacco farms of her youth. That we might be better people if we were mostly farmers I do not deny, but labour and hardship in general are said to improve character, yet it is idle to suppose that a society will or even should inflict these things upon themselves willingly, for mere self-improvement. Religious orders may impose physical labour for this purpose, and indeed if some few enthusiasts wish to practice agriculture, why on earth should I protest? Only please do not suggest that I should get behind the plow, or comment on my modern effeteness for not wishing to do so. And yes, I realize that here I probably part company with Chesterton, who seemed to associate agrarianism with distributism, along with Fr. McNabb...I can only say that I hope this association was unnecessary, because I like the basic idea of distributism very much.

Lastly: I don't care a fig for democracy, and I don't see anything absurd about monarchism...just don't, don't try and tell me that the American Revolution was an "illegitemate rebellion". You can sneer all you like that "no taxation without representation" is not a fundamental law of justice...yet it certainly appealed to one: we payed taxes to a government which was run by, and for, the British - there was no doubt on this point, and to try to pretend George III (or any other King or Queen) put the welfare of his American subjects on a par with that of his British subjects is a joke.

The definition of tyranny is "government that is not for the benefit of the governed". QED. Yes, some things are really that simple; the only question is whether expelling a tyrant was worth a war, and I would say yes - given that this was hardly the most terrible of wars, the benefits seem to outweigh the harm. That the founding fathers were a bunch of Freemasons does not change this. Dr. Johnson's obfuscation that slave-owning Americans did not deserve freedom is a sophistry beneath contempt (as if injustice could be excused by the sins of its victims - that the author of Rasselas should say such things!), that Canada got de facto independence without a fight some decades later is no argument (should Washington have been a prophet? Besides, would Canada have fared alike had we never won independence? I also get the feeling that of the two British Colonies in America, Canada was the fair-haired-boy of the twain; their treatment argues little about what we would have got).

I like Great Britain but I like her even better on the other side of the world, and have no patience with arguments from those who think otherwise.

Besides, why on earth would a monarchist want to be subject to the British crown? As I understand it, their Parliament was running things long before 1776; perhaps I have a mistaken impression from the fact that they executed a King they didn't like.

But these are all minor, political points that separate me only from a fraction of traditionalists; if I wax emphatic about them, that is just a bad habit.

As a change from my previous mode of blogging, I think I will post more on "devotional stuff" - which I had always been embarassed to write about before, yet I think egotism more than humility was the reason for that. Because of course, to refrain from saying things so as not to feel prideful, implies that these things are impressive enough to tempt one to pride...but my little observations on the spiritual life are not going to impress anybody anywhere! Having realized that, I will correct the error. Tomorrow I think I will post something about the Rosary, even if all my readers (hello to you both! Wait, there's a third!) are more familiar with this great prayer than I am. Also in the pipe: Cdl. Newman!

In conclusion

2006-01-07T21:03:00.000-08:00

As we can all tell, I've quit posting to my blog, but I figure I should give official notice of my indefinite-leave-of-absence. I'll keep the page up - why not? - and end with one last little anecdote.

Today I was standing in line, listening to the conversation of the two people in front of me. Hey, what else was there to do? Most of it was dull, but there were a few bits that struck me as telling somehow. I'll try to give you the gist of it as best I can:

"Bill" (for so I shall call him): you've never been to the basilica? (the Minneapolis basilica is not far from where we were standing in line)

Jane: no.

Bill: oh, you should go, it's cool.

Jane: what's cool about it?

Bill: well, it's funny, there's this huge altar, you know, from the old days, and the priest has to face away from the congregation. Then there's this tiny little altar in front of it, which is what they started using after, you know, they turned the priests around and stuff. They can't turn around the other altar because it's attached to the wall.

Jane: I never go to churches. They're scary; it creeps me out. I think it's all the dead people in there, from funerals and stuff.

Bill: so do you feel the same way about cemetaries? (a rather incisive question I thought, especially given her answer)

Jane: well, kind of, yeah. (She clearly realized that this didn't sound very persuasive, and changed her stance): they're just so dark and smelly and dusty.

Bill: yeah.

[somewhat later]

Jane: I should go to that gay church sometime.

Bill: what gay church?

Jane: oh, you know, the one...[gives directions to said church]. They like, make a big deal about accepting gays.

Bill: well actually, all of the churches are okay with it really, except the Catholics. Like the United Methodists....

There was something vaguely through-the-looking-glass about that conversation....

p.s.: on the Tridentine front, I've not gone there lately - but that changes tomorrow! Up at 7, on the bus by 8:30, and in church by...11:00 (yes).

Blogimus Reports Again

2005-12-12T23:04:00.000-08:00

Okay, yesterday I hauled myself out of bed at the requisite time and made it to the Tridentine Mass, finally with my 1962 Missal in hand. I still couldn't understand quite all of it, because I was confused at times as to just where we were, but I followed most of it and will no doubt become quite familiar with it soon enough.

Just why did this have to go? There is such a sense of solidity and reality to it; the prayers are all very appropriate, nothing is out of place. As I understand it, the justification for removing such an enormous number of prayers in the new Mass, was that these were "accretions" and "useless repetitions". I remember that recently, a few Catholics - I think they were traditionalists themselves - wrote a manifesto for the "Society for St. Pius I", repudiating the modernist innovation of a Latin Mass; it was filled with phrases like "according to neo-trad 'Saint' Jerome...." The point was obvious, and they captured the manner of certain trad polemicists very well. Yet it seems to me only a stone's throw away from this parody, to dismiss about half of the Tridentine Mass as "accretion", and harken back to a rite from 1500 years ago, or more...in which "On Eagle's Wings" was a prominent feature, I suppose.

The Fuss About Evolution

2005-12-07T19:53:00.000-08:00

This isn't a new topic for me, and my answer to most of the important questions involved is usually along the lines of "I don't know; I'm not a biologist. I don't think the biologists know either...." But still, it's interesting to revisit every now and then.

One interesting fact is that one of the great pillars of Darwinism, is not the adaptation of creatures to the environment, but the lack thereof. Darwin once wrote, rather gloatingly, about all the useless, perverse works of Nature that he could list; since his day, the Darwinists have been torn between a love for preposterous just-so stories as to how this or that trait arose, and an arrogant presumption that whatever they do not understand is quite pointless. I wonder if any of Darwin's examples of "pointless" works of Nature would withstand scrutiny today...in any case, the follies of this latter presumption are now becoming evident. We have known for some time, for instance, that most of our genes do not encode proteins; the scientific consensus, then, was that the vast portion of our genome was "junk DNA". Of course, it is nothing of the kind. Likewise, this paper, which the Intelligent Design theorists are fond of citing, may not provide a ringing endorsement of their claims but it certainly gives another black eye to the old "oh, that? We can't figure out any point in it, so it's just garbage" mentality. Despite my still-lingering memories of college biology classes and the accessible character of the paper, parts of it were still a bit beyond me; however the idea is this: two organisms often have similar proteins that perform identical functions. The differences in sequence between two such proteins ("homologues" is the classy term for such sets of related proteins...scientific Greek starts to sound pretty weird the more you learn about actual Greek, but never mind...) were apparently regarded as insignificant products of genetic drift. But according to Dr. Axe here, the differences between two homologous proteins do not indicate a simple interchangeability of the amino acid residues which differ from protein to protein (at least on the exterior). Rather they indicate two different "designs" that perform the same function.

Darwinists have been, since Darwin himself, ideologically motivated to find randomness and simplicity in all of the processes they study. They often find it when it's not there. I am unconvinced by the arguments of Intelligent Design theorists that Darwinism is demonstrably incapable of explaining evolution - but it is interesting to consider, that Darwinists have often been led astray by the implications of their theory. This is rather the opposite of what one expects from a true scientific theory. It is further remarkable that in refuting the I.D. theorists they must invariably - I have yet to find an exception - have recourse to sophistry, particularly the hilarious idea that to hypothesize design is "not science"...the I.D. theorist Dembski brushed that aside by asking substantially, "what if every cell came with the inscription 'made by Yahweh'? Wouldn't you have to consider design then? And if you allow 'science' to hypothesize design in that case, why is this the only sort of demonstration of design you will accept?" and considered the point sufficiently clear. Yet one hears this patent idiocy almost every time a Darwinist bravely sallies forth against the creationist hordes! They can't seem to help saying it. A theory that is primarily espoused my men who cannot think, arouses somewhat of suspicion on my part.

But let's ignore all that, and look at some ancient history. Specifically, Belloc's "A Companion to Mr. Wells's 'Outline of History'". The first thing he attacks in Wells's book is the beginning, which treats of the origin of life. Belloc describes Natural Selection, the theory to which Wells held, as "dead."

The "well-educated" modern reader will smile at this out-of-touch crank...but I wonder what this reader would think if he ever got to the appendix, where Belloc quotes several eminent scientific contemporaries, saying quite clearly that Natural Selection was an inadequate explanation for evolution. Belloc may have been wrong, but it was not a matter of "him and William Jennings Bryan" vs. "Science". There seemed to be a great deal of "science" on his end of things; just what on earth was happening back then, anyway? We can be sure that if there ever was some academic reaction against Darwinism during which it became unfashionable, the Darwinian propagandists have smoothed over this little bump in Progress. Or did it never happen? Was every one of those professors Belloc quoted simply a crank? I have my doubts.

But there are other, very interesting things in there. Consider this passage from Belloc's "wrong-headed" attack on Natural Selection:

"Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product of other living beings.
"When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, "These things look as though they had a common ancestor." The next step is to suppose that there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefather - those of them who were civilized - discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the Christian Church spoke in the same terms."

There is some other very interesting stuff in this "outdated" chapter....

But to consider that passage for a moment: unless you have been wise enough to study the Classics, these two paragraphs were perhaps a bit contrary to what you had previously thought about the past? Well, in my case I knew that a few of the Greeks had held to an evolution-like theory, and that Aristotle had said something-or-other about it, but I was shocked to hear Belloc discuss it as a mere commonplace of ancient thought.

It is an interesting thing about modern education, that it tends to exaggerate the glories of the present by demeaning the past. All the fallacious notions we have of ancient thought - that nobody knew the world was round until Columbus (all educated Westerners had known it for over a thousand years), that the idea of natural explanations for...natural events...came only gradually as science progressed, fought by religion every step of the way (the so-called "God of the gaps" rubbish...in fact, as soon as the Greeks began to think, their philosophers put forth natural explanations for everything...nobody significant ever resisted the idea. St. Thomas discusses right in the beginning of the Summa the claim that "nature is sufficient to explain everything" and refutes it by demanding a need to explain nature, not by denying that natural process explain the world), all of these just happen to paint our ancestors as much stupider, much more superstitious and backwards than they actually were. Coincidence, perhaps?

Wednesday

2005-12-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Well, around here at Blogimus Maximus we don't get "tagged" with "memes" very often. But Boeciana has decided to wring a confession out of us.

So:

- I often don't actually like reading some of the stuff our Saints have written. All too often they seem to be talking about me, and quite frankly their remarks are not very complimentary. I'm more comfortable reading Belloc, or Chesterton or some jolly fellow like that. Which is why

- I'm a bit skeptical when people say Chesterton should be a saint - no doubt he is in heaven, but he almost never offends me, which just seems disqualifying somehow. But if you can point me to something offensive in Chesterton's works then I would be happy to change my mind.

- I would probably listen to classical music 24/7 if it were possible. I know, it's an addiction.

- Actually, I've always aspired to be a composer. But I'm not, um, any good.

- Poetry is beyond me. Sad, but true. Wouldn't know a good poem if it beat me up and stole my wallet.

- I refuse to drink anything stronger than beer or wine, because I tend to toss it back like water & the results are unpleasant. Hard liquor is deceitful stuff anyway; such a small bit of liquid has no right to such a disproportionate effect.

- I hardly ever read books all the way through. And I almost never read a non-Wodehouse novel nowadays. And my supply even of these is running low. Even Wodehouse can only be re-read so many times within a certain period.

How's that?

Tuesday

2005-12-06T20:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry for my truancy in posting; I've been distracted for the last few days.

No reports on Tridentine front; when the alarm woke me at 7:15 that morning and I heard it was 4 degrees (-15 heathen system) outside, I might have had the manly fortitude to make my bus connections anyway, if I had slept decently the night before. But thanks to an evil burrito, that had not happened...so to make a short story appropriately short, I caved and went to the 11:00 Mass at my "ordinary" parish. I know, reprehensible weakness on my part.

Good news: I've wanted to write a novel since the beginning of time (more or less; I've never had a head for dates), but in the last few years my plots have fallen apart as soon as I started to make them. Now, however, I'm cooking up a nice one which I expect to survive scrutiny. The secret of most novelists, I think, is that they are not very logical people, so they have no trouble cooking up a nice story. Especially true of science fiction/fantasy type novelists (and I could never be anything else - early breeding); even in my callow teens, perhaps before that even, I kept finding insuperable objections to the speculative schemes of such novels. Especially when they wrote time-travel stories! Nobody ever wrote a single one of those that made sense, except H.G. Wells, who sensibly mentioned all the possibilities of paradox and then sidestepped it all. Though I can't recall any major problems with Fritz Leiber's Change War stories either...I've never read R.A. Lafferty's time-travel stuff, and since he was said to be A. a conservative Catholic and B. one of the best writers in the history of the genre, I'd rather like to. Hard to get hold of, unfortunately.

Anyway, this one should be fun, except for the actual writing part. Writing is a miserable exercise. But in this case I have a motivation which should suffice to keep me hacking away.

Now for a random interlude: this post by the Secret Agent Man provides an amusing quote from an actual novel by someone named Ken Follett. Apparently he is a writer of historical novels who is not very good at it. In something called "Eye of the Needle" he delivers this gem:

"The building in which he lived . . . was a Victorian brick house at one end of a terrace of six. The houses were high, narrow, and dark, like the minds of the men for whom they had been built."

The Secret Agent Man sees in this an encapsulation of Follett's dismissive attitude towards the past. I see in this hilarity! Never mind the arrogance of it, the sheer ham-handedness of the prose is delightful! "The houses were high, narrow, and dark," now wait, wait for that simile..."like the minds of the men for whom they had been built[!!!]" That's the real stuff! Even something like "the minds of their former inhabitants" would have been funny, but with that stilted clause "for whom they had been built" it becomes Art. It really savours of those collections of laughably bad prose you see passed around by email - google "two hummingbirds who had also never met" and you will find examples of what I mean.

Interlude the second: apparently the sole version of Dvorak's Jakobin (my King Charles's Head, to steal a phrase from Belloc's great polemic against Wells' Outline of History...I wonder, was that Copperfield reference a common idiom, or Belloc's idea? Beautiful either way) on Amazon.com is the very one that I have (once again) borrowed from the library. The case is labeled "hidden treasures from Prague" and apparently this is not a misnomer - but for this recording, Jakobin would be even harder to come by than it is. Listening to it again, I realize that in addition to the excellence of the opera, the performance is also superb. The two baritones (Vaclav Zitek as Bohus and Rene Tucek as Adolf - sorry, funny Czech markings are beyond my capacity) are respectively the hero and villian, and their voices suit the roles quite excellently. Karel Berman as Filip the Burgrave (bass) is a wonderful comic under-villian - it's hard not to laugh just hearing him. However Daniela Sounova (soprano, playing Terinka) is just a shameless scene-stealer. She doesn't have one of those quirky, recognizable voices like Callas or whoever...but there's just a wonderful liveliness and clarity in her voice; it's exquisite, and without singing more loudly or anything crude like that, she still puts the other soloists in the shade when they're unlucky enough to share the stage with her. Why if she were forty years younger...ah, well. 'Tis not to be.

Well, I probably wanted to say something serious at some point or another, but it's getting late so it will have to wait til tomorrow.

Wednesday

2005-11-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

Alas, the habitual blog-stoppage of Thursday & Friday impends, to be followed by the habitual blog-resumption of Saturday, however. In the meantime:

Today I had to visit downtown Minneapolis, and while there I'm afraid I splurged a little on music. Fortunately, all but one of the resultant CD's in my coat pockets were borrowed from the library, not purchased (the lone purchase was a bit of violin & piano music by Dvorak). Among other things, I borrowed a couple of Masses: Guillaume de Machuat's famous Mass of Notre Dame, and Mozart's Requiem, which indeed I had never heard before.

I was quite surprised by the character of de Machuat's Mass. At the time, sacred music in the West (and secular music too, I would suppose) still used microtonal ornamentation - for those unfamiliar with musical terminology, just think of that wavery stuff you hear in Middle Eastern or African singing. It all sounds very, very different from the music of Palestrina two centuries later.

Mozart is probably the most intimidating of composers, not excepting Bach I would say; the appalling smoothness of invention, the casual ingenuity and power of his music is unequalled. And the Requiem, of course, is one of his very greatest works. But enough of that.

Have I mentioned what a wonderful thing this 1962 Missal is? I can just flip it open at random and start reading; everything is good.

Anyway I've started re-reading "The Lord of the Rings." Now the movies are nice enough, but they are in no way the slightest patch on the book. There is something odd about it, though, a mix of grand themes and noble characters, with a sort of comfortable homeyness both in style and in dramatic treatment. It was hardly the only manner of which Tolkien was capable, as the Silmarillion shows, but at times I wish Tolkien had been a real master of the language, such as scarcely walk the earth anymore - a magician, a dramatist, a poet, an orator - in short, someone who knew English. Yet perhaps this mixture of virtues is psychologically impossible; the magicians tended to be lazy fellows except when it came to writing for a pay-check, and I could never imagine either a Shakespeare, or a Dickens, or anyone of that sort expending the enormous effort required in inventing the whole world of Middle-Earth - languages, history and all - not to mention writing such an epic work as Lord of the Rings.

Tuesday

2005-11-29T20:05:00.000-08:00

Well, I now have "The Roman Missal (1962)" right here in front of me.

This thing is neat! I hadn't realized traditionalism was so much more fun than...well, the alternative. It's like a little (2000-page) handbook for Catholics - everything in the Mass that doesn't change, everything that does change, and all sorts of non-liturgical prayers (hundreds at least), including Latin versions of ones we all know at least in english, as well as plenty that I certainly don't know at all.

Is it too much to ask - why anyone would ever want to get rid of all this???

I know, I've just got my Missal and I've only been to 3 Tridentine Masses; shouldn't I take a little longer to start complaining about the Novus Ordo and all its accoutrements, in the manner of a cranky old traditionalist?

Well, the thing to keep in mind is: my conversion was based on reading, along with accompanying thinking, and specifically, reading pre-Vatican II writers like Chesterton, Fr. Ronald Knox, Hilaire Belloc (my man!) and if you want someone who practically embodies everything the modernists hate about the "pre-Vatican II Church", it's Belloc. Neither was I enraptured by the vitality of something called a "lifeteen mass", nor did the example of John Paul II influence me (I never paid much attention to the news, and apart from having thought [in earlier days] that the pope couldn't be a very good fellow as he was such a conservative [this being bad, supposedly] but that I vaguely wished I could like the pope as everything I heard about him personally seemed rather likeable, JPII barely appeared on my mental radar), nor did some American evangelical fellow realizing "hey, we're actually quite wrong about this, this and this! Moreover, somebody else seems to have been getting it right for the last two millenia!" particularly impress me. I certainly wouldn't say I converted in spite of the Novus Ordo, and as far as Vatican II, I have never paid much attention to it at all, I have to admit, except that the declaration on religious liberty has always been hard for me to square with what several popes have said on the matter. I am still unclear as to whether the documents of the council are infallible - Pope Paul VI seemed to have said "no" in one statement - nor am I confident in my ability to understand such things in any case, so I have always left that issue for wiser heads than my own. But I certainly did not convert because of the Novus Ordo or Vatican II or anything after 1960.

And in a year and a half of attending Novus Ordo Masses, it was not so much that I grew disenchanted with it, as that I was never attached to it in the first place. When I converted, one thing that struck me is how much importance Catholics attached to the Eucharist. And when people complained about the liturgy, the response (from non-pod-people) was "yes, it's quite awful - but Jesus is there, either way". This seemed quite logical to me - after all, the very presence of God Himself is surely more significant than a little bad music more or less, and some uninspiring prayers, etc.? It is only now that I realize, that this reasonable-seeming attitude really devalues the Mass. Consider these words from my 1962 Missal, introducing the "preparation for Holy Mass" and "ordinary of the Mass" section:

"Of all the practices recommended by our holy religion[...]-the august Sacrifice of the Mass is infinitely greater. It is the most precious, the most holy of practices, as well as the most conducive to man's salvation".

"Mass" is not used here as a synonym for "communion". There is a difference; the whole thing is important, and it does not exist solely to give us communion. Yes, the transformation of bread and wine into the Body of Our Lord is indeed at the very heart of the Mass, but this transformation is for Sacrifice and not solely communion. This fact, which I've harped on for a while now, is very significant here because a sacrifice demands a ritual solemnity beyond that of a "communal meal". In fact this is putting it too weakly, because neither music nor prayers are in any way part of communion at all, whereas ceremonial matters are indeed part of a sacrifice, at least in a sense, being naturally attendant on it. Thus, when you see Mass as nothing more than communion, it is easy to say "what if the music is bad? What if there are insipid prayers? It matters little". But when you say that sort of thing, while regarding Mass as a Sacrifice, you are saying "so what if the sacrificial ceremony is performed badly?" and that is lunacy. We must still, indeed, distinguish between the ceremony offered by mortals and the Sacrifice offered by Our Lord, lest we say "the Sacrifice is badly done" at this or that Mass, seeming to imply that Our Lord's action in the Mass in in some way deficient, which is obviously impossible. But anyway, no one will be loony enough to say, "what if the ceremony of Sacrifice is badly done? It is not important." This is obviously a very bad thing, and very irreverent.

Therefore the deficiencies of the Novus Ordo Mass (and I refer to the Novus Ordo as it actually exists, not as it might possibly be done according to the rubrics - though even ignoring such things as are not mandated by the rubrics, i.e. the altar-smashing, the priest facing Our Wonderfulness, putting everything in the vernacular and a very bad vernacular, the wretched music, etc., I have read through the Ordinary of the old Mass a few times, enough to see that the prayers here are much more numerous, more beautiful, more proper to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, than what one hears at a Novus Ordo Mass) lead to a sort of warped spirituality even in the devout (or the not-so-devout who still take their religion seriously), a sort of "communion-only" approach to the Mass. And though it might seem superficially that over-emphasizing "communion" would not be destructive of spiritual "community", I think that one of the main consequences of the New Mass is an almost Protestant "Jesus and me" approach to the spiritual life, where the role of the Church is minimized. This seems ridiculous, since the "communal aspect of the Mass" is supposedly much emphasized nowadays. So it is, but that only reinforces my point: regard the Church as nothing but a community, and not as our Mother, and you cannot love Her. The community to which a Novus Ordo Mass-goer is invited, is not an appealing one, hence the retreat into individualism that marked not only myself, but I suspect anyone who has had to comfort himself with the refrain "at least Jesus is there, whatever else I have to put up with" - a refrain perhaps more despairing than the speaker realizes, for it was only after the realizations I described above that the deficiency of such a mentality occurred to me.

In short, this is something that has been welling up in me for a long time; from the beginning I had some sympathy for traditionalism, for perhaps a year I have been inclining to think the traditionalists were right in at least most of what they said. But typically, I delayed quite some time in "taking the plunge" - so if any of my opinions should appear rather quickly-acquired, I assure the reader that this is not the case; I have simply been waiting. Waiting too long, in my opinion, now that I know what I was missing....

3rd report

2005-11-27T16:54:00.000-08:00

I could definitely get used to this Tridentine Mass. Apart from everything else (and there is a lot of "everything else") it's nice to go to a Mass that does not make me wince. Look, "focus" is not exactly my strong suit anyway, and it doesn't help to have thoughts like, "what a terrible, terrible hymn" or "but this psalm-setting is even worse" or "this english pseudo-chant stuff is NOT RIGHT" or "that prayer of petition was not a good idea" or "do I have to shake hands? Okay he's turning towards me, so it would kind of be rude not to shake hands, wouldn't it? Okay, is that enough now?" running through my head. And I'm much too arrogant as it is, so the last thing I need is to separate myself from the crowd by different (and better) devotional practices, i.e. receiving on the tongue while 95% of the congregation receives in the hand.

At a Tridentine Mass there is no bad music or bad chant (actually this is a Low Mass so there's no music or chant at all; a pity, but there aren't many options), I don't have to shake hands, there are no unbearable petitions, everybody receives on the tongue while kneeling...though the simple absence of distractions would not be enough to put me on a two-hour bus ride every week, this is a very nice feature.

The more important superiorities of this Mass I have already mentioned in my earlier reports. That the priest does not turn his back on the tabernacle to face the wonderfulness of the congregation, but faces the High Altar with the tabernacle on it, thank you very much, that the priest does not blast out his every prayer at the top of his voice (with the strong implication that his prayers are only important because we hear them)...and yes, that almost all of it is in a language that does not corrupt over time, in a liturgy whose words were not written at a time when nobody seems able to write well...yes, this is all very good. I could certainly get used to this.

Ahh

2005-11-26T18:13:00.000-08:00

In America we have a holiday called "Thanksgiving", the main idea of which is that you eat a great deal for several days, Thursday of this past week in particular. Blogimus is well fed now.

So, not to be stealing all of my topics for posting from ex laodicea (that would smack of laziness, wouldn't it?), but really, this rather startled me. Remember, traditionalists who worry about Modernism in the Church are silly, paranoid people. Cdl. Hans Urs von Balthasar was a great theologian. Now shut up and let me explain to you suspicious, uncharitable Rad-Trads what a flawed concept of Tradition you have - and start on your Tarot and Trimestigus pronto-donto, or we'll start to wonder if you've really accepted Vatican II at all.

I mean...using the "Major Arcana" as a way to the "deeper, all-embracing wisdom of the Catholic Mystery"? Look, there was a time I might have been interested in that kind of b.s....then I became a Catholic. It's a very weird thing I noticed after I converted - I had gone through every sham religion and philosophy, and was by then, quite frankly, completely uninterested in the thought of any non-Catholic on religious matters (and often on historical and philosophical matters, as these have much to do with religion). Time has only cemented me in this position; for the poor people who suggest that the cute little arguments and speculations of C.S. Lewis, or the dour musings of Karl Barth, or whatever it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, could be at all edifying to me, I smile and return to my St. Augustine, or my Belloc, or whatever real intellectual has my attention at the moment.

It is not that they are wrong and we are right; Lewis is no more useful to me when I agree with him than not. It does not hinge on being right in the sense of saying "B" instead of "A"; it hinges on being right or wrong the way a painting or a symphony is right or wrong; without the Faith to inform them, men cannot write about theology in a way that is interesting - interesting not in the subjective sense of "amusing", but in the sense of providing useful food for thought. At their very best, the Protestants or what have you can tell me what I already know; at their worst, they can tell me what I already know to be wrong. But as far as religion is concerned, however they may exceed me in other matters, they have nothing to tell me that I do not know at all.

But after my conversion, I noticed (and here is that very weird thing I mentioned earlier) that many of my newly-fellow Catholics seemed to have an opposite attitude. They seemed to have a positive thirst for non-Catholic writers on religion, usually Protestant, and they would quote some famous name of some famous heresy, as if he were some sort of theological authority. This was beyond me; such citations have a vaguely "ecumenical" air, except they are not even cited in the presence of Protestants! As if, to be real ecumenists, it is not enough to have a "dialogue" with them, where we quote approvingly from some silly ass they all revere and say "yes dear, he was actually right about this [if we interpret him in a sense that came to me while I was knocking back my fifth cup of home-brew]" (which is already a bit much), but we actually have to go quoting non-heretical statements of Luther TO EACH OTHER, as if he were somebody worth listening to. No doubt if I challenged anyone on this practice, they would say "I just take truth where I find it [you narrow-minded traditionalist bigot, you]". But that begs the question of why you would go looking there - not to mention, in practice, the fact that almost all of these "truths" are either false, or trite, or savour of the author's particular errors in a manner that is clear to any observant intellect.

Oddly enough, this habit strikes me as remarkably reminiscent of the justification for some of the innovations in the Mass, where "ecumenism" was also a factor: in order to further some pie-in-the-sky hope of bringing our "separated brethren" into "fuller communion", we must be willing to mutilate our own spiritual lives by suppressing things that annoy them. Allow me to encapsulate this strategy by quoting a Protestant, specifically the Screwtape Letters. It is a better work than I remembered, actually, and these bits of advice between demons are quite apropos:

"Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present[...]It is far better to make them live in the Future[...]He does not want ment to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do."

"To get the man's soul and give him nothing in return - that is what really gladdens Our Father's heart."

Lewis was not, to put it mildly, talking about wrecking the Mass (or our theological discourse) by Protestantizing it for the sake of ecumenical dreams. He would probably have approved of this (though not of the ICEL translations, much less our new music); he says elsewhere in the book that most Catholics & Anglicans, ignorant of Aquinas and Hooker as they are, should stop pretending they have anything significant to disagree about in re: the Mass vs. "communion" because most of them could not articulate the theological differences between them. This was false: apart from the snobbery of supposing that the inarticulancy of the uneducated means that their opinions are worthless (after all, what of those Christians who likewise couldn't give a coherent explanation of why they believe in the Faith at all - or why they believe the earth orbits the sun, or politicians are crooked? The same logic would condemn them on all three counts, but of course the logic of "you can't explain to me your reasons for believing this, so you're a fool to believe it" is always the logic of the intellectual snob and the sophist, in religion and everything else), many Catholics - they need not have been superbly educated - actually could have explained the most important difference: "the Mass is a Sacrifice; a Protestant service is not" is a simple proposition that plenty of Catholics and Anglicans used to know, understand and believe; the former believed in the Mass and died for it; the latter believed in 'communion' and killed for it; the Anglicans had forgotten all this by Lewis's day but not, I think, the Catholics. Most of us have forgotten it now, however....

Still, whatever Lewis's opinions, doesn't he put that very nicely? Or to quote another Englishman who I don't think was Catholic either:

"Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today."

In short, this odious practice of slathering ourselves in Protestantism so we won't smell wrong to the Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists and Calvinists is a shell game, whether we do it by "downplaying" the sacrificial character of the Mass or by quoting Protestants whenever we can & approving their heretical formulas in whatever orthodox sense we can invent. The goal is vague and unreasonable, the sacrifices are real and weighty (souls), and the practice is folly. The false character of all this, should be obvious to anyone considering the fact that ecumenism is a much more reasonable project with the Eastern Orthodox, yet we have never changed the Mass to suit them, much less mutilated it for their sake, and we're much less likely to quote Eastern Orthodox writers, adopt the terminology of their theologians, etc. When we do quote them, they're more likely to have their heads on straight too...that we are most eager for "union" with those self-styled Christians who least resemble us, is telling and reeks of trickery.

Yet the people who turn to Protestants for truth, however much they might irk me, are infinitely more sensible than one who turns to medieval occultism for Christian wisdom (or likewise the ones who see something useful in Jung, who I think are much more numerous than the followers of this weird perversity uncovered at ex laodicea).

Either way, though, they are exhibiting that strange habit I noticed when I first entered the Church: of preferring to scrabble around for theological truth in the sterile back-alleys of unbelievers, when they can rummage at will in the two-thousand-year-old storehouse of sound and fruitful Christian thought which we have as part of our patrimony. Perhaps it began in ecumenism, but it has ended in a way of the spiritual life, and an insane one. That such people read Catholics as well is not the point; the point is that unbelievers even show up on their radar when it comes to religious matters, except as potential converts or polemical opponents - this betrays a lack of proportion in reading and in thought. We have the Truth, and as Belloc said, "outside is the night."

Speaking of which, I've scored a copy of "The Servile State" (serious) and "Companion to Mr. Wells' 'Outline of History'" (fun, mostly anyway). Reports to follow!

2nd report

2005-11-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

Well, I went to St. Augustine parish (my patron saint, by the way, so nobody go knocking St. Augustine around here!) for their Tridentine Mass again. I could definitely get used to it....

I'm hoping to get a better grip on what happens in the Mass next Sunday, by which time the 1962 Missal from Baronius Press (thanks to Boeciana for the recommendation) should have arrived.

During the (extensive!) three-fold bus ride to St. Augustine, I sat next to a madman during the second leg of my journey. He was presumably what they would call "paranoid schizophrenic" nowadays. It had been some time since I was in the society of such a man, and I was surprised at the intelligibility of his monologue, after due acclimation. I wonder, if sometimes the incoherence of a lunatic's thought-processes is somewhat exaggerated, by people who are themselves too thoughtless to examine their fellow men with any accuracy.

For instance, when he said, "I am the wicked servant, the mystical money tree," I suspect there are all sorts of careless people - perhaps including some with "advanced" degrees in psychology - who would make some dismissive remark about "word salads" and say that this was gibberish. In fact, by the "wicked servant" he referred to the wicked servant in the Parable of the Talents, of which his exegesis was odd (though not odder than the interpretations of some sane people). Instead of taking the master to represent God, he took the master to be a sort of arch-capitalist, and interpreted the parable as an illustrating the evils of avarice, so that the "wicked servant" who failed to turn a profit was in fact the hero of the story. The fact that the talent was buried, conjured up an association with the adage "money doesn't grow on trees", and "mystical" is a somewhat obscure quality by which he seems to distinguish his own thought-processes from those of ordinary people (presumably he is well aware that a distinction exists); he, having a different, mystical concept of the purpose of money (as he explained), embodied by the idea of growing a money tree instead of trading it at the market, was thus "the wicked servant, the mystical money tree." Obviously this is not sane, but not really incoherent either, which surprised me somewhat.

But I was surprised even more, when he made what sounded like a series of sensible remarks on morality and the modern attempts to recast it in a new, "tolerant" mold. During this part of his soliloquoy, he said, "a lot of people want to tell Jesus, 'you'd better change this, or else.' Or else what?" There was something very reasonable in the way he said this, not to mention the reasonableness of the remark itself, from which many sane people could stand to learn.

When the driver announced we were heading down "Dr. Martin Luther King Drive" (I suspect there are about five million of these in the country) he made a joke based on the "I have a dream" speech, obviously of his own devising, but rather funny; however it was slightly bawdy (though only a prig would call it racist) and I will not reproduce it here.

This also makes me wonder about the neat and tidy little concept that many of us have, of a schizophrenic who is "all right" when he takes his medication, but otherwise crazy. That picture is easy to understand if a lapse into madness is a mere lapse into delusions, hallucinations or chaos; however as I said, his thinking was not wholly chaotic, nor did its faults consist merely in delusions in the sense of some false opinion (say, that the Jews were plotting against him - certainly he believed this, but not all of his monologue involved actual errors in fact of this sort. It is also interesting to note that during one passage on the Jews, he said something like "Judas is false righteousness", a remarkably cogent interjection), and he made no clear reference to hallucinations of any kind. Rather he had an ordered way of thinking which was itself insane. For the schizophrenic who in fact uses and benefits from anti-psychotic medications, does (for instance) his pre-medication Biblical exegesis completely vanish, along with all the other features of his schizophrenic mindset, simply by virtue of properly-adjusted brain chemicals? I find this doubtful, especially since a schizophrenic is still capable of reasoning, so the line between his "crazy thinking" and "sane thinking" does not seem perfectly sharp. I expect that whatever degree of recovery a schizophrenic may achieve, is due to much more than taking the right drugs, however useful they may be; it may actually be that his own will has something to do with the matter. Certainly anti-psychotics are not always or equally effective - almost as if a man's mind is not governed solely by a balance of neurotransmitters, strange as that sounds.

In any case it is clearly a horrible affliction, even if it is not as simple as casual observation and popular reputation would have it. Most pitiable, it seems to me, is the sheer loneliness that such people must endure. I myself looked at the man and listened to him, but said nothing, as nothing came to mind. How many others would not give him even so much attention as that?

So when I arrived at St. Augustine, the 10am Novus Ordo Mass was just ending, and when I entered the sanctuary I saw men removing the Novus Ordo altar. I have to say that there was something striking about the symbolism of this - a bare, impermanent block of stone being carried away, to give clear view to what it had never managed to obscure completely: the High Altar.

n.b. on Eusebius

2005-11-16T18:14:00.000-08:00

My knowledge of Greek is scanty, but for anyone reading Eusebius whose knowledge is yet scantier: whenever you see the word "witness" (and probably "testimony" as at the beginning of Book VI) this is the same as "martyr"; likewise the verb forms of "to witness" are of the same origin. I suppose it's common knowledge that that's what "martyr" means, but somehow it strikes me as less obvious that the converse is true, so when Eusebius or some other Greek writer is made to say "witness" in the context of discussing the martyrs, it's handy to realize that this is more or less an arbitrary decision of the translator. Not to criticize them - where would we be without translators?

That's the another thing I like about these old-timey Greeks and Romans: even if they were great scholars like Eusebius of Ceasarea, they knew one language and one only - except for St. Jerome. Makes me feel right at home....

Nothing New Under the Sun

2005-11-16T17:42:00.000-08:00

In Book V, chapter 28 of Eusebius's history he describes the heresy of Artemon. It was an earlier, much more straightforward version of Arianism - Arianism, from what little I know, strikes me as a fundamentally tricky heresy, such as might strike the unwary observer as a minor terminological dispute with the orthodox, while the full implications of it, once unravelled, would scarcely imply more dignity to Our Lord than the doctrines of a Muslim. Artemon seems to have denied the divinity of Our Lord in a more direct and obvious fashion - and so, of course, had much less success than Arius. The followers of Artemon also took a free hand towards the Scriptures, and denied the antiquity of the orthodox teaching regarding Our Lord (not very plausibly, as pointed out by the writer Eusebius quotes). Heresy doesn't really change much over the millenia....

There

2005-11-16T13:22:00.000-08:00

I spiffed up my profile, giving my readers such useful information as my location (which information I consider COMPLETELY accurate) and a general idea of what Blogimus looks like (sans beard/goatee-like thing).

Cold

2005-11-16T11:12:00.000-08:00

So, when I went outside today, something told me that autumn is beginning to draw to a close. It could have been something about the grey cast of the sky, or the complete denudation of the non-evergreen trees - or perhaps it was because everything was covered in snow.

Whereas yesterday had been something like 40 or 50 degrees (about 5 to 10 degrees for those using the heathen metric system), the nearby bank thermometer (that great institution) was reading 19 degrees as of 15 minutes ago. That's about -7 by aforementioned heathenish reckoning. This, of course, is only the beginning; so far it's positively balmy by the standards of a Minnesota winter - or at least, it used to be. Minnesota's been a lot warmer lately, if you ask me.

Which brings us to this post by Boeciana. Now, I will pass over the fact that Scotland doesn't look all that cold to me, and move on to a fact concerning all natives of cold-ridden lands: that they wear their resistance to cold as a badge of pride [and engage in shameless one-upmanship, such as Blogimus committed in first clause of this sentence - ed.] Well, I wear my resistance as a heavy down coat, but to each his own. I find it interesting because from my (limited) experience, the natives of hot places don't seem to feel the same way. My dad had a friend named Arafat, who as you might guess was a native of rather warm climes, but when the weather was hot, rather than swagger around saying "bah, you Minnesotan slugs! This is nothing! Back in [I forget where he was from] we would think this was winter!" he actually hated the heat. Likewise the Southerners of my acquaintance tend to regard air conditioning as the very stuff of life.

If this is a true contrast, then perhaps it simply means that cold is generally easier to bear than heat. But I wonder if that is in fact true. Perhaps, instead, it has to do with the nature of resisting cold vs. resisting heat, namely that you don't really "resist" heat at all. Except via air conditioning.

Enduring cold is like fighting a battle, and when you have disdained hat and coat and glove, and calmly walked out to your car without rubbing your hands together or shivering or showing any similar weakness, you have proven your worth. You are a conqueror.

But when it's hot, there is no struggle. You just suffer - and turn up the a.c. if you can.

Well, maybe that explains it; who knows.

Note

2005-11-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

A warning to fellow bloggers: do not refer to oneself in the third person while using a weird internet pseudonym, however appropriate it may seem to do so. Or you will find yourself trimming your beard one day and saying "well, Blogimus has a nicely-trimmed beard now." I mean, hypothetically this could conceivable happen to somebody. The thought just occurred to me for no reason whatsoever.

Tuesday

2005-11-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

Well, today I've been rooting around the New Advent site - or, "why God permits the Internet to exist". If you're going to waste time online, that is certainly the place to waste it - the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Summa and all sorts of Patristic texts, all in one place!

There seems to me something strange and Providential about the compilation of the first Catholic Encyclopedia, back in the golden age of encyclopedia-writing where the target audience did not consist of first-graders and the authors were people who actually knew something of their subject (for instance, the article in our old Brittanica on the theory of relativity was authored by this fellow "A. Einstein". Likewise I recall the author of an earlier Brittanica article on music was some "Tovey" character....) Like gathering in a store of food for the winter....

Right now I'm on book IV (of X) of this monumentally important work. When I was a little one I always thought history was boring, either because I was young and stupid, or because my dad was (and is) an early mideval historian (and what your dad does can't be cool, now can it?) Nonsense! This stuff is great! And a bit saddening, because as you read Eusebius's history, you start to realize the enormity of our own ignorance regarding early ecclesiastical history - or ancient history period. I think everyone supposes history is well-mapped-out and we know most of the important stuff...until they study it. And for all the sciences in which progress in recent centuries has been enormous, this is the one science that - up to a certain point - regresses. Or would anyone seriously deny that Eusebius knew enormously more about ecclesiastical history than anyone alive today?

Sunday

2005-11-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

Well, I had a bit of a cold today and didn't sleep very well last night, so I decided that the 2-and-a-half-hour trip to St. Augustine was not a good idea. So no "Tridentine reports" on the Blogimus front; I went to the "default" parish. But it only confirms my desire to go back to St. Augustine. I should be healthy from now on - two colds in one season is already a bit much for me; I don't know what my immune system was thinking.

Saturday

2005-11-12T22:06:00.000-08:00

I know this sort of thing is not really in the Blogimus style, but it cheered me up. Click while the link still works! But you'll need sound or it won't be funny.

Wednesday

2005-11-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how het up people got over this "women & pants" thing at St. Blog's. Moral of the story: topic is dangerous. Avoid!

And to be sure, I have a hard time getting terribly interested in it anyway, but there is one thing that drew my attention, which is women saying "hey, what about guys being modest? What's good for the goose is good for the gander - so why can you go around in tight jeans, t-shirts (or no shirts) and all of that?"

Maybe this is just some male illusion, but I had never thought women found the sight of an immodestly-dressed man particularly tempting. The only feminine reactions I've seen to guys going around shirtless and so forth are something along the lines of eye-rolling and "yeah, you're really buff aren't you, you've made your point, now put your shirt on!"

So while I try to dress with a reasonable amount of modesty, it's more a matter of "I don't want to look like a barbarian" than "I don't want to go driving the ladies wild, now do I?" I have to agree that the modern epidemic of male shirtlessness is abominable, but I've always thought the main problem was simple decorum, and not that my Tarzan-like brethren were corrupting the virtue of the opposite sex. Am I wrong?

Of course there is a particular problem with shirtlessness, which is that of hair. The shirtless man is either displaying to the world: 1. that he is not manly enough to have chest hair or is weird enough to shave it, or 2. that he has chest hair and it ain't pretty. Not an impressive array of options.

Amusing

2005-11-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

I like this professor. Not just because he says "the right things"; there's just something funny about the dry way in which he says it.

Why I Don't Read Novels Anymore

2005-11-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

'It had long been their plan to seize the person of Boniface and compel him to abdicate, or, in case of his refusal, to bring him before a general council in France for condemnation and deposition. Since April, Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna had been active in Tuscany for the formation, at Philip's expense, of a band of mercenaries, some 2,000 strong, horse and foot. Very early on the morning of 7 September the band appeared suddenly before Anagni, under the lilies of France, shouting, "Long live the King of France and Colonna!" Fellow-conspirators in the town admitted them, and they at once attacked the palaces of the pope and his nephew. The ungrateful citizens fraternized with the besiegers of the pope, who in the meanwhile obtained a truce until three in the afternoon, when he rejected the conditions of Sciarra, viz., restoration of the Colonna, abdication, and delivery to Sciarra of the pope's person. About six o'clock, however, the papal stronghold was penetrated through the adjoining cathedral. The soldiers, Sciarra at their head, sword in hand (for he had sworn to slay Boniface), at once filled the hall in which the pope awaited them with five of his cardinals, among them his beloved nephew Francesco, all of whom soon fled; only a Spaniard, the Cardinal of Santa Sabina, remained at his side to the end. In the meantime the papal palace was thoroughly plundered; even the archives were destroyed. Dino Compagni, the Florentine chronicler, relates that when Boniface saw that further resistance was useless he exclaimed, "Since I am betrayed like the Saviour, and my end is nigh, at least I shall die as Pope." Thereupon he ascended his throne, clad in the pontifical ornaments, the tiara on his head, the keys in one hand, a cross in the other, held close to his breast. Thus he confronted the angry men-at-arms. It is said that Nogaret prevented Sciarra Colonna from killing the pope. Nogaret himself made known to Boniface the Paris resolutions and threatened to take him in chains to Lyons, where he should be deposed. Boniface looked down at him, some say without a word, others that he replied: "Here is my head, here is my neck; I will patiently bear that I, a Catholic and lawful pontiff and vicar of Christ, be condemned and deposed by the Paterini [heretics, in reference to the parents of the Tolosan Nogaret]; I desire to die for Christ's faith and His Church."' [from the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Boniface VIII]

Can you beat that, Mr. Dickens?

Uh huh. I thought so.

Monday

2005-11-07T17:13:00.000-08:00

I remember an old episode of "the Simpsons", in which Ned Flanders (the geeky evangelical neighbor to the Simpsons) somehow got ahold of the Monkey's Paw with which, of course, he was able to get four wishes or something of the sort. I think that's how it went; anyway he wished for world peace. And what do you know, but he got world peace; the whole world laid down its arms and for awhile everything was nice.

But then the aliens came, realizing that this was their big chance. With everybody now committed to pacifism, they could conquer the earth with nothing but a couple wooden clubs. In descending from his spaceship to wreak havoc, club in hand, one of them said "your superior intelligence is no match for our puny weapons!"

When I think about the riots in France, I can't help remembering that episode.

Blogimus Reports

2005-11-06T15:01:00.000-08:00

As you may remember, Blogimus decided to go to a Latin Mass this week for the first time. It took awhile, but I got there. You may also remember that I promised a report.

Short version: looks like I'd better buy a 1962 missal and get ready for some long bus rides.

Long version:

Some people seem to think a church should be sparse, minimalistic and - if you have the money - designed by some fashionable architect for millions of dollars.

It's kind of funny if you think about it; in our society, we think people should be very complicated. To call someone "complex" is a compliment, though it comes down to meaning that he is either partly good and partly bad, or else partly one kind of bad and partly another. But we think our art should be simple. I don't deny that modern art can be complicated in the sense of having many parts; only that intricacy is not a value in modern art and simplicity is. "Busy" is an insult; "spartan" is at worst a legitimate style for which some people may not have a taste. Unreasonable, riotous ornamentation is anathema (unless you are a "folk artist" or "outsider artist" - the good thing about the postmodern mindset is not that it really rejects artistic modernism [by and large it doesn't], but it allows modernism to be trumped by PC, and since the aesthetics of many PC-sacred-cow groups are much healthier than those of artistic modernists, this is definitely good).

I think that both things come from vanity. If the real focus of everything is us, then that is where all the fancy ornamentation should be - in the subleties of our own "personalities". If the things we make are meant to be expression of our wonderful selves, then complexity is a handicap, for all the subtle, beautiful little details in a thing are not very effective - poor things! - in pointing back at ME, the genius who gave it form. A broad stroke of the brush may express the anger of a painter; a fine stroke, meant to capture some exact bit of shading, expresses nothing - it is only beautiful, and what good is that? Thus realism, whether in "modern" or "post-modern" art or whatever you like, is scorned except as a trick used to express some brilliant concept of the artist (the photo-realist school of painting certainly produced some impressive feats of technique [or perhaps patience...], but it was only the gimmickiness of its exact imitation of the photograph, that appealed to trendsetters).

Or to put it differently: the more complicated a work of art, the more it draws attention to it, and the simpler a work of art, the more our attention is drawn to the "statement" it makes, whether one of "self-expression" or something that amounts to an in-joke among art critics.

So I walked into the sanctuary of this parish, saw the gaudy, painted statues and all the business and clutter on the walls and in the niches, all of it leading up to a carved, stone altar that was the epitome of riotous ornamentation (at least in comparison to the altars I see in other churches) - and I smiled. This was a church.

When it was time for the Mass to begin, in walked the priest - a tall, hefty, bearded young man wearing a biretta - and soon enough he had his back turned to us and was doing things.

Now there is a lesson for you. When I go to an ordinary parish and the priest pays attention to me, he does not interest me. I may like him, I may pay attention to him, but I do not find anything fascinating in him. But here, when the priest blithely ignored me - I couldn't look away! The Novus Ordo has been criticized - including by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in his "Spirit of the Liturgy" - for focusing too much on the priest: "Everything depends on him. We have to see him, respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing." I suspect the translator may have colloquialized the prose of our new pope a little, but in any case he did not mean that this is a good thing. But my point is that the priest became instantly more interesting when we did not make such a big deal of him.

This is because, when he is not behaving like a master of ceremonies, it becomes much more clear that he is doing something. I have also heard the Novus Ordo criticized for downplaying the sacrificial character of the Sacrifice of the Mass; while I could understand this criticism in some sense, I could not really begin to feel the force of it.

But I should say that when I went to Mass today, I was not precisely overcome with the sacrificial character of it. To be honest, I was too disoriented and ignorant to really have any profound understanding of what was happening. All I could say was that something was happening, something very different from a mere gathering of the community or a "worship service". This was a ritual; that much, at least, was blazingly clear.

When traditionalists say that the sacrificial character of the Mass is obscured, I suspect that many would find it all too easy to dismiss that as a tendentious theological argument, and say "well, you emphasize your aspect of the Mass, we emphasize another one." But the fact is, the bare fact that this is a ritual and not a worship service was never brought home to me - even if I might have assented to the proposition - until I went to a Tridentine Mass today. Of course, when you ask "what is this ritual?" then "a sacrifice" is the answer, but the point is that the old Mass appears to be exactly what it is, whereas it seems to me that the new Mass obscures its own character, when the priest spends all his time chatting with the congregation.

Again, the whole dispute over language was put in a different light. While it is certainly good for the people to understand what is being said, in a ritual of sacrifice to God, what matters is that God hears the priest, not that we hear the priest. If all we are doing on Sunday is celebrating a "communal meal" (another concept that our new pope disparaged in "The Spirit of the Liturgy"), and the priest's words are largely or entirely for the edification of his human audience (that he is often praying alone does not exclude this, as he still may often seem but a "spokesman" who could as well be replaced by any fellow who can read prayers in a good loud voice), then it would indeed be lunacy for him to edify us in a language we did not understand. But that is not what we are doing.

So I guess...it's time to get that Missal.

New Fun with Haloscan

2005-11-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry to ax my old comments right after you posted yours, Bettina, but I decided it was way past time that I went to the enormous trouble of setting up Haloscan, which took all of 10 minutes. The last straw was that I couldn't figure out how to delete spam from the old system....

[after investigation it seems that all is well, except a certain tendency to delay updating the number of comments - ed.]

[have also brought links up to date. Perhaps more sprucing up is in order]

Wow!

2005-11-02T19:05:00.000-08:00

Independent confirmation that we actually exist over here! Scroll down past stuff about self-referentiality, which is appropriate here.

And welcome to the Inquisitor Generalis who also confirms the existence of Minnesota, about which an excessive acquaintance with American news can encourage skepticism.

Of course, as Amy Welborn notes, we are at least famed in St. Blog's as the progenitor of St. Joan of Arc parish, which is either the most liberal parish in the country, or the most liberal one with a website, or else the St. Bloggers just kept on using it as the ultimate symbol of liberal wackiness because they heard about it once, and ever after it was the best thing they had on hand. You decide!

Wednesday redux

2005-11-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

To be a little more serious about all this "public debate" over sodomy and so forth: I particularly doubt the utility of frequent arguments on this particular subject, because it is too much like having a public debate over cannibalism. Can there really be a point to such things? While we're on the subject of offenses against nature, isn't occupying one's mind with solemn arguments that it's really a bad thing to (fill in manifestly disgusting practice) something along those lines? I mean, shouldn't we ask ourselves, "what sort of filth does a man have to argue, before he loses the right to expect a civil debate from his fellow man?" Perhaps that sounds harsh - but since nobody seems to benefit, in actual practice, from arguing over the most basic principles of morality, I don't think we're really depriving any poor souls of rescue from their own delusions, by declining to argue with them.

Of course there is a place for apologetics, but sometimes it seems to veer on apologetics-as-gamesmanship, which is particularly unhelpful because, through misguided zeal, it gives an impression of insincerity or at least shallowness of conviction. After all, our opponents are not idiots, and if they see us cheerily arguing over sodomy as if we were discussing a controversy over the rules of baseball - only with less emotion - when they know full well that we have historically regarded sodomy as a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance...the inconsistency will not escape them.

Besides which, the whole enterprise is a bit like invading a foreign country, passing by all sorts of major cities and heading directly for an inaccessible mountain town of little strategic value and immense defensive strength. The people with whom we are arguing either do not believe in God, or do not believe in the God we know; they do not believe in the authority of His Son or His Church - and from my practical observations (including my own conversion), it is easier to convince people of the truth about these things, and let morality follow in their wake, than to attack the question of morals directly.

And in particular, they do not believe that Beautitude is the final end of Man for which he was created, so why on earth would we argue with them about "human nature" (which is what all this sodomy-debating comes down to) when we do not even agree on what Man is for? It's like arguing about the significance of that nail-plucking thingy on a hammer with someone who thinks hammers are an eating utensil. It's true that you can make certain judgments on whether this or that is "natural" to a thing without knowing the thing's purpose - for instance, I don't have to know what a computer is for, to be fairly certain that dropping it from a rooftop will severely reduce its utility. But a computer, being a man-made utensil, can at least be safely assumed to have a purpose. If our opponents don't even regard Man as having a purpose at all, in the sense of being made by a rational will in order to attain some end, then we cannot even argue for those provisional judgments.

I suppose one reason that I'm drawn more to the "traditionalist" wing of St. Blog's is that they by and large hold a similar attitude, and are not so much inclined to engage in these earnest and useless online polemics with liberals.

But then, maybe I'm being too gloomy and critical. It's happened before.

Wednesday

2005-11-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

I admire those conservative folks who actually get up there and, you know, argue about stuff with the champions of liberalism. When I argue with my dad about that sort of thing I just usually get tired; I think he gets tired too. That sort of argument never seems to go anywhere anyway. So I'm skeptical as to how much these admirable folk actually accomplish, but I have to like their spirit (my favorite liberal/conservative slugging match on "social issues" is this blog, not because I read it very often but because I used to deliver books & law journals to the guy on the liberal side {Dale Alan Carpenter III, law professor at the University of MN}. Perhaps he remembers tall, skinny quiet kid traveling hall with bin full of law journals...that's Blogimus, delivering books to the people who do the "real thinking" in our society....)

Still, I have to think that when we talk about "the light of reason" this is different from the heat of logomachy, or even of some interior dialogue; we realize that we haven't been honest with ourselves about something, or that we've been approaching this question in an irrational manner, or we've carried around a lot of false assumptions, without which the picture of things becomes very different - it's not as if our brain cooks up some verbal formula and we are illuminated.

Of course, they do say St. Augustine argued with a Manichee once and...the Manichee converted. But saints are always working miracles, so I'm not sure that counts.

Tuesday

2005-11-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

Now this would not be Blogimus Maximus if it weren't for the occasional irrelevant musical aside, so:

Everyone talks about the advantages of learning other languages, and in fact it's difficult to find a downside - unless the Somalian guys next to you on the bus really ARE making fun of you, or something of that sort - but there is certainly one, which is that if you hear singing in that language, you run the risk of understanding it.

Think of all the wonderful music in the world, wedded to horrifying lyrics. You know, like the Ninth Symphony - joking, joking! Doubtless "Diesen kuss der ganzen Welt!" just makes me wince cuz I'm a Philistine...but I doubt I could ever be a serious opera buff, because as far as I can tell the writing for those things is generally trash - libretti have a lower standard to meet than lyrics proper, but still there's a limit to how low you can go.

Of course, if you can make your peace with the ill-written lyric then I envy you...but for some of us this is impossible, so apart from the rare exception, we're left basically with instrumental music, sacred music, and music in languages we don't understand. Maybe I should preserve my fund of the latter....

Monday

2005-10-31T11:35:00.000-08:00

My earlier-expressed concerns about the interrogations of our military are not exactly assuaged by this opinion piece. All the things that I generally associate with liberals trying to defend abortion or some other atrocity, are on display here - slippery English, ends-justify-means variety of argumentation, fighting the most moderate measures tooth-and-toenail because it would eventually lead to an outcome that...doesn't sound all that bad.

First, um, there's this little passage that should send off warning bells to anyone who knows anything about any military that ever existed:

"The proposition that the Pentagon threw out any rules is simply false. Regarding Abu Ghraib, no fewer than nine courts-martial were confident enough of the rules to hand out sentences of up to 10 years to soldiers who violated those rules."

The fact that the higher-ups in our military enforce the rules when everybody in the world is watching, as in fact they were when the Abu Ghraib story broke, is not really very impressive. I want to know what rules they follow when nobody is watching.

"abuses have occurred, and dozens have been punished. Overall, rates of reported detainee abuse by U.S. soldiers today are historically low compared with other conflicts, such as World War II."

That's very nice to know, but other than having a vaguely-reassuring sound, it doesn't speak to the question of how much torture is going on.

"terror suspects cannot be aggressively interrogated at all. They cannot be held for more than several weeks after capture without charge. The insurgents know this, and thus know that they have little to fear if they fall into U.S. hands."

"Aggressively interrogated" is one of those phrases that worries me, because it can mean anything from asking questions in an impolite manner to practices that any reasonable person would describe as "torture". And...our enemies do not FEAR falling into our hands? The idea that we might "become what we fight" has been stated frequently during this war, but it's always been suggested that this is a bad thing. Here, instead, it is a good thing! Let us win the war on terror by terrorizing our enemies - oh, I'm sorry, they're only supposed to "fear" falling into our hands; "terror" is the bad kind of fear that only the enemy inflicts. My mistake.

"Far more impressive is the near-unanimous opposition to the McCain effort from commanders currently fighting the war on terror. They understand that the amendment will be interpreted as an unnecessary rebuke, and as a huge disincentive to push detainees hard when seeking information on "ticking bombs."

Or as Senator Pat Roberts explained his opposition in the Washington Post: "I know as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the information we get from interrogating terrorists is some of the most valuable information we get. It saves lives. . . . Passing a law that effectively telegraphs to the entire terrorist world what they can expect if they are caught is not only counterproductive, but could be downright dangerous.""

Again..."push detainees hard"? Just what does that mean? Is that like "aggressive interrogation"? Anyway, it's here that we start getting to "with ends like that, who cares about the means?" territory. We can stop "ticking bombs" from going off, "It saves lives"...well then, it has to be a good idea, doesn't it? And then there's that gem from Sen. Roberts: "Passing a law that effectively telegraphs to the entire terrorist world what they can expect if they are caught is not only counterproductive, but could be downright dangerous."

Right. Now silly, naive little me, I thought we were going into this with the idea that we are better than the terrorists. In which case "the entire terrorist world" and in fact "the entire world" certainly would know what to expect: that we would treat our enemies decently, and behave like civilized people no matter how eager we were to win; that we would willingly refrain from doing things that "save lives" because we accounted honor more important than survival. Look, you can't have your cake and eat it too: honorable conduct comes with a cost. In war, that means it will cost lives - maybe yours, and yes, probably somebody else's if you are in a position of authority...honor isn't there to make you popular, or make you feel good about yourself. And if you are willing to behave like a dog, you can probably succeed in places where an honorable man would fail. That is a choice you have to make - but there are always men who find, ever-so-conveniently, that morality and expediency never actually come into conflict, but always happen to make a happy alliance.

Cars are a good thing

2005-10-30T19:00:00.000-08:00

Blogimus has learned this in the most reliable of ways, namely being carless.

For instance, I decided that I ought to attend a latin Mass some day, and since every day appears to be some day, including next Sunday, I decided to start making plans. First I looked up a list of "Indult parishes" in Minnesota. Now Minnesota is physically the size of a reasonably large country (222,000 sq. km), and in population terms...well, the size of a rather small country (4.9 mil). Hey, there's about 2.5 Minnesotans for every Slovenian; that's not bad. And a fairly large fraction of that 4.9 million is Catholic.

So naturally there are two parishes with a (licit) Tridentine Mass.

Oh well, I shouldn't gripe. But it does take about two and a half hours to reach the nearer parish by bus (I did a "test run" today after Mass). It's in a church district - really, I think there's some kind of zoning ordinance. Nearby is something with a name vaguely like "Iglesia Adventista Septa Dia" which I take to be a Seventh-Day Sheep-Stealer...I mean, Adventist Church. Sorry, I REALLY don't like Protestant "missions" to Latinos. And there's the "First Hmong Baptist Church", which for all I know could really be the first. There's a lot of Hmong in Minnesota; actually there were a lot of them in my high school. Their language is called "Hmoob" which is probably my favorite language name. And there are other churches in the area too.

Next Sunday I will bring back a report, hopefully sans gripes in re: enourmously long bus rides. In the meantime, must begin preparations to avoid massive confusion at unfamiliar Mass.

[incidentally, have now embarked on chess fast. Get thee gone, infernal time-consuming game!]

Wednesday

2005-10-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've been horribly remiss in updating. I've been a bit busy, but also - let's face it - playing too much chess. Maybe that Internet Chess Club membership wasn't such a good idea.

Probably doesn't help my addiction, either, that I beat an International Master in an online simultaneous game (with 32 other players). Yes, it's not that hard to win a simul...still, it was nice, especially since I didn't seem to make any real mistakes until after I had secured an excellent game with a nice tactical sequence - he had White in the so-called "Riga Variation" of the Ruy Lopez, a remarkable line which leads to an endgame where Black has exchanged bishop and knight for a rook and two pawns (White has other choices, but I think they are much worse than their reputations). White can make things a bit dicey for Black, and he tried to squish me very quickly in the endgame by penetrating with his king. But I "reminded" him that his king was not exactly safe in the middle of my position, and to defend himself he had to allow a really ingenious advance of my f-pawn. When I looked at the game afterwards with a computer, it seemed that my idea was quite sound, and he had to either give up his knight, or trade his bishop and knight for my rook, or else allow me a really lethal h-pawn. After that I made a slight blunder out of over-caution, then a horrible one that should have lost, but fortunately he was over-cautious himself (the tactics were tricky for both sides) and he resigned on his 34th move (a bit generous, as I'm not sure I really could've ground out the win).

Not bad! Except psychologically perhaps....

Now I know that while everyone comes to Blogimus for the flashy site layout and the breakneck, instapundit-like frequency of posting, they stay for the in-depth political commentary! Or...not really, but reading this and considering my own feelings as vaguely representative of "my" sector of The American Public (and this is what punditry is all about, right?) I'm thinking that Bush is losing his popularity/tolerance level among conservative Americans (for instance me) who are now joining...um...the whole world, I think, in disapproving of his presidency in some degree or another. Obviously the Bush=Hitler types are out to lunch, and I often feel some degree of sympathy for Bush the man (I mean, the whole world hates him - heck, I didn't even like being hated by just the whole second grade of my elementary school; imagine what this would be like), but Bush the president seems to be doing worse and worse.

Blogimus Re-Plugged!

2005-10-22T21:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've got my Internet connection up and running, so you can finally expect a return to regular posting. It's a bit late for me to write anything extensive today, but there is something I wanted to write about.

A few days ago I saw a channel 2 documentary on Abu Graib and other incidents of torture employed, or condoned, by our government during the war against Iraq or "on terror".

Now I know everyone (American, that is) will say oh, those liberal channel 2 things, you can't trust a word they say. And I'll admit, at the outset, that a thing or two or three aroused my bias-anntenae...but when you see interview after interview with, you know, actual Army, CIA and FBI officers, it gets harder and harder to dismiss everything as Bill Moyers (or whoever) rounding up a bunch of disgruntled employees and spinning it all like crazy. Besides which a lot of this stuff - like the gutless, disgusting CIA practice of shipping detainees off to Morocco or something and...not wanting to know what happens to them, so long as they talk - I had heard about elsewhere.

I'm certainly not a liberal nor a pacifist, and I see nothing wrong with hunting terrorists, nor am I entirely sure it was even a bad idea to invade Iraq, though the execution was certainly horrible. But stuff like this makes me wonder, who are we to claim we're a whit better than our enemies? And while I could bring myself to ignore all this, maybe, as a few injustices in pursuit of a just cause...I looked for something today that I probably shouldn't have, because it leaves me just shaking with anger at our military - and if anyone gives me the line about "uniforms that guard me while I sleep" and tells me to shut the hell up, well they do, I admit it - and I'm ashamed to be guarded by that uniform.

This is an abomination.

No military that allows this deserves success in anything - and no country that uses such an army. I don't want to hear any excuses for it, any crap about "this is what they wanted; who are you to say that they can't be there" etc. etc. Anyone who says "well why didn't you join, so they didn't have to" can kindly go [reflexive verbal construction expunged by editor]. This is inexcusable.

Hmph. I'd better quit now before I get any more worked up.

Tuesday

2005-10-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I still haven't been able to get my own Internet connection up and running, hence my continued silence. Fear not, nothing will keep my quiet for very long.

One thing I've always envied about other people, is that they have, you know, an ancestry, a homeland, etc. I know that a lot of St. Bloggers (mostly Americans) like a ruminate on their Irish, or German, or Italian ancestry. But I'm a southerner by blood, and unlike Americans from everywhere else, who are apparently legally obligated to have at least one immigrant grandparent, I suspect a lot of southerners have, at best, a vague idea that there is probably a good bit of Scotch-Irish in them (in my case it would be more French and Welsh); otherwise the family tree just melts into the hills of Tennessee or wherever. And since I was born in Minnesota, I can't really work up any profound loyalty to the South either. Bobby Lee is just another 19th century general so far as I'm concerned, and the name "Sherman" does not cause any boiling in my blood.

On the other hand, maybe it doesn't really matter. Irish grandmother or no Irish grandmother, a lot of other Americans seem to be just as rootless and disconnected. As if our ancestry is just a bit of interesting and irrelevant trivia. When people talk about individualism in America, they tend to talk about it in terms of community or lack thereof - but I think the real sine qua non of individualism is separation, not from some "community" at large, but from the past. Which means that it's not something you can fix just by saying "individualism is a bad idea, so let's get all social and whatnot. Whaddaya say we start a bowling league?" How do you just "connect" to your past? If you have way too much free time, you can make a hobby of it - trace your geneaology back to the Old Country, study its history, fly over there, write a book about it, and so forth. But I'm too busy doing important things like blogging and playing chess, and in any case, it strikes me as sort of contrived. Do I really have any real connection to la dulce France, after all? I don't actually feel very Gallican, to be honest.

Well, America is an unusual country.

The Return

2005-10-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

For all those of you who were wondering, "when will Blogimus return?" it appears that the answer is, "right about now." This is quite unexpected on my part. It seems that I had been misled regarding certain details of my schedule, the upshot of which is that it was not really necessary for me to move out of town (to a place with no Internet connection and hence no Blogimus)...but that alone wasn't so much the decisive factor, as the fact that some of my new housemates began acting very strangely. That, and the fact that they were keeping loaded guns around the house led me to conclude that as Blogimus was not in need of any amateur, high-speed body-piercings, he would do best to return to civilization. So - I may be a bit busy the next few days, moving out and so forth, and Thursdays and Fridays will be bad blogging days...but otherwise, I'm here to stay!

Still out there

2005-10-01T21:54:00.000-07:00

Have you ever lived in a place without a phone connection? Without a car? 3 miles from the nearest town? And not in the rosiest financial situation, if not exactly swimming in debt either. I don't recommend it...which is why I'm going to buy a beater when possible and solve at least one of those problems. The others are a bit trickier.

Things are holding together, for now, but I can't say that I see good times ahead - for me, or for my country; good news on any front has become a sort of precious resource. I don't know whether to call it a blessing or not that I'm now pretty much cut off from the news, the Internet, civlization, etc. right now.

But life still has its pleasures - I've just finished reading all the good parts to Gulliver's Travels (i.e. pre-Houhynym - in your hearts you know I'm right, Swift-worshippers). Surely the high point was the section on the floating island and the "Academy" below - some of the most biting, imaginative satire in English. It is truly immortal; it could have been written yesterday - except that there is no longer anyone like Swift to write it.

People have said that satire is dead, simply because there is such a preponderance of evil in the world that it can scarcely be parodied. But if it were only that, I would say that this is a matter of poor workmen blaming their tools - as if evil were a sort of piddling little thing back in Swift's day. Yet I wonder if satire really is dead, or hibernating, for another reason: that the deadliest accusations of a satirist are at worst left-handed compliments today. It is hard to find a vice that actually bothers people besides the corruption of public officials (and even this may be dismissed with the realistic but apathetic lament that "they all do it") - and while Swift certainly had fun with that one, it is hard to make a whole literary career of that alone. The passage where Swift refers to atheists renowned for piety and sodomites for chastity is a perfect illustration of what I mean - in his day these were bitter words; the modern reader only feels a sort of distaste, for anyone so gauche as to think atheism or sodomy are something to be condemned.

One could still write satire today, but who would want to read it? Swift remarked that no one took offense at his works (perhaps an exaggeration), since anyone gazing at the looking-glass of satire will "see every image but his own". Yet if someone were to write a serious satire of modern America - even ignoring the sheer enormity of this task - the barbs would be too obvious for anyone to fail to recognize himself as the target. And foreigners would like it little better, as many of the barbs would sting them no less.

And the world chess championship in Argentina has just finished round 4 of 14. Rustam Kasimzhanov beat Vishy Anand, which was a huge upset - I like Anand's style, but I'm glad to see Kasim kicking around one of the top seeds; he doesn't get any respect (despite being sort of the world champion), and people may have to take him a bit more seriously if he can chalk up a few more wins. Alas, Peter Leko beat his countrywoman Judit Polgar (they are Hungarian) - of course any gentleman should cheer for the lady in the tournament, but she is also the most daring player of the eight...possibly excepting Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, who is now leading the tournament with +3 (yes, 3 wins out of 4 games, plus a draw with Anand - who barely managed to escape defeat). He beat Michael Adams today...every American spectator apparently roots for Adams, Topalov or both, possibly because Topalov is a firebrand and is having a superb year, and Adams is the only Anglo-Saxon in the top circle of Grandmasters. I suppose they had mixed feelings about this round...Svidler beat Morozevich...Moro hasn't been doing so hot lately, while Svidler is really on a roll here. For me, these are the only "world events" I keep abreast of...anything else is just too gloomy.

Anyway, I certainly miss blogging; lots of people complain that blogging eats up too much of their time, gets them involved in all sorts of stupid arguments, gets their blood pressure up etc., and end up bailing out of it for "theraputic reasons"...for me it's been the opposite; I'm not a particularly steady or well-balanced individual, normally, and blogging helped me keep a sort of equilibrium...unfortunately without Internet access (I'm at my mom's place right now, which is why I'm here) it's not something I can do. Maybe at some time or another I'll be able to rectify that - I hope so. While my month-long absence (with more to follow) has no doubt conducted another "readership purge"...well, when I'm finally able to start up again, I may as well just come back here. Anyway, it doesn't matter to me that a lot of people read my blog - if the occasional web-surfing visitor comes and finds something to his interest, then I've done enough; I'm not ambitious. So we'll see what happens.

Saturday

2005-08-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

One observation of Chesterton's that the thoughtless like to ridicule, is that the Church is criticized on opposite and contradictory grounds. They are aided in this by a sort of shallow Chestertonianism by which these and other observations are treated as clever debating points, rather than solid and simple truths.

Like the Egyptian magicians "reproducing" the miraculous plagues that God sent upon them, and thus satisfying the Pharoah that there was nothing to worry about, no not at all, just push the frogs off your dinner-plate and eat up - like that, they recount some trivial instance of some person or institute being criticized on two contradictory grounds, and say "see? There is nothing, then, unusual about the Church in this."

But of course, if one actually reads Chesterton, one finds quite clearly that he saw this as significant not from a single instance, but because it formed a distinct pattern. Do people really think Chesterton was merely stupid, or such a rank sophist, so as to ignore the obvious fact that a Fabian socialist (to take an example from his day) would have been condemned both by Conservatives and anarchist bomb-throwers, by one for being too revolutionary, and by the other for being not revolutionary enough?

I sat down and tried to think of the various ways that the Church has been accused of opposing errors. For a moment I thought "well, I suppose in, say, Trinitarian theology this is not really so..." somehow I had blanked out on Sabellianism and tritheism (which was named after some fellow too, I think, but I can't recall who). Arianism has not, maybe, had a really opposing error, though Docetism comes closest. When we consider Christology we also find Nestorianism and Monophysitism, which are practically a picture-perfect illustration of Chesterton's dictum. Moving on to grace, we have the Pelagians on the one hand, and the silly fellows who accused us of Pelagianism on the other hand (Calvinists in the main, though Jansenists had something of that too). Considering the created world, there are the iconoclasts, puritans and so forth who say we are infatuated with the world; then there are the wordly who accuse us of hating life. Chesterton mentioned the Unitarian Universalists, who were much more respectable in his day than ours, and believed in Purgatory but not Hell (not in so many words, but progress in the afterlife was part of the Universalist scheme) - and of course, the Protestants who believed in Hell but not Purgatory. Regarding the human reason, it hardly needs mentioning that we have met accusations both of rationalism and obscurantism; regarding morals, accusations of laxity and unreasonable rigour. There are those who accuse the Church of rigid adherence to "antiquated" beliefs and customs, and those, mainly the Eastern Orthodox, who accuse us of changing too much - though there are also unbelievers who accuse us of calling yesterday's heresy today's orthodoxy. Long ago, there were pagans so outraged at our dismissal of their superstitions that they called us "atheists"; now there are Protestants and unbelievers (largely influenced by Protestantism I think; there is a direct line between Hislop and "modern" [i.e. old in Chesterton's day] babblings about Mithraism) who accuse us of paganism.

This is just what I can call to mind off the top of my head, without going about it in any systematic way. It is idle to deny that such a situation is unique; the only objection that even deserves response, is that it certainly is unique, but that it is not so clear that this uniqueness indicates anything significant. After all, the Church is the oldest institution in existence; it is unsurprising that She has a long list of enemies past and present, and that some of these enemies were not in agreement with some of the others.

First I must ask, has there ever been an institution, whatever its age, that would even admit of contradiction in so many contrasting and various manners? The religious sects, despite innumberable divisions, can certainly boast no particular party, however old (and there are such parties that predate the birth of Christ, and remain today in some form at least) from which other parties have fractured on such various and contradictory grounds as all those who have broken off from the Church; likewise those who never adhered to these sects in the first place, have usually condemned them on rather few and limited grounds; no one has ever said that Muslims were pagans, or that Buddhists were infatuated with Creation. Yet no one really could, by the nature of Islam or Buddhism or what have you.

If the Church is unique not only in Her enemies, but in Her very potential for opposition, then I suppose one might complain that we have rather "stacked the deck" when we say that we and we alone have met such opposition, since nobody else could ever have met it by the very nature of things. There is something in this (yet it hardly impedes our argument, inasmuch as it only concedes another uniqueness to the Faith to explain the first one) but this does not explain why such opposition would arise. It is not self-evident that, simply because our doctrine and customs logically admit of very many contradictions, that human beings will have any inclination to make more than a few of the possible ones. Indeed, even if no one would ever say Muslims were pagans, surely there are enough doctrines in the Koran that a large number of contradictions (and inconsistent contradictions) of Islam would be theoretically possible - the question is how many are made. Outside of the Church, the primary objections (as opposed to mere debating-points) to anything whatever are rather few in number, however old the thing in question. This is because, due to the nature of Man, only a few points of a thing will sufficiently interest human beings so as to incite their condemnation.

Yet in these days, we find an extraordinary thing regarding the Church: that rather than nature producing the impetus to object, and thus keeping it within certain predictable bounds, their objections produce their very notion of human nature. That is, men will say, "we reject Christianity" and in so doing, they will reject humanity itself, calling it part of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" (they have learned this trick of speaking, because stating the plain fact that their quarrel is with Christianity, would make it sound more like petty sniping than the tone of lofty, anthropological observation for which they aim). All rules governing the mind that are not merely self-evident (and sometimes even those), are called "Aristotelean" (another stalking-horse for Christianity, as they would have nothing against Aristotle were it not for St. Thomas) and dismissed as obsolete; all rules governing the body, are referred back to that "Judeo-Christian tradition" and dismissed as the fruit of "repression", "patriarchy" or something along those lines. Nothing but the barest social-contract legislation retains any force, though men still exhibit a sentimental admiration for "altruism" now and then. Now what mere human institution, is such that its rejection leads to the rejection of everything? Or how much more clearly can it be seen, that there is something violent at the heart of all the objections to the Faith, something that is not produced by the objections but produces them?

In any case, the mere possibility of mounting many objections to the Faith does not explain the profusion of those objections in reality. Nor does it account for their consistent violence; the hatred of Christ, whether it be called "anti-Catholicism" or whatever you please, is known wherever the Church is known; these opposing objections, a few of which I named above, were each and every one of them - however absurd they seem today - the grounds of a fervent and abiding hatred and contempt for the Church. Even one so ignorant of history as myself, can see plainly that this is a very strange thing without historical parallel. And Chesterton could certainly see it quite well.

Opera

2005-08-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

One of the things that, growing up in the modern world, I was not really brought up to think about, is the language barrier. Yes, yes, there's all that fashionable academic nonsense about "the impossibility of translation" but that's not what I mean; translations are the one bright spot in this matter, and it's typical of silly modern people to complain about the least important of the problems - even the least problematic of the problems.

You see, we're assured that we live in "the information age" and to be sure, there are enormous amounts of information at our disposal, so we get a little like spoiled children and take it for granted that whatever information we want, will be available. Likewise with works of art and similar things that are not "information" per se but whose availability is determined by information (that is, the materials are ubiquitous so it isn't something like jewelry); we take it for granted that if you have a hankering for a symphony, a souffle, or just about anything that isn't terribly costly, you can "get hold of it" and probably without too much trouble. When these things are inaccessible, it rather offends us - "why, this is the twenty-first century!"

But then you become, say, an historian, and realize, "wait a minute, I can only find one book on this subject...and it's in German and never been translated! Well...looks like I've got a date with Mr. Langenscheidt for the next few months." And so on.

So I was listening to Verdi's Aida, which is of course a staple of the opera repertoire, then I listened to Dvorak's Jakobin, which is utterly obscure. And I thought, "you know, Verdi's quite nice and all, but can anyone seriously claim that the music of Jakobin is the least bit inferior to Aida? In fact it's hard to avoid concluding that it's better - and it's not as if the quality of the libretto is so poor [not that that's a disqualification, or there'd be no opera repertoire at all], at least as far as I can tell without reading Czech..." and I suspect that that last bit is the key to the whole business. It's in Czech, and operas are generally in Italian or German. I've heard there are operas in English, but frankly the thought makes me queasy.

Czech is a beautiful language; it shares the hair-raising slavic consonants of, say, Russian, but it strikes me as more graceful somehow. But beautiful or not, nobody but Czechs seem to go around singing it very often, so despite priding ourselves on the cosmopolitan or "global village" world in which we live, where literary snobs will blither about the "tale of Genji" as readily as Joyce, a really magnificent opera is condemned to obscurity for the sole reason of language. Of course the Czechs know a good thing when they hear it and Dvorak's operas have been popular there from the beginning.

Still, this is the information age, and if you want Jakobin I'm sure you can get a hold of it. There is certainly some remarkable stuff in there - especially in the first five scenes of Act Two. At the beginning of the act, the schoolmaster Benda is preparing the children's choir to rehearse "his" serenade; he chortles to himself that even Mozart would not have been ashamed of his little creation. Benda is a rather comical character and I'm not sure what the librettist (Marie Cervinkova-Riegrova) expected; maybe that Dvorak would write the sort of thing an obscure choir-master would likely write for a children's choir - not necessarily terrible, but nothing much. Unless she had an unbounded faith in Dvorak's genius, it's hard to believe she expected what actually happened...in any case there are some really funny parts in those first few scenes, and the music contributes to the humour in some unusual ways - but some of it is more serious, in a sentimental sort of way (and I admit, it's hard to like Dvorak if you don't like "cheap sentiment" as heartless people generally call it) and the duet of Julie and Bohus is really somewhat moving. It's an extraordinary sequence, and those five scenes are the crown of the work, but the whole opera is laden with beautiful melodies, including a number of "folksy" interludes such as Dvorak favored, which display that charming habit of using a violent, allegro, fortissimo passage in a minor key to express a really buoyant cheerfulness.

Anyway, a very nice opera, and it's a shame it doesn't get more attention.

Thursday

2005-08-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has to be admitted that better men than myself have "given up" blogging, only to find...well. Blogging daily as I've (occasionally, certainly not lately) done in the past will be impractical, but beyond that I'll play it by ear. The site will still be here, I'll still know my login and password (I've had problems with that before.....) and when I have something to post, I'll post it. Tuesday's pessimistic assessment of things was perhaps a bit impulsive - not that I ever do or say things impulsively, oh no. Don't know where anyone would get that idea. So I guess my final answer is "we'll see" - but don't expect any more 6000 word posts. Ugh, that was horrible; at work the next day I was barely alive.

Work, by the way, has ended in preparation for the coming move, if I haven't mentioned that already. My co-workers gave me a 24-pack of coke cans as a parting gift; they seem to think I'm addicted to the stuff or something. Of course I'm not addicted, that's just a silly idea. Reports that the container is 3/4 gone after only a week, are greatly exaggerated (and besides, my mother drank some of them).

Tuesday

2005-08-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

Alas, the more that I consider the matter, the more it seems that without an internet connection at home, I can pretty much give up the whole blogging thing...so whatever I write this week will be, as it were, a farewell to blogdom. Perhaps it's for the best, as I enter a stage of life which discourages blogging - I think I've about finished the part of my life where I know everything, and am beginning the more humbling stage of life in which one tries to at least learn something. Someday I will actually learn something, and then I can happily go back to lecturing people at length on my blog or whatever; as it is, the various online disputes and so forth which I could probably address as well as anyone, do not really interest me and the matters that do interest me, I lack the competence to address. Meaning, in other words, that the well of subject-matter has rather run dry and is likely to stay that way for awhile - but perhaps, before I go, I can leave my audience (of about 3, I think) with one more week of posting.

For now, I'd like to say a bit about thinking. It's funny that an act so essential to the human being, the act that separates us from the beasts, is so obscure to us. You'd think that the one thing we would have down pat, would be the nature of that very knowledge through which we know everything else, and that very reason by which we come to our conclusions. But the darkening of the intellect that accompanied the Fall, seems to have especially hid from our intellect that intellect itself.

As I look back, it's clear to me that I always looked on really solid, clear thinking as a sort of magic trick. There I would be, trying to understand something knotty and stuck right at the beginning - if I was lucky; if not, I would convince myself I was getting somewhere, only to realize it was all more or less a fantasy. And then some sharp fellow in a book would come along and set to work in a very methodical way, saying only the most obvious and self-evident things, progressing from plain truth to plain truth - and then, voila, it all made sense. Having somehow convinced people that I was a child prodigy and even convinced myself, I never was willing to admit any intellectual inadequacy on my part, yet all the same I felt it. I might have been clever, but I could not think; because of that, I am perhaps more impressed with the mere fact of clear and systematic thought than people who were raised in its presence. To me it's a bit like something out of a science-fiction novel...in fact I've thought on several occasions of A.E. van Vogt's "World of Null-A", in which the heroic Uebermenschen of the novel have achieved their powers by dint of Korzybski's General Semantics - very silly, you say and you are doubtless correct. In any case the "A" in "null-A" was "Aristotelean", the idea being that this villian Aristotle had corrupted manking with his dichotomistic thought, or something of the sort, and that by nullifying this we may achieve "cortical-thalamic sanity" (what an unpleasant-sounding sanity). Did I mention that a lot of science fiction is a bit whacked in the head?

The funny thing was that the villainous, systematic thought of Aristotle and his equally-villainous henchman, really did (and does) savour to me somewhat of van Vogt's Venusian supermen. I had the idea of writing a novel called "the World of A"...but it never went anywhere....

I don't think I'm alone in this. For all that the "modern mind" is said (with some justice) to be disrespectful of authority and tradition, one of its prime markers is a really craven and superstitious awe for "great minds"; people look back, for instance, on earlier critics who spoke of Shakespeare, if generally with great admiration, yet also with free criticism, and they smile tolerantly. These small-minded men of the past could not appreciate the towering greatness of the Bard, they say. He is, they say or at least imply, beyond the criticism of mere mortals such as ourselves, and those Victorians and whatnot really ought to have seen that.

That is the sort of cravenness to which I refer. If you can do something significant with your mind, you are like a shaman of some sort; this sort of attitude can only be explained by supposing that our civilization has, generally speaking, lost the ability to think methodically and therefore rationally. Yet I suppose that this superstitious awe is better than a mere ignorance of thought, which is displayed by particularly debased intellects; such people are unaware that thought more clear, original and subtle than their own sophisms is even possible.

In any case, Belloc seemed well to understand the position of Chesterton: a man who was admired, and dismissed, as a slinger of paradoxes and pretty verbalisms, yet who was simply a clear and correct thinker in an age that had lost the power to recognize such. And Chesterton, in turn, well diagnosed the deepest flaw in modern thought, which is that it starts "at the wrong end of things". That is, we think about something in terms of yesterday's polemics, slinging around terms whose meaning we pretty much probably understand, using bits of popularized 18th and 19th-century philosophy to bolster our arguments even when we are none too sure about the philosophy that does the bolstering...continuing arguments when we are no longer really sure quite why the arguments began or what they concern.

In such an age, it becomes almost a sort of mystic discipline simply to think.

Monday

2005-08-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

Well, my new place doesn't have a phone connection, so if I blog anything after this week (I move in on Monday) it will have to be...when I'm somewhere else.

Yeah, country living can have its disadvantages. On the other hand, the setting is a good sight better than the northern suburbs of Minneapolis. It has what you call "grasses" instead of the dwarfish little stuff you just call "grass" - that, and trees that do not lie in a row decorating a boulevard nor stand alone to provide a tiny backyard with that je nais sais quois (or however you spell it) of backyardiness. In other words, actual woods - I've never been what you'd call a "nature lover", mostly because nature includes bugs...lots of bugs...but even I was not immune to the whole "this is how Man was meant to live" thing when I first saw my new surroundings. I'll be able to take nice long walks - in fact I'll be obliged to do so, since I don't have a car and I'm 3 miles from the nearest small town.

The only thing I'm particularly nervous about is the new parish. It has that reassuring Neo-Gothic-meets-American-kitsch look, it's called "Immaculate Conception" and there's generally no a priori reason to fear liberal pastors and liturgical wackiness...but on the other hand it's the only church in town (Minnesota, settled largely by Germans or so I've heard, though everyone seems to think it was Finns [there certainly are some Finnish regions up north], is maybe evenly split between Catholics and Lutherans; your stereotypical small town in Minnesota will have a Catholic church at one end and a Lutheran at the other). So I'm a bit nervous, but I probably shouldn't be - I'm certainly not increasing lifespan nor stature by fretting over it.

Thursday

2005-08-18T20:46:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the prolonged absence; I've been atypically busy lately. I'm moving to a new place, for one thing, on August 29th. It's very nice; out in the country, which will be a definite and mostly-welcome shift from suburbia.

I've also been finishing up at my job, which ends tomorrow. It was quite an experience, and I have to say it has been wearing me down a bit. This week I've been tired pretty much all day...and hence not really in a blogging mood. But I have a break next week between the job and the move, so posting should return to normal then, don't worry!

Wednesday

2005-08-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

The first volume of Rosmini's Essay consists of a massive overview of philosophy, in the context of its various accounts for the origin of ideas, and in particular the idea of being or existence. It is imposing and not what I would call easy reading, but there is a very human and personal touch to his work at the same time.

I am stepping well beyond my level of expertise in saying this, but it seems to me that there are two excesses into which even very great minds may fall, when treating of philosophy - and perhaps we may consider Plato and Aristotle as exhibiting these two trends. On the one hand Plato represents the exhilaration, the loftiness of philosophy, which is an excellent thing true enough, but can all-too-easily become an end unto itself, rather than a sign of the nobility inherent to philosophical thought. The allegory of the cave, which (I confess) constitutes about half of what I know about Plato, is a perfect illustration of this. On the one hand it is thrilling, and not without reason either; there is something in it. On the other hand, you can't become a philosopher by thinking up cave allegories. Not that Plato would have had anyone doing that, but the mind which delights in drinking the heady draughts of great thought, can become rather drunk on great thoughts and fail to notice when they are not actually correct thoughts.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is not what you would call thrilling. I would not say he is dull, but many would say exactly that. In any case he discourses on things in a rather detached manner. And it is easy enough for people of a certain temperment to say "see, this is why I don't like Aristotle. Give me Plato any old day." It is even easier for people of my own temperment to say, "such rank emotionalism has no place in serious thought; you are no true philosopher but a child fascinated with pretty things." I think there is something true in my snotty little remark there, but it is not quite right, and there is also something in what the other fellow says, however illogical it seems on its face to reject a thinker because he is boring. For it is not exactly boredom with which we are dealing, or at least not this purely.

For philosophy does not, after all, consist alone in manufacturing, by whatever means, various true propositions, true answers to various pertinent questions. A philosopher who does not know the worth of philosophy, is no philosopher at all, for if a philosopher need only be right, and need have no inkling of the profound significance of the truths he knows, then there is no philo, only sophia - or rather sophistry. A philosopher must love wisdom because otherwise, after all, what is the point of his knowledge? An absence of utility is practically the defining characteristic of metaphysical knowledge, for as it pertains to being in general, it cannot give rules for the behaviour of those specific systems of being, the understanding of which will bring us worldly dividends. Only insofar as philosophy improves the mind, is it useful - but see Newman's Idea of a University for the problems inherent in seeking knowledge merely to improve the mind. After all, it will invariably turn out that some counterfeit, some imperfect and falsified knowledge, will serve the same useful end "in a pinch". Thus the philosopher must love the knowledge because he loves being in general, and the truth of it - if he loves them not, his motives are based on some worldly utility for his knowledge, whether a self-satisfaction or victory in some dispute or something else, and because he will be able to satisfy these ends with some counterfeit metaphysics, he is bound to come up with one, and likely sooner rather than later.

Rosmini strikes me as steering a middle course, quite excellently, between glorying excessively in the grandeur of philosophy, and ignoring this grandeur entirely and focusing only on the examination of propositions; not only does he seem to have a sound view of philosophy himself, but I think encourages such a sound view in the reader. But it is time that I went off to bed....

Tuesday

2005-08-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

For several years I have had a funny conceit, which I'm sure everyone will find improbable, and in fact I suppose it might be all explained by chance and the results of semi-purposeful inquiry...but anyway. I've thought that whenever I feel dissatisfied in an intellectual sort of way, as if there's something rather missing from my overall view of things, some problem so simple and intractable that I can't so much define it as vaguely localize it - just then, I will find the right book. It's not exactly on the level of a superstition, in that I don't say "hm, I wonder what the next book will be." But it happens rather often, so I wonder a bit sometimes. I don't wonder very much because really, what's there to wonder about? That God, in His Providence, should sometimes direct me towards those of my fellow men who have thought things through a bit more than I have, is not something that would seem implausible a priori.

With that I lead to a now-obscure philosopher (at least I'd never heard of him) named Fr. Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855). To link to those great Catholic mainstays of the Internet: one may learn something of Fr. Rosmini from this article, and something of the controversies surrounding his work from this one. But what neither of these express, is the profundity and grandeur of his thought; the Ven. Newman spoke highly of him ("although he belonged in a special way to your Institute, a man like him, as long as he lived, was the property of the whole Church") and I cannot but see, already, a connection between Rosmini's thought and Newman's, though I do not know of any major influence of Rosmini on Newman. Suffice to say that those who seek a bracing tonic for the narrow, contentious, polemically-based habits of thought that so pervade our times, may be edified even more by Fr. Rosmini than by Cdl. Newman. The various objections to his work, amount basically to two things: he expressed things rather boldly, if not boldly by the brazen standards of today, and perhaps occasionally lacked in precision of expression - and his system is too incomplete and possibly too idiosyncratic to form a general philosophical method commendable to all Catholics.

Be that as it may, I dug around a bit in his works and am now embarking on his New Essay - Origin of Ideas; after reading his weighty preface alone, I am convinced of his great stature as a thinker. And, ha, anyone who calls Kant "the sophist of Koenigsburg" (a play on the ill-conceived epithet "saint of Koenigsburg") can't be all bad...but don't worry, his stature consists in much more than sniping at silly people.

He recognized the futility of conducting arguments with men in a post-Enlightenment mindset without considering the fundamental fallacies in their systems - that to engage them in debate over any subject, however important, would lead to a mere waste of words if their very concepts of being, truth, and reason were corrupt.

Further reports to follow.

Monday

2005-08-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I used to be a science fiction/fantasy fan; nowadays I hardly read the stuff. Partly this is because not so much of it is all that good, but I also have to say that the anti-religious bent of most of its writers (including some of the better ones) rather started getting to me when I became, well, a religious man. It's not so much that these writers would aim constant barbs against religion in general and Christianity in particular (though there was something of that, too...) nor that they ignore religion per se (Wodehouse ignored religion, aside from profuse Biblical allusions and the odd campy-Anglican ecclesiastic - but you won't hear me complain about Wodehouse, oh no) but that sf/fantasy writers, having much more freedom in the setting of their novels than mainstream writers, will frequently create a world which is, as it were, steeped in and premised on unbelief. Such worlds do not interest me, and as even the best modern fantasies are not really of a flabbergasting literary quality (with a few exceptions like the underrated Tolkein, who was of course a Catholic), I give it a pass nowadays.

And my personal (though for the most part on-line, if you want to call that personal) contact with many fans and a few writers, despite introducing me to some good people (particularly Lynn here of course) rather left me bitter about the whole business I have to admit. I saw first-hand a world of people whose intellectual principles - like my own at the time - were largely formed by science-fiction writers of one stripe or another (if this sounds outlandish, consider that sf is often the primary reading material of precocious young children, and in a culture so entirely bereft of serious education, this constitutes the introduction to the intellectual life for many, unless they have the good luck to get hooked on older books instead) and it was not a good thing. So many fans will give the most disproportionate accolades to men of the most minimal stylistic and intellectual gifts, simply because they write the stuff on which the fan had nursed his suckling mind. And one particular instance of this, has left me with a permanent antipathy to the "greats" of the genre - a fan whose habits of thought were so largely the product of these arrogant and fatuous men, and who constantly praised them, and deferred to them and tolerated very rude treatment from at least two of them, yet who was clearly the mental and moral superior of these half-educated oafs. She deserved better than such as they, and with their thoughtless corruption of her alone, they have hewn an enourmous millstone for their collective necks...no, I do not have fond memories of the genre.

But all the same, there are many ways in which sf compares most favorably with its contemporary alternatives. I remember an old, stale dispute between the mainstream "literary" types and the sf fans, which in retrospect I find quite revealing: some mainstream lit fellow would get up and say that of course science fiction is not "literature", for this or that reason. One of the reasons was particularly hilarious - the fellow quoted Aristotle to the effect that spectacle was the lowest of the literary effects, and that sf with its fantastic backdrops, was an affair of mere spectacle and thus the lowest of literary species.

Uh huh. The idea that a modern critic would appeal to the Poetics in condemning sf, is utterly absurd for anyone who actually reads the Poetics. For if you asked an ordinary sf fan "what are the most important things in a story?" he would probably say something like this: plot, characters and interesting ideas are the most important things; literary style isn't quite so important, though of course it ought to be good. If you asked the same thing of a modern lit type, it would be something like: "well, of course I'm a sucker for beautiful prose; I'm simply in love with the English language - I like good characters too. Plot isn't so important."

So let's look at Aristotle's rankings, where he supposedly condemns science fiction. They are quite clear:

1. Plot

2. Characters

3. "Thought" (or ideas)

4. Style

5. Spectacle

I think I'm leaving one out, but they're all in the right order anyway. Now when mainstream types are notorious for regarding the second-to-last item as the be-all end-all, while everyone would admit that sf fans put a heavy focus on item number one, isn't it quite laughable for such a one to appeal to Aristotle in defending his position?

And of course, Aristotle is almost fanboyish in his admiration for the Illiad and the Oddyssey - and if the Oddyssey isn't fantasy, nothing is.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand: the sf fans rejoined that the mainstream category of "literature" as something existing on a higher plain from trash like sf, was the rankest snobbery - and of course they were entirely right. If you can read it, it's literature; the idea of "Literature with a capital L" bespeaks an utter ignorance of literary history. It is obvious to anyone with eyes that Shakespeare, Dickens and so forth wrote the same sort of "popular trash" as everybody else; they just did it much, much better. When Shakespeare wanted to create Serious Art he wrote poetry.

But of course, the literary types were quite right that sf and fantasy novels do not deserve comparison with something like Dostoyevsky's (Tolkein is an exception, and their contempt for him will look ill in the judgment of history). The interesting question is: why are they right for such a wrong reason?

Perhaps I am merely floating off into the air here, but I will speculate that they have invented this false category of "literature" as something separate from mere fiction, because they do not honestly enjoy reading Shakespeare. Left to their own devices, they would end up reading the trashiest mystery novels or whatever, and so they must have some account of why their preferred reading habits are so at variance with the best. The explanation, then, is that Literature is sort of like vegetables - very good for you, not very pleasant. Sf or mystery novels or whatnot are more like chocolate - tasty but bad for you.

I suspect that a similar dynamic exists with classical music - many, perhaps, can see that Mozart is in some sense better than the stuff they listen to for entertainment, and rationalize this by separating "high art" from "low art" (though here with more justification, if not very much).

In other words, distinguishing between "high" and "low" fiction is not so much a sign of good taste, as of bad taste of which a person is ashamed. Personally, I think it is better to have honestly bad taste than to read your Shakespeare because it's good for you...I suspect Shakespeare rolls over in his grave, whenever anybody reads his plays because they are Great Works of High Literary Art - though perhaps he is not insensible to the flattery either.....

(As I write this, I see that Tom at Disputations has just written a long post about science fiction. Now it was weird enough when he dissed Kant in his comment boxes shortly after I asked "why on earth is that ninny still so darn famous after two centuries?", but when he starts anticipating my posts that's just a little too much.)

Friday

2005-08-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry about my absence this week; I haven't been feeling so well. Summer colds are always the worst...at least that's what I say when I have them.....

Friday

2005-07-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

You know, it strikes me that we talk about this or that event being "probable" or "likely" or the reverse, without necessarily considering what that means. I guess the best way to illustrate this is to ask, "what's the probability of a coin landing heads-up?" Naturally this is a trick question and the answer is, "it depends on how likely you are to flip a coin" or something of that sort - the point being that probability can only exist within a system of certain parameters. If you have a coin, and it's being flipped, and it's not weighted funnily or anything of that sort, then (and only then) can you have the probability. When we say that some event is "probable" as if in the abstract, we are using a sort of figure of speech, often because many events cannot easily be narrowed down to any specific "system" besides "the world", whose laws we tend to grasp vaguely when at all.

This is all reasonable, but the problem comes when we start to imagine, through a sleight of hand, that some event really is "probable in the abstract" - as if there is some free-floating thing called "probability", which can inhere in this or that thing. When we say that something is "likely" or "unlikely", it is reasonable to ask, "under what circumstances is this thing happening or not happening? What laws govern such circumstances, and how much do I understand of them, either explicitly or through an intuition born of experience?" One effect of this notion of "free-floating probability" is that, since it proffers the illusion of determining (at least in some degree) an event's likelihood by examining the event alone, it gives us a vastly-inflated notion of our own ability to determine "likelihood". To be sure, some events will not be likely (or unlikely) in any realistic set of circumstances, but in difficult cases it's a good idea to be sure about such things. For when we admit probability to stem from the event in question considered in its context, we often have to admit that we don't know a whole lot about the context, and this may make us a little slower to declare this or that event "unlikely", "implausible" or the reverse.

Well, anyway that's the sort of musing that occurs to me when I'm not getting enough sleep. Have a good weekend - I hope next week I will arrive in a slightly better-rested condition than this.

Thursday

2005-07-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

Native english-speakers sometimes like to brag about the enormous vocabulary of our language, in which we have ten words for everything, but I sometimes wonder if the great size of our lexicon can actually reduce our powers of expression. I suppose much the same problem may occur in many other languages - but any case, one of the benefits of learning New Testament Greek (even badly) is that you realize how few the words of Scripture really are. For instance "kyrios" may be translated as "Lord", "master" and maybe a few other things; likewise "dikaios" and its derivatives might be "righteous" or "just" or "upright" or "virtuous" or any number of things. And words that seem utterly different from one another when translated, may be clearly derived from the same origin in the original.

I think that this is particularly important in Scripture, especially in a day so filled with woeful translations, because every verse is an inexhaustible font of meaning, and if (to imagine an instance that probably never actually occurs, but there are many like it) someone should translate "kyrios" as "mayor" because the text is referring to something like a mayor, many of these meanings will be obscured, leaving us with only the most straightforward of them. This is why a language with fewer words (in which, say, the word "kyrios" is used very often) can have advantages over a language with many, where "kyrios", which suggests many meanings, can become something so banal as "governor" or "sir", which suggest only one meaning - the very precision of english can be a weakness.

Of course, it helps a great deal to use a good translation. I dismiss pedantic claims that this or that team of biblical scholars has improved on the naive work of our ignorant forbears - they have done nothing of the kind. For as important as good scholarship, is a sound mind - not that ignorant men (like me, for instance) can translate Scripture no matter how sensible they are, but as far as translating a text, learning will reach a point of diminishing returns. And sometimes, in some scholars, learning may even prove a hindrance to translation, in that they will have some theory (perhaps even correct) that this phrase would generally have been taken to mean such-and-such, and thinking that we ourselves are too stupid to figure out the phrase if they merely translate the words, they give us the "such-and-such" that they take it to have meant, using perhaps some common English idiom that has nothing to do with the Greek. To some degree this is necessary, but I have seen many translations where it is taken much too far. This, and also the generally low-minded character of modern translations that I suppose everyone has noticed, even the translators who more or less try and make a selling-point of it, are ruinous of the subtler meanings of Scripture.

If only it were easier to get the Douay-Rheims in print!

Wednesday

2005-07-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

You know, it's no secret that I tend to blog at a time when sensible people sleep, but I like to think that as a general rule, I can at least keep a clear head on my shoulders despite the onslaughts of fatigue. Yet, as I consider the unavoidable fact that my "Tuesday" post was written on a fine but distinctly Monday evening, I have to think that the old engine was not exactly firing all cylinders at that time.

Anyway, I hope tomorrow I can have a more substantial post, maybe something about Rasselas, which is certainly worth a bit of attention. And maybe someday I can figure out the answer to a knotty question: why has anyone ever heard of Immanuel Kant?

Don't get me wrong - the fact that a philosopher's conclusions are more or less bunk does not make his fame incomprehensible. It's not just that Kant is wrong. Presumably Hume was more poisonous than Kant, and the little snippets I've read of him were generally wrong about something, but he doesn't strike me as a stupid man. But the snippets I have gathered of Kant have made me wonder, without hyperbole, as to whether Kant was really very bright.

For instance, I had known for some time that he dismissed, along with the "ontological argument" for the existence of God, the entire idea of a necessary being. "Existence is not a property" he said magisterially, and that was apparently that, or something like that. But today I learned something really flabbergasting: he rejected the "cosmological argument" (that is, arguments for the necessity of a First Mover or First Cause) because...they aim at proving the necessity of God's existence, and because (as he thought) there was no necessary being, such arguments must be invalid.

Now consider what this means: the cosmological proofs are supposedly false because they are conclusive. For if they only proved that God most probably exists, then Kant's objection to necessary being would be forceless here. Or if they proved that God must exist, but only because of some contingent quality of Creation, rather than that He was proven by the very nature of Creation, then likewise the proofs would become unobjectionable on such grounds.

His error was, I suppose, in conflating two sorts of necessity: the necessity of God's existence that inheres in the very nature of God (which necessity Kant called impossible), and the necessity of God's existence as shown creatures - and that some creature can show the necessity of something's existence is obvious; that any creature can show the necessity of its Creator's existence is hardly surprising, and does not involve the (perfectly valid, but denied-by-Kant) idea of necessary being as the property of a nature. Which is a subtle enough error I suppose (though still a black mark in a purported "great philosopher" who treats of a very important subject), but even a subtle error is inexcusable when it leads to a patently absurd conclusion through a very simple chain of reasoning, for then it should be immediately manifest that some error was made, thus inviting a closer search.

And surely the idea that cosmological arguments are invalid for the very reason of their conclusiveness is such an absurdity; the idea that if an argument were just a little bit worse, it would be better, should not pass the scrutiny of any true philosopher. To be sure, there are arguments that "prove too much", but only by leading to an absurd conclusion - not by leading to a reasonable conclusion too effectively! Even if there is no logical contradiction, the oddity gives any sensible man pause.

So I have to wonder, in the face of all the respect he is accorded, if he was even a particularly intelligent man - and if not, why on earth do we still hear about him?

Note

2005-07-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

Belatedly it occurs to me that the compiler of the page linked below, included a number of obvious derivatives of the Biblical story, so that some of the apparent "cognate" narratives may simply be folk corruptions from Genesis itself, that have had more time to alter in form through successive retellings and spurious additions. Scripture is known just about everywhere, and in many of those places it's been there for some time. The page is interesting, still, but it will take some more work (tomorrow, after necessary sleep...) to see how much these are all "separate witnesses".

Tuesday

2005-07-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

Following a link by a commentator (Marion) on the Disputations blog, I found this page, the content of which was almost entirely new to me. Quick summary:

Most of the legends are clearly just silly tall-tales. But consider this "Altaic" (central Asian) story:

"Tengys (Sea) was once lord over the earth. Nama, a good man, lived during his rule with three sons, Sozun-uul, Sar-uul, and Balyks. Ülgen commanded Nama to build an ark (kerep), but Nama's sight was failing, so he left the building to his sons. The ark was built on a mountain...Nama entered the ark with his family and the various animals and birds which had been driven there by the rising waters...On successive days, Nama released a raven, a crow, and a rook, none of which returned. On the fourth day, he sent out a dove, which returned with a birch twig...."

But just go the page and do a ctrl-f for "rainbow". If you have more time on your hands, try and note the names like Noj, Nuu, and other fellows commanded to build a large boat so as to survive the flood. Nuu is from an Hawaiian story; there's a "Nanaboujou" from an Ottowan something-or-other. And note the frequency, on both hemispheres, of the basic idea "God saw that the world was wicked, and destroyed it in a flood."

I'm sorry, I guess my old skepticism hasn't left me yet; I simply can't convince myself that this is a coincidence...leaf through them yourselves; it's easy enough to tell at a glance which ones you can ignore, and which ones fit remarkably well into the overall patter.

But of course, we moderns know better than to put stock in ancient folk stories.

Thursday, Part II

2005-07-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

On Belloc: his historical method is often derided for its vague and unscientific character. But it is interesting, anyway, to apply that test so favored in science nowadays, of evaluating predictions. On the one hand, what sort of predictions were the respectable, scientific historians making in the late 1920's? It is hard to believe that they predicted anything other than puerile nonsense, but perhaps I am wrong. On the other hand, read the "New Arrivals" section in "Survivals and New Arrivals"; there is not a thing in it, that looks silly in light of actual events.

Reading Belloc does not tell you much about the matter of history, that is true enough - but as regards the form of history, he is suberb. I would say, in general, that he is of little use as an instructor, but he helps one to organize what one has already learned, and to see it in a new light. He also, of course, has his literary delights - under the heading of "materialism" in his "Survivals" section is a queer comic gem that is pure Belloc. Or so it strikes me; your results may vary.

Thursday

2005-07-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

On the subject of evolution (more briefly than on the first occasion, I assure you), let us turn to a more reliable source than myself: Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis. Here are the most pertinent paragraphs, given in installements:

"35. It remains for Us now to speak about those questions which, although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith. In fact, not a few insistently demand that the Catholic religion take these sciences into account as much as possible. This certainly would be praiseworthy in the case of clearly proved facts; but caution must be used when there is rather question of hypotheses, having some sort of scientific foundation, in which the doctrine contained in Sacred Scripture or in Tradition is involved. If such conjectural opinions are directly or indirectly opposed to the doctrine revealed by God, then the demand that they be recognized can in no way be admitted.

36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question."

First consider that from what Pope Pius XII knew at the time, there could not have been a clear contradiction between the origin of the body from pre-existing and living matter, and the Faith. For if it were clear, he would have seen it; if he would have seen it, who would be so eccentric as to suggest that, seeing the contradiction, he would yet permit discussion on the matter without even hinting that this origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter, were in fact false? His injunction that we must give due consideration to opinions for and against, and not as shoving through some conclusion that was sufficiently proven, must not be taken lightly today, even if we think that this origin is better-shown today. Yet that he saw no contradiction between "human evolution" (in general, as opposed to certain specific varieties of this theory) and the Faith, remains clear.

"37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]"

Here, then, he condemns that theory of multiple origins for mankind. Note how he relates its condemnation completely to the doctrine of Original Sin, not to the inerrancy of Scripture (except insofar as Scripture teaches Original Sin, as indeed it does). I do not say that polygenism cannot be condemned from Scripture on any other grounds than that it contradicts the teaching of Original Sin; only that Pius XII did not choose any of these grounds.

"38. Just as in the biological and anthropological sciences, so also in the historical sciences there are those who boldly transgress the limits and safeguards established by the Church. In a particular way must be deplored a certain too free interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament. Those who favor this system, in order to defend their cause, wrongly refer to the Letter which was sent not long ago to the Archbishop of Paris by the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies.[13] This letter, in fact, clearly points out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, (the Letter points out), in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.

39. Therefore, whatever of the popular narrations have been inserted into the Sacred Scriptures must in no way be considered on a par with myths or other such things, which are more the product of an extravagant imagination than of that striving for truth and simplicity which in the Sacred Books, also of the Old Testament, is so apparent that our ancient sacred writers must be admitted to be clearly superior to the ancient profane writers."

It is clear that we may not wave away the historical content of Genesis with a vague muttering about "metaphor". But consider: "the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes...."

Since 1950 have exegetes - true scholars, not laymen such as ourselves, and certainly not Protestants - determined that Genesis is in contradiction to evolution? Of course they have not; exegesis obviously does not proceed with the unanticipated, revolutionary discoveries of the natural sciences, but even though what was once obscure does become clearer with a greater accumulation of study, it is obvious that since 1950, respectable exegesis did not drift in the least towards a rejection of evolution. Respectable exegetes are perhaps much harder to come by as compared with 1950 (I wouldn't really know), and as the time has been short in any case, the accumulation of exegetical expertise since Humani Generis is perhaps minimal if extant at all. Yet this only solidifies the certainty that nothing contradictory to evolution has evolved, as it were, from Catholic exegesis.

So then: both evolution and "the origin of Man's body from pre-existent and living matter" were acceptable in the day of Pius XII. Since then, cell biology has posed enormous problems for Darwinian selection in demonstrating a horrific complexity in the cell, but at the same time reinforced the evidence for common descent of living creatures (which includes the origin of Man's body from etc.) since we all have DNA, and all share many apparent accidents of structure both in this and other features of the cell, which (if indeed they are not functionally necessary) could not be explained by similar function producing similar design. Michael Behe, perhaps Darwinism's most prominent opponent, is a molecular biologist who would know about such discoveries quite well, and he accepts the common descent of organisms, which includes the origin of man's body from etc.

So as regards common descent, leaving aside Darwinian selection in particular, the case in the physical sciences is at the very worst no weaker, and seemingly much stronger, than in 1950. The state of respectable theology on this matter, has not changed at all to my limited knowledge; the great multiplication of heterodox theology has probably somewhat hampered, in more than one way, the development of authentic theology since then.

Why, then, is common descent unacceptable today while acceptable (if unproven) in 1950? I think it clear that it is perfectly acceptable, though it is unwise to proclaim the thing as certain, given that it turns on historical events of which we have no direct evidence. Perhaps even with the growth of knowledge, it could never become more than a very plausible theory, but in any case I do not find convincing, claims that it is inimical to the Faith.

That said, if someone considers evolution false, I have no strong reason to controvert with him - but to say that it is contrary to Faith is much more than a judgment of falsity; it is a weighty claim that no one may throw around lightly, and as I consider it to rest on no substantial grounds, I think it should be opposed. For we should not impose upon each other any needless burden in the Faith, and surely to claim that a popular theory with many persuasive arguments in its favor, is unChristian and must be rejected, when in fact it is not unChristian and may be held, is just such a needless burden as the Apostles rejected (see the Book of Acts). That some, in tying a rejection of Darwinism to the holding of religion, have thus rejected religion upon being convinced of Darwinism, has been an undisputable and even undisputably frequent phenomenon in the Protestant, anti-evolutionary world. Do we wish for the same to happen in the Church?

Lastly, let us return to the antiquity of the world. The most unmetaphorical, literalistic reading of Genesis Chapter 1, would tell us that the world is about 6000 years old, proceeding from the geneologies in later chapters. Is this theory even to be considered defensible, much less contrary to the Faith? Note that in speaking of the historical interpretation of Genesis, and on the origin of the human race (matters that would surely relate, naturally, to the question of the world's antiquity), he speaks not a word on the matter. Neither has any other Pope. The evidence for the world's antiquity is much more multifaceted, much more certain, much less controversial than the evidence for evolution. It occasioned far less controversy at its introduction, it was accepted by many of those 19th century biologists who rejected Darwin, it is proven by everything from the distance of the visible stars and galaxies, to the features of our landscape, to say nothing of the fossil record, which also proves this much less ambiguously than it does evolution. Yet as the reductio ad absurdum of Protestant Bible-Christian exegesis has shown, this well-proved theory too is at variance with a "plain-meaning" reading of Genesis. How, then, can such an exegetical method be maintained, even apart from the objection, that were Scripture so easy to interpret, scholarly exegesis would not be necessary?

Wednesday

2005-07-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

I had called Belloc a breath of fresh air, but I had, then, yet to come across this remarkable book. For all the provocative and lofty character of his writings in general, I have never considered any of his books as "essential reading". But this work is simply unique and almost eerie. In his other works, especially "The Great Heresies", I had already noticed his prophetic prediction, at exactly the moment when it would have seemed most ridiculous, that Islam would be a threat to our civilization in the coming years. Here, however, he hits one home run after another. That this work was written in the late 1920's, seems almost incredible to me.

In passing, it is interesting to note his remarks on evolution. He considered evolution by "mechanistic natural selection" to be "dead as a doornail", but in the same paragraph, considered that the bestial origin of Man's body was probable - and simply took as entirely and satisfactorily proven, the great antiquity of the world. He discusses the fundamentalist notion that this is all contradictory to Genesis, and dismisses it. Likewise he confirmed what I had suspected - that in Catholic countries, the controversy over evolution in England in the 19th century was regarded as so much of a tempest in a teapot. If any Catholic would deny the fact, that whatever one says about natural selection, the great age of the earth is indisputable and the common descent of creatures probable: what further proof is needed, that this denial is entirely a creature of fundamentalist Protestantism, and has nothing to do with the Catholic Church? Is Belloc, too, to be accused of denying a teaching of the Faith? And did more than a century of Catholics, from about 1800 onward, somehow fail to see that this theory contradicted the Faith (unless Belloc misrepresented this? I doubt that, since everyone else I've heard is in agreement with the fact that 19th-century Catholics everywhere were undisturbed by Lamarck, Darwin et alia) while a ragtag band of tub-thumping "Bible Christian" Protestants in England and America struck at the very heart of the matter with the fine intellectual and spiritual discernment for which they were so well known, and perceived its incompatibility with the Christian religion that they themselves only held in a most perverted manner?

Belloc said that he considered Lamarck's explanation the true one; oddly enough, I remember reading in my childhood an old article by the aforementioned John W. Campbell, written perhaps a decade or two later, in which he recounted a conversation between two microbiologists where one said, "everyone knows that Darwin and Larmarck were both half-right." I dismissed this as quack scientific speculation from a well-known eccentric (though why his own oddity should affect this reported conversation unless he were simply a liar, is difficult to fathom), but on the other hand, try googling "epigenetic inheritance" (unless you know something about it already). Is Lamarckianism always on the verge of a revival that never happens?

In any case, while lacking the multi-faceted richness of Newman's "Idea of a University", this is another book that talks about really important issues of our day, analysing them with intelligence and depth. What on earth has happened to men like this? I admit, they were thin on the ground even in earlier years.

Tuesday

2005-07-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

As a little one, I was (like many little ones) quite the science geek. After losing interest in a somewhat unusual manner, I find myself rekindling this love of childhood, but (I should hope) having left behind that emotional and thoughtless approach to the sciences which bright children necessarily take, and which does so much damage, I suspect, to the formation of many intelligent minds in the modern era. So far I have not dug very deeply at all, and I admit that my poor native ability and dislike for mathematics will not make things easy.

In any case, just making the vaguest overview of things, I am finding the odd fact that when one traces the origins of modern sciences, one invariably comes up against a few 19th century Germans or (more rarely) Englishmen or Frenchmen who more or less invented the foundational theories of this science. And in perusing some of Einstein's popular writings, it is clear that in every way he was the product of the 19th century German Academy, surely among its greatest. In saying "the 19th century" of course I am referring to a general period, not precisely bounded between 1800 and 1900.

I can't help wondering - could we really produce these sorts of minds today? To what extent are the sciences progressing towards perfection at an ever-growing pace, and to what extent do we lean upon a golden age in the natural sciences (an age less golden, true, in philosophy and certainly in religion, and dominant but perhaps not unmixedly beneficial in its influence on historiography) that is now gone?

In any case, I came across an essay by an author much more interesting than myself, who does little either by his imposing example, or by his own opinions, to contradict the idea of a general intellectual degeneration in our culture in the past century: Hilaire Belloc's essay on G.K. Chesterton after his death. Belloc, like the Ven. Newman, is a breath of fresh air.

Friday

2005-07-15T18:32:00.000-07:00

Well. A post like Wednesday's demands some recovery time - ironically, I sat down at around 7pm thinking I would hammer out a quick post, relax the rest of the evening and turn in early. When 11pm rolled around and I was still typing with no end in sight, I realized something had gone wrong...I think it was around 1 in the morning when I finished it.

A 1000-word blog post is one thing, but 6000 words in one sitting is really pushing it...don't think I'll do that again anytime soon.

Wednesday

2005-07-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

[note: I began this as a brief post. It is easily the longest I have ever written - but is in my opinion the best of a questionable lot, on the other hand.]

The fray between proponents of evolution and opponents of the theory is one in which I am not at all qualified to jump; I barely passed evolution in college. I think I passed it...well, anyway, there are at least a few points on which I may have something to say.

First of all, though opposition to Darwinism in one form or another is not a monopoly of American protestants, they have, as it were, a very large share of the market. And whatever the merits of Darwin's case, the protestant objections to evolution do not spring, in my opinion, from a reasonable intellectual position - and it is much clearer, I think, that many conservative American Catholics have acquired this same mindset, to their detriment. Before the following, I wish to make clear that I do not consider all anti-evolutionists to be described by the following remarks; I have said that I am too ignorant to engage the actual theory on its merits, and I mean it. I am describing something peculiar to American protestantism, which has yet made inroads among American Catholics.

There is something which I have encountered in several places, but which has manifested itself to me most clearly in protestant attacks on Darwinism, and on the Catholic Church; the latter, as with all things injurious to the Faith, we are required to avoid, but one does come across these things willy-nilly anyhow - in my case, largely in reading various Catholic bloggers who undertake to refute protestant calumnies and sophistries. I have only recently realized the identity of this thing, and how it should be described: it is a sort of American, protestant "parallel Academy." To put it more crudely, they have "their own little world" of intellectual activity, a kind of Potemkin village - something Americans are good at making.

In the Faith, we have a clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural virtues; the virtues pertaining to learning, both in aiding research and study, and those which are honed by the same, are of course natural. The same applies to, for instance, the arts. Thus, while cognizant of certain dangers involved in certain cases, Catholics will often learn from unbelievers, enjoy the music of unbelievers, etc. The respect which many Catholics have long held for Aristotle, is a clear demonstration of this.

Furthermore, because we do not abhor human nature, but only consider it both flawed, and even if perfected, still insufficient for salvation - we therefore recognize ourselves, generally speaking, as part of the same society as the unbelievers who live among us. For human nature does not only define the individual, but the society as well, so in possessing the same human nature as all others, then just as all others participate in the society into which they are born and raised, so do we. Even those ways in which we must separate ourselves from society, are often but rejections of deviant, unnatural behaviour in our society, so that it is we, and not they, who act then according to human nature. Our supernatural life imposes still further separations upon us, and is indeed the reason that we observe the confines of nature so carefully, but we do not consider that our membership in a supernatural community of souls, removes us from our natural communities; it only means that these are no longer our "primary citizenship", hence we are said to be "not of them".

For protestants, on the other hand, things are not so clear. They are taught little or nothing of the natural and supernatural orders, and consider grace as replacing nature, rather than adding to nature and also perfecting it. And so they do not consider the domination of our Academy, or our arts, or anything else in our society, by unbelievers, as a flaw to be remedied; instead they establish their own Academy, their own Art, and so forth. When the Church has found it useful to provide some Catholic alternative to some popular trend injurious to the Faith, she takes what is good in that injurious thing, removes what is bad, and promulgates it among the Faithful - hence when Averroesian Aristotleanism was sowing unbelief, Providence gave us St. Thomas Aquinas - or so the story is related to me. But the protestant approach, is to quite honestly and straightforwardly offer a counterfeit - something that bears sufficient resemblance (they hope or believe) to the popular thing, to fool people into accepting it as a substitute. The difference in the two approaches may seem a subtlety, yet in truth the difference between them is not a subtlety, as they are almost opposite in strategy: we copy the substance, while removing the harmful accidents - and if the substance itself of the thing be harmful, we do not sugarcoat the thing but simply reject it completely. They, instead, copy the accidents, sometimes including the harmful ones (as with their "Christian rock", which often has all the sensuality of ordinary rock music, without the virtue of an occasional good tune), and do not investigate the substance.

Thus I think they have created, rather quietly, their own parallel Academy, with its own scholarly debates, its own intellectual snobbery, its own fads and fashionable ideas, its own ear-mangling lingo. They have everything that an Academy needs, except that they are not an Academy; for all that the real Academy in America is filled with fatuity, cant and debased intellectual and moral standards (nor can these be separated, as for instance generous concessions towards one's disputant both in private thought and public argument, are both a matter of common courtesy and an absolute necessity for cultivation of the intellect), it is still the real thing. And when the Darwinists complain that ID theory "is not science" they have, for all the flaws and fallacies of their arguments on this score (and leaving aside the question of their own theory's correctness) a point against the American protestant Potemkin village of the intellect, not only with regard to this village's opposition to evolution, but against the fakery that undergirds the entire enterprise.

Thus the Potemkin Academy treats evolution not as a theory to be studied, understood, critiqued if necessary, opposed if necessary, and accepted where possible. Rather they see that this theory has, for whatever reason, sowed doubt in their ranks - and therefore it is a snare of the devil, to be fought with their own competing theory. I do not say that they speak of it either so clearly or so bombastically; I am far from thinking that all conservative American protestants that oppose evolution are "fanatics" who hear of Darwinism and fly into a rage. But they engage this theory with a polemical mentality, as if making a case against a foe, an attitude such as befits a lawyer but not an intellectual. This polemicism, with which the anti-Catholic sorts also engage the Faith, stains their criticisms of "Neo-Darwinism" through and through, for all the intelligence and learning that their best partisans display - and for all that their opponents in the "establishment" generally have not the wit to equal them in controversy.

On the one hand we must be leery of a professionalism, according to which we bestow excessive respect on the experts in a given field, who are often quite mistaken in their own areas of supposed expertise, and sometimes so clearly mistaken that intelligent laymen (and even stupid laymen) will be right where they are wrong. Yet a mind sufficiently educated as to see some element of likeness and connection in all sciences, will not be inclined to this superstitious awe of scholars in this or that particular field, knowing them to have the same fallible judgment as those in fields with which they are more familiar - while at the same time respecting their expertise. For if professionalism is dangerous, dangerous as well is the idea that a few quickly-perused arguments, a battery of pre-digested facts from some book or website, and a sharp mind are sufficient to equal the fruit of long and difficult study. Even if the website is right and the disciplined student is wrong, the reader of the former should realize the shakiness of his ground. For this very reason, I decline to render a verdict on evolution despite knowing more on the subject than some, I daresay, who have leapt into the fray on either side - I leave such pronouncements to those who didn't leave their College of Biological Sciences halfway through its undergrad program, thank you very much.

In any case, this Potemkin Academy has, like many elements of American protestantism both liberal and conservative, made inroads upon American Catholics, and while the unmeasured scorn that Darwinists tend to pour on their enemies is quite disgusting, I think that a certain rebuke to these Faithful is not untoward, inasmuch as we "should not give unbelievers cause to laugh at us," as St. Thomas said in condemning arguments which claimed to prove by reason alone that the world was not eternal. Unlike a fondness for American protestant "Christian rock", which is merely incomprehensible, any Catholic alliance with their "Christian Academy" risks bringing disrepute to the Faith.

But as regards evolution itself, granting my incompetence in evaluating its truth or falsity, what can I say of it? Firstly, I cannot see the grounds on which one would consider it injurious to the Faith, although I can see how certain popular trends in that theory have indeed proved thus. Secondly, it seems to me that the difficulties with this theory are enourmous, yet not necessarily disqualifying or even prejudicial to its acceptance - yet be that as it may, these problems should certainly be taught to students and the Darwinists have no good argument against this. Thirdly, it seems to me that the Darwinists have some grounds in their vague and facially-absurd claim that "Intelligent Design is not science", but the situation is a bit complex. Let us deal with the first heading first.

The claims that it is injurious to the Faith, rest (it seems to me) on three different propositions: that evolution contradicts the book of Genesis and therefore the inerrancy of Scripture, that evolution directly contradicts certain doctrines of the Faith concerning the first Man and Woman, and that evolution indirectly contradicts doctrines concerning Adam and his descendants by promoting nominalism.

Now the first proposition is mainly protestant in character, and not even universal among protestants; it is more particularly a "creationist" claim as it is called, in that even in positing a great age for the earth, Darwin is thus said to contradict Scripture. Catholics, of course, are not taught to believe in a young earth and generally have little to do with such narrow-minded interpretations of Scripture. That we believe the literal sense of Scripture to be true, does not mean we are what is now called "literalistic"; as the good old Catholic Encyclopedia has it: "The literal sense of Sacred Scripture is the truth really, actually, and immediately intended by its author." If that truth is expressed in metaphor, then the metaphorical meaning, and not what is popularly called the "literal meaning", is the true "literal sense" (the whole article is, of course, worth reading for a much deeper discussion of this).

The second proposition had, at an earlier time, some validity, as it was once widely believed that Man evolved in several places at once; this is, as I believe it was Pius XII said, contrary to the Faith; the start of Original Sin with one man, from whom every other man was descended, is not a metaphor, whatever other metaphorical, allegorical or "non-literal" elements are within that holy Book of Genesis. Stephen Jay Gould complained that such an instance of "religion" dismissing "science" was inconsistent with the separation between theology and the physical sciences. But this is false, as this separation is conditioned on the content of Revelation, which is clearly not separate from the science of history. Revelation, revealed as it was to save sinners, tells us (as I think Galileo really did say) "not how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven". It does not tell us about the theory of Relativity - or about heliocentrism. Or, I believe, about biological evolution as a general theory. But our salvation is accomplished through, among other things, divine Faith in certain historical facts - and the dawn of Man (and the Fall of Man) is an historical fact; a scientific theory that Man arose in twelve places at once, is also an historical theory and may (and does) contradict Revealed truth. They cannot make historical assertions, then exempt themselves from criticism by calling it biology. Fortunately that theory of multiple origins has fallen into the dustbin so far as I know - from what I've heard, genetics has shown us to be a highly-inbred species, indicating a very tight "bottleneck" (or several such) where the total population of our species was quite small. As to whether genetics has truly proven, as some have said, that we all descend in every line from one woman, I do not know.

That it promotes nominalism is a subtler claim, one that underlied Chesterton's objections to the theory. Indeed, from all that I have heard, Darwinism clearly did this in its original stages, and perhaps does now as well - but to what extent this is a necessary accompaniment of evolution as a theory, is another matter. Let us first consider the idea of form which lies in contradiction to nominalism.

The basic idea, of course, is that various creatures have distinct forms, which are not merely convenient representations of the mind, but really present in the things that hold these forms, though they (I think, along with smarter people like St. Thomas) have no independent existence as per Plato's "Ideas". Still, that only tells us something about the forms, not what they are.

I am not an expert on such things, but I think that a form is defined by a specific act, so that creatures whose matter assumes two different forms, must thereby perform different acts in some way - and these to be understood as habitual acts, not some acts that they happen to perform at the moment, i.e. eating (habitual) as opposed to scratching its nose (accidental).

Aristotle thus (I am told - I have yet to read a word of his extant writings on the physical sciences) defined species according to function, and has since incurred much opprobrium for that. He "set back biology by centuries" and so forth. I suspect that this is not really just; one error with which he is charged is "doing science by deduction and not observation". Yet Aristotle, highly as he valued deduction (for it is highly valuable) was clearly quite taken with observation; I have a hard time reconciling the careful observer of drama who wrote the Poetics, with the "pure reasoner" in his "ivory tower" who supposedly strangled scientific observation in its cradle. And as for classifying species by function and not physical resemblance - this is admittedly incomplete, but hardly a bad principle in modern taxonomy (and since one function of a species is reproduction, and since like produces like, it is hardly contrary to Aristotle's thinking that only interfertile animals can belong to the same species).

After all, his idea of classification by function is used today. We call it a "biological niche"; it is not a taxonomic means of classification, since genetic relation is preferred (and with reason, since the organism's form is determined by its genome; therefore genetic similarity is the best measure of likeness in form). But I suppose it rarely arises, that two different animals occupy (of necessity due to their natures, and not by accident of circumstance) very different biological niches, yet look very similar and can even interbreed; the similarity of genotype required for reproduction, is generally accompanied by considerable similarity of phenotype, and thus "niche" or, alternatively, form.

Of course, there are certainly those who, nominalists to the core, object to the idea of biological niche on principle, conjuring up their usual petty objections from this or that strange and ambiguous case, or simply by declaring it inconsistent with nominalism, which they identify with correct thought. But niche is quite real; a system of various functions arises quite naturally among organisms - and the idea is quite Aristotelean. Of course one must not imagine the ecosystem as a machine that requires some exact list of parts, with every niche perfectly filled; imperfections are to be expected.

Still this order exists, and from what I can tell, it was not really present in early Darwinian thought. "Ecosystem" was not a word when Darwin wrote his books, and the idea of species evolving from something that performed this particular function in a system, to something that performed that function in a system, was not (I think) how evolution was thought to work. It was more the idea of natural selection as keeping the biological world in a constant state of flux - endlessly progressing to nowhere in particular, rather than shifting things, at times, from stable state to stable state. This was much in keeping with the philosophies popular at the time.

It is not in keeping, I think, with more modern ideas of evolution, which have had to bow to the unfortunate (for some) fact that a "species" is not simply an arbitrarily-defined group of ever-progressing organisms described in their particular evolutionary state at some particular time, but a stable form; this is (apparently) attested by the fossil record. The philosophy in which evolution is encapsulated is still nominalist, but I think this is simply because the people teaching it are nominalists, not because their theory demands it.

Nor can it be urged that in allowing for a transition from form to form, the concept of form is abolished - for the possibility of intermediary forms is self-evident given that different forms are composed of the same sort of matter; evolution simply poses no new challenge to Aristotlean metaphysics, or any other that incorporates a clear distinction between forms. Evolution is quite comprehensible in conventional metaphysics; anything that performs some function A, can usually be "jury-rigged" to perform some function B for which it is not specifically suited, but only suited in a general way. If this thing is an organism, it will very likely adapt so as to better perform that function B. Thus the human hand is not specifically suited to piano-playing, but only generally so (inasmuch as it is suited to manipulating objects of a certain size, and piano keys are such objects), so that at first it performs the task poorly, but later adapts. Why could not a species, thrust by circumstance into the performance of some function it is not very good at, have a natural mechanism for adapting over time? And if what I have heard about genetic researches, that there are various highly-complex mechanisms governing the origin of mutations (as opposed to the old idea of DNA polymerase driving evolution through typos), is true, then "evolution" would be literally a mechanism for adaptation, driven by an act of the organism (though not a specifically directed act, unless we want to get Lamarckian). And for any adaptations that do not succeed but precede a change in function, it is again nothing strange that some accidentally-acquired feature, could turn out to have a function (which it probably again performs poorly at first, at which point adaptation again takes place).

But then there are problems arising with evolution, nominalism and the origin of Man in particular. What are they?

If Man evolved over time, from some apelike creature, then first of all some might say that with no clear distinction between himself and an ape, he is not really a separate form from an ape. The usual reconciliation between separation of forms and transition between those forms, does not really work here because Man's immortal soul cannot arise incrementally from something that has no immortal soul; a soul can be mortal or immortal, but cannot stand halfway across the gulf between them, as the gulf is not a finite thing.

Yet the immortality of the soul is neither physical, nor does it arise from anything physical. Some might object that because the possession of a human soul affect our physical actions, it must be accompanied by some physical (and thus evolutionary) change, but this assumes that the soul cannot affect matter, but only parallel the operations of matter, so that physical change must follow physical cause alone. Many modern thinkers, who have finally come to terms with the obvious fact that the soul (which they call "consciousness", an inadequate conception) is a real and non-material thing, still wish to maintain that the soul is yet completely in the power of matter, created by matter and powerless to alter it. Yet this is contrary to reason, for the very notion of causality implies that any creature which changes another creature, is itself changed in so doing; therefore if material motions have effects on the soul (as assuredly they do) then the moving material - presumably in the brain - must be itself affected by its relationship to the soul. This is not merely some "primitive intuition", but is confirmed by all observation and all reasoning - for never was observed the creature that affected something else, without itself changing as a result. If the earth pulls at me, I pull (however slightly) at the earth; the sun is not altered by the fact that it shines in my eyes, but the electromagnetic waves it emits (which are what act directly upon me) are very much altered, and the sun is in turn altered by the act of emitting those waves. Thus with all creatures - all that ever is or was, but the Unmoved Mover (I never til now understood that part of St. Thomas's fivefold proof, though I think he called it "the simplest". But it seems rather obvious now that any object that induces change in another, not only changes in so doing, but it would not have begun inducing that change unless something else had, in turn, changed it - and the infinite series of movers fails for the same reason that extending a moving staff [as per the Doctor's example] to infinity, saying that this part was moved by the part behind it, etc. and ad infinitum, would not explain its motion, until you posit a hand somewhere; hence the necessity of an Unmoved Mover. Anyway he puts it much better. That's his "simplest" proof - St. Thomas unnerves me sometimes).

So matter affects the soul, but the soul affects matter. Therefore, by an immaterial change in the immaterial soul, a creature's actions may be affected. So you could have some apelike creature, whose offspring were genetically very similar, whose behaviour were different in kind because God provided it with an immortal soul.

But of course, it is scarcely impossible that Man were created literally from the dust, and that his origin is an exception to a general rule of evolution (if there be such a rule). Yet this has no bearing on evolution as a general theory.

If one supposed that the first man were indeed born bodily of an ape, one would naturally ask, "was Adam given a soul at birth, or did he receive it later?" I am not sure. We are, in any case, dealing with very specific incidents in human history, where general rules are of little use, and obviously there is no archaeological evidence; we have only the teachings of the Faith, that there was a first man, and that he and his wife were in a state of blessedness, and that they were tempted and fell.

But supposing that he and Eve were born of an ape, it is not necessary to suppose that they lived as the apes did; that the Garden of Eden could have been a physical garden, as well as an allegory of Man's initial state of blessedness, is possible. That Adam and Eve really saw angels of the Lord, and were tempted perhaps by some really visible manifestation of the Evil One, to eat some real fruit, is also perfectly possible - though none of this is, as far as I can tell, a doctrine of the Faith. My point is that if Man's physical origin were through nature, this would hardly dictate that everything in Adam's life must have been perfectly "naturalistic" in appearance. For as I will argue later, the reason for believing in such a natural physical origin, is not some naturalistic prejudice according to which the miraculous must be minimized or eliminated (that this mentality does indeed, including among the Faithful, provide much impetus for Darwinian theory is probably true, and regrettable - thus perhaps a passage in Maritain, I think [maybe Gilson; I get them mixed up], where he said something that implied, as I understood it, that Man's first parent was some brutish apelike creature living in brutish, apelike circumstances, as if this were an evident fact. None of this disproves the theory of evolution, anymore than a fondness of heretics for Aristotle in the early days of the Church, proved the Stagirite foolish).

So it seems to me that Darwinian theory does not contradict the Faith. As for the difficulties involved in the theory, my treatment must be very scant, given my own lack of knowledge.

But it is clear that the only observed, proven instances of evolutionary change are of a very minor sort. And as I said earlier, I think, on this blog, the fact that species are generally genetically stable for a very long time, raises even greater difficulties with the idea of (say) a human being evolving from a fish. Yes, the hypothetical fish dates from 500 million BC or something like that, which is quite a long time, but the actual time it spends in a state of significant genetic flux, would presumably be a miniscule fraction of that - for most of those 500 million years, its descendants would be members of some genetically-stable species. The exact time is impossible to estimate, yet to suppose, say, just a million years spent in genetic flux, is hardly ridiculous. Which is not really much time to get from lungfish to Adam. Of course there are various theories about interspecies, non-reproductive "jumps" of various genes, so that if some species is not evolving at a given moment, nevertheless the genes of its descendants might be "in the oven" in some other, rapidly-evolving critter. But the idea of whole organs or enzymatic pathways leaping from species to species strikes me as exceedingly implausible, and the possibilities for extending the "time-spent-evolving" with this sort of clever bookkeeping strike me as limited - still, we've long sinced passed my competence zone so I'll quit speculating on that.

My point is that there are all sorts of functional leaps for which the mechanism is completely unknown and difficult to imagine. I know that Michael Behe, one of the leaders of the "ID Theory" movement, specializes in enzymatic pathways (I think he is a molecular biologist) whose construction strikes him as particularly unlikely. "Irreducible complexity" is a term he uses often; that there are things whose complexity could not really be reduced, without depriving it of any conceivable function, I will admit. It is even possible that certain things might somehow, someday, be demonstrated to possess this irreducible complexity. But I think it highly unlikely that such irreducible complexity could be demonstrated for enzymatic pathways with the resources at our disposal. Yes, certain pathways would fail when deprived of any of their enzymes - but that there could not be some other, similar, simpler pathway that performs some other function, is difficult to demonstrate. How on earth does one demonstrate such a thing?

Still, the difficulties of Darwinism are immense. In fact, one would likely conclude that the evolution of such varieties of organism from a common ancestor were impossible, except that there is good reason to believe that it happened.

To clarify the assertion that evolution has never been seen in action on a large scale: a standard Darwinian counter to this, is that of course it's been seen on a large scale, but since the fossil record is so scanty, the "creationists" who "demand" transitional forms will eventually demand more than the record can provide. But when we consider species as generally stable forms, which periodically enter a state of much-heightened genetic flux (perhaps in some small, genetically-isolated population; I think this is called "allopatric speciation"), it is clear that evolution is really only happening during those periods of speciation or flux. Therefore, when considered as evidence for evolution, examples of creatures in the process of speciation are categorically different from (and more valuable than) examples of separate and stable which are morphologically similar, such that one appears to have descended from the other. The evidentiary value of the latter is not zero, and if the fossil record lacks the most compelling class of evidence for evolution, this is not tantamount to disproof; Newman, in his Anglican-period "Essay on Miracles" pointed out that the value of the given evidence for an event, is not degraded by the mere potentiality for better evidence; the evidence must be weighed on its own merits, not by its inferiority to the "evidence that might have been". Still, the Darwinists are either dishonest or dim-witted in failing to recognize the difference in kind between the "transitional forms" they proffer (which are mostly, if not all, stable species to the best of our knowledge, if my recollection is correct), and an actual organism demonstrably in the process of speciation.

So, is there a case for evolution, and can such an ignorant layman as myself grasp it?

I believe that the answer is yes on both counts, for the following reason. It can be traced, actually, from something Michael Behe himself said: that ID really does mean just "Intelligent Design", and that while he himself believed this design to be divine, he could not disprove the assertion of one who said that the design was by aliens or something. Now, I don't believe in aliens. If I did, I would find ID arguments more persuasive than in fact I do. As it is, the only intelligence that I believe capable of designing a new species, is the source of all intelligence, God. Now let us consider this.

The Darwinists would tell us that "bringing in God" is "not science". Unless they are simply unbelievers who are not in the mood for serious argument, and wish only to brush aside the ID theorists with whatever blunt instrument lies to hand, I find this stupid to the point of lunacy. Science means knowledge. Knowledge pertains to, among other things, events. If God created some particular species, that is an event. Ergo, it is a proper object of science. The question, is simply whether God created species particularly, or whether He created the world such that new species would naturally arise from old species. If He created them particularly and separately, this is no doubt disappointing to the Darwinists, but the nature of the universe is not actually tailored to fit the desires of scientists.

For they have actually urged, as if this were a serious objection to "ID theory", that this theory does not allow for any research, or for much education. Really! And the "non-Atlantis" theory, according to which there is no lost Atlantis, does not allow for much research into the history of Atlantis! This is not considered a viable objection to the "non-Atlantis" theory. How perverse can men be? If a thing did not happen, it is scarcely pertinent to say that it affords a more interesting subject for study than what actually happened. I suspect that such "arguments" as this have made more converts to the ID-theory side than anything Behe or Dr. Phillip Johnson has written.

Nor is it sensible to say that scientists are "not permitted" to bring in a supernatural explanation. Certainly if they do so merely because they can think of no natural explanation, this is inappropriate (why so, we shall consider momentarily). And it seems to me, indeed, in this case, that this is the precise grounds on which they are being asked to "bring in" the supernatural. If, however, it were demonstrated that any natural explanation were implausible (not even necessarily impossible), then there is nothing unreasonable in inclining instead towards supernatural explanation. Again, we have the obscurantism of treating history as if it were biology; I suppose that even some of these scientists who "aren't permitted" to bring in supernatural explanations, would do so if they were personally offered some miraculous event before their very eyes, for which no natural explanation, not even hallucination, would avail. So, then, must evidence for the supernatural be right before their eyes to be valid? Presumably not - but why, then, must it even be in recent history? Why not distant history? That ID Theory has proven any even to be supernatural, I do not admit - but that it is categorically impossible to rule out a natural origin for a far-distant historical event, I do not admit either. The Darwinists only embarrass themselves and win converts for the other side, by claiming such categorical impossibility.

But as I have hinted earlier, if we assume that anti-evolutionists have not really proven a directly supernatural origin for speciation, we should be strongly inclined to suppose that there is a natural explanation, even if this is beset with difficulties. Why is this so, given that (as I said above in re: Garden of Eden) we should not make skepticism a guiding principle?

Regarding miracles, my ignorance and incompetence exceeds even the bounty I possess with regard to evolution. Yet it seems to me that if we are ignorant of the exact character of some act, so that we cannot see directly whether it is natural or supernatural, we must examine its possible causes (if any) and its effects. Now there is a natural cause for speciation, which is the "emptiness" of some biological niche. Thus it is hypothesized that when the dinosaurs vanished, the niches occupied by these large organisms were no longer "full", so that the previously-small mammals evolved to fill similar roles to their saurian predecessors. Thus, once plants had colonized the land, it is thought that some semi-amphibious lungfish-like creature could therefore benefit from being able to live on land and eat all the free food, so it gradually became a complete land-lubber. Likewise the effect of speciation (a new species) is not supernatural in character as is, for instance, the effect of the Sacraments; rather it is natural. So with a natural cause and a wholly natural effect, we should be inclined to anticipate a natural act, or so I should think.

Furthermore, as this act seems to have been repeated countless times, it has further the character of a natural event that proceeds from the nature of the earth - whereas the origin of life, for instance, is a special event, happening only once as far as we can tell, so that there is little reason to think it a natural consequence of circumstance.

Lastly, any claim that because we are believers, we must be "ID theorists" by definition, requires this qualification: we must believe in an intelligent design to the universe as a whole, but the operation of chance within that universe, is in no way contradictory to the doctrine of Divine Providence (see this excellent post). And there is no reason to declare that speciation may not result from the operation of chance. Thus, those who say "Darwinism, hypothesizing randomness in speciation as it does, is inherently atheistic" are simply wrong. True, if they hypothesize randomness in some ultimate sense, that is atheistic, but evolution could easily be random in the sense that this particular set of taxonomic groups, as compared to all the other sets that could have arisen, need not be so special among the myriad possibilities as to leap out at us as "evidence of design". Just as Providence need not give a "designed" appearance to a rock-face in order to be at work on all things, including that rock, thus it need not give a "designed" appearance to creatures; the only indisputable design is that in the very fabric of the universe - the natural law.

I would be interested, however, to hear any arguments to the contrary of all this - I know in particular that Bettina is more familiar with biology than myself, and has (as I recall) spoken unfavorably of Darwinian theory. In any case, I should probably get to bed now.

Tuesday

2005-07-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

Hm, my previous link to the EU Constitution didn't take. Well, apparently there is, as per the BBC article, a (mushily-defined) veto power for the Member States as regards "common policies" of the EU - but as far as subsidarity is concerned, I think the BBC was flat-out wrong; whoever wrote that just guessed (or was misled) as to the meaning of "principle of subsidiarity". I certainly do not think it means "the EU is subsidiary to the Member States". Anyway, in the chapter on "Common foreign and security policy", we find this spiffy little passage (the Council = the heads of the Member States):

"1. The European decisions referred to in this Chapter shall be adopted by the Council acting unanimously.

When abstaining in a vote, any member of the Council may qualify its abstention by making a formal declaration. In that case, it shall not be obliged to apply the European decision, but shall accept that the latter commits the Union. In a spirit of mutual solidarity, the Member State concerned shall refrain from any action likely to conflict with or impede Union action based on that decision and the other Member States shall respect its position. If the members of the Council qualifying their abstention in this way represent at least one third of the Member States comprising at least one third of the population of the Union, the decision shall not be adopted.

2. By way of derogation from paragraph 1, the Council shall act by a qualified majority:

(a) when adopting European decisions defining a Union action or position on the basis of a European decision of the European Council relating to the Union's strategic interests and objectives, as referred to in Article III-293(1);

(b) when adopting a European decision defining a Union action or position, on a proposal which the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs has presented following a specific request to him or her from the European Council, made on its own initiative or that of the Minister;

(d) when adopting a European decision concerning the appointment of a special representative in accordance with Article III-302.

If a member of the Council declares that, for vital and stated reasons of national policy, it intends to oppose the adoption of a European decision to be adopted by a qualified majority, a vote shall not be taken. The Union Minister for Foreign Affairs will, in close consultation with the Member State involved, search for a solution acceptable to it. If he or she does not succeed, the Council may, acting by a qualified majority, request that the matter be referred to the European Council for a European decision by unanimity.

3. In accordance with Article I-40(7) the European Council may unanimously adopt a European decision stipulating that the Council shall act by a qualified majority in cases other than those referred to in paragraph 2 of this Article.

4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 shall not apply to decisions having military or defence implications."

Okay, I missed the meaning of all this the first time through, so I hope you won't be insulted if I give you a little "Cliff's Notes" summary: in deciding on a "common foreign and security policy" that does not have "military or defence implications", the EU must be unanimous in its voting except under circumstances a, b, c, and d, where only a "qualified majority" is needed (at least 15 Member States or 55% of them, whichever is higher, and provided that they together comprise at least 65% of Europe's population. This sort of thing is enough to give a man second thoughts about the democratic system....)

Now, one problem with a written Constitution that has haunted us Americans, is that large sections of it will later be shoved aside (for good reasons and bad) as "irrelavent". In examining the document before age has atrophied its less-exercised paragraphs, one must thrust aside any idea about what the document was "clearly intended" to mean, and consider what could be done with it by a sufficiently dishonest and sophistical person, by taking provisions out of context and twisting their meaning, or finding a pretext for effectively making certain provisions unusable. In this case, it is clear that the limited case of paragraph 2 could possible become the "typical" case, with the general requirement of unanimity in paragraph 1 becoming unimportant.

Less obvious, is the consideration that this sentence-fragment could someday (supposing that this horrifying Constitution ever becomes law) be important: "If a member of the Council declares that, for vital and stated reasons of national policy, it intends to oppose the adoption of a European decision to be adopted by a qualified majority...." Who is to determine what are "vital...reasons of national policy"? The obvious answer is that the objecting nation determines this, but what if, instead, some Union body were to determine this instead, and ignore objections that it deems "non-vital"?

I am not saying that this particular consideration will arise. I am saying that things of this sort will happen - that is, absurd interpretations of the law which, if predicted, would likely bring scorn on anyone so silly as to worry that this interpretation could ever be advanced...until it is advanced. Allow these interpretations to gain the field, and no provisions for individual national autonomy will avail - particularly since, even if the Union overstepped its Constitutional boundaries, it might not matter. Violate the First Amendment of our own Constitution, and someone is likely to notice; say what you like about this Amendment, but it's pretty brief and catchy, and Americans have developed a fondness for it. But suppose you violate some paragraph of the EU Constitution saying that "decisions regarding common social policy as defined in Part III shall be reached by a Class 12 Majority as defined by the Taylor Series given in Part IV, Title III, Article 4, Paragraph 2." It's just not going to provoke rioting in the streets.

And beyond that, the bloated Constitution of the EU might be, in practical terms, much more easy to modify if adopted than our own fairly-constant text. Having so much garbage in it already, no one will worry about throwing in a little more - so really, this whole interpretive dance may be unnecessary as the EU attempts to extend its powers.

Anyway, this fun stuff aside, there are two important objections to the EU in general and its over-reaching Constitution in particular: that it will end up being a United States of Europe, and that whatever the merits of the idea, the people actually running the thing are horribly corrupt and arrogant. In other words, "bad idea" or "bad execution".

I've heard the former objection poo-pooed as follows: "oh, that's just ignorant paranoia; Europeans are too diverse a group with too many deep-seated divisions and too little grounds for unity to become one big country like the US; the very idea is absurd." Certainly it seems a bit odd that a bunch of two-bit bureaucrats will succeed where Napoleon and Hitler failed, and conquer Europe. But then, they've made pretty good strides that way already. Even just a common currency is nothing to sneeze at - it's more than Napoleon managed. And as for the "too diverse" business, the Roman Empire was not exactly one big gathering of like-minded individuals; it still lasted for quite a while. Certainly the cases are very different, but the arguments I've heard for the impossibility of a "USE" don't convince me. Maybe I just don't know enough about Europe.

What I can certainly say after reading something of the EU Constitution, is that if a "USE" is possible, and if the EU is not checked in its path by something more substantial than a few failed referenda, then it is going to happen. Extending the EU grip as far as is practical, is the clear goal of this hideous document. And in America, we know how easily and naturally a "Union" of "States" can become one big honking State, granting this Union certain minimal powers at the beginning (taxation and a military are the most important I suppose. Currently the EU subsists on Member contributions, but it is easy to imagine a "streamlining" of this process, such that taxation becomes more direct).

As for the latter accusation that the EU, good idea or not, is run by a lot of bad eggs...well. That one hardly needs proof.

On the other hand, there's this sunny view of things from the Economist, according to which evil has been defeated and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. This is, so far as I can tell, the prevailing view. Am I, absurdly, becoming concerned at that exact time when all cause for concern has vanished? The public has spoken, and "non" is its answer - right?

I wonder if all these sunny people have seen this page. Perhaps as an ignorant American I am profoundly misinterpreting this seemingly-straightforward list. What I see is that in the countries where no referendum was necessary, only a legislative vote - most of them ratified it with a yes/no ratio of more than ten. Ten yeses for every no. Belgium was an "exception" at 118-18-1 for its parliament and 54-9-1 for its senate. Cyprus was the real maverick; the yeses (30) only outnumbered the nos (19) by a hair over 50%. The most striking was Malta at 65-0-0, but they all voted yes.

I'm intepreting this to mean simply that the politicians really, really want that Constitution. Can a fragile majority in a handful of member states really stand in the way of such near-unanimous determination by their rulers?

Perhaps they really can. Or perhaps the seemingly-overwhelming support for the EU and its Constitution among the politicians, is some sort of artifact of a political process I do not understand. An artifact that occurred in 12 different parliaments...this would be reassuring, anyway, if true.

Our Friends Across The Pond

2005-07-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Over here in America, I expect most of us are just like me and don't pay a fig of attention to the EU. Some of us might let out a cheer when a referendum on the EU Constitution fails, but as for actually reading the EU Constitution...let's just say that if you want a written Constitution, you could do a lot worse than ours - and the EU Constitution proves it. For all the flaws of that old chestnut from 1787, at least it's concise. Where as that European monstrosity looks suspiciously as if it were designed to discourage casual reading.

Alas for the EU that I had a slow work day today!

Now as I am an American who, again, knows zilch about the EU, my readers whose governments are members of that august body (let's call them Boeciana and Bettina), perhaps do not expect any new observations on said august body to emanate from said ignorant American.

Probably not, but as an American, I have the advantage of an historical experience that my European brethren lack (how often can an American say THAT?), unless they are familiar with American history - American legal history to be precise. We have some knowledge, through the sad history of our own Constitution and its Amendments, as to what, exactly, happens to a written Constitution as the decades progress. And in the EU's case, if they can push their Constitution through (and since every parliamentary vote on the Constitution has been something like 70-4 or worse, I do not expect that such a minor road-block as the popular will, can stop it for long), I think that events will proceed considerably faster than in our case.

Of course, it hardly takes an experience gleaned from history, to notice the most obvious things - first, that the areas of "shared competence" would swiftly become areas of "exclusive competence" under another name, and that the "principle of subsidiarity" which is supposed to prevent this, will be a feeble reed. Subsidiarity is a fine principle but a rotten law; you might as well put "the EU shall be governed with common sense" into the Constitution while you're at it. Perhaps throw in that the EU parliament should be composed of "good guys" - or is that actually in there? Second, that the areas of "shared competence" can be tweaked to encompass just about anything:

"1. The Union shall share competence with the Member States where the Constitution confers on it a competence which does not relate to the areas referred to in Articles I-13 and I-17.

2. Shared competence between the Union and the Member States applies in the following principal areas:

(a) internal market;

(b) social policy, for the aspects defined in Part III;

(d) agriculture and fisheries, excluding the conservation of marine biological resources;

(e) environment;

(f) consumer protection;

(g) transport;

(h) trans-European networks;

(i) energy;

(j) area of freedom, security and justice;

(k) common safety concerns in public health matters, for the aspects defined in Part III.

3. In the areas of research, technological development and space, the Union shall have competence to carry out activities, in particular to define and implement programmes; however, the exercise of that competence shall not result in Member States being prevented from exercising theirs.

4. In the areas of development cooperation and humanitarian aid, the Union shall have competence to carry out activities and conduct a common policy; however, the exercise of that competence shall not result in Member States being prevented from exercising theirs."

Needless to say, you have to go to the mysterious part III to get the juicy details - can't make things too easy for the casual reader, right? But the main point is clear - "freedom, security, justice", "social policy", "transportation" - the EU would have "shared competence" in all this, and throw in the economy for good measure. Just what is left?

It's getting late, and I haven't said all that can be said on this nonsense, but I'll mention one more thing: google "EU Constitution", and the first thing that comes up is this lovely little piece, which is either Pollyanish in the extreme, or merely mendacious. Some interesting bits:

'The Union is said to be subsidiary to member states and can act only in those areas where "the objectives of the intended action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the member states but can rather... be better achieved at Union level."'

Really? As I understood it, the EU is to be governed "in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity", which is a very different thing indeed; it means that the Member States are subsidiary, but their (inferior) authority will be respected except in cases where the (superior) authority of the EU is needed. Maybe I missed something; I'll check back on this later. As it is, I suspect the BBC writer did not really know what he was talking about.

"It [the office of the EU Foreign Minister] sounds grand, but the minister will only be able to speak on the EU's behalf when there is an agreed or common policy,"

This is a very important and very common idea: "common policy". In reference to war, the BBC interprets it thus:

"It does not mean that a common foreign or defence policy will be imposed on member states. Each one will retain a right of veto and can go its own way."

Again, I have yet to find that in the Constitution. This, in turn, illustrates a problem with the EU Constitution that our, in general, did not share: the framers of this Constitution are extremely reluctant to explain exactly what happens when the EU clashes with national governments. That alone, apart from the specifics of the cases, is rather worrying.

Friday

2005-07-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how much you can learn just by reading those books you never got around to reading. After perusing Aristotle's Poetics or Metaphysics, it's amusing to see the similarities between his time and ours - the bloviating critics, the latest trendy thinkers, the poseur artists, the real artists, the intellectual fads that make no sense in retrospect (Pythagorean numerology? I had no idea how significant a force this was in Greek thought, including Plato. Even Aristotle's refutation of it is nearly incomprehensible, much less the attraction of the original theory). Yet there was a great gulf as well - they stood at the beginning of a long tradition, of which we stand at the end. There was a freshness to their speculations, even the silly ones; looking at these "giants" of earlier days, I cannot help reflecting on the terrible age of our civilization - it is all the more striking in that it does not necessarily manifest itself in individuals, who presumably feel as young and vigorous as they ever did; it is only their ideas that are clouded and maimed by half-remembered arguments in centuries-old disputes, which applies not only to philosophy but to the modern mind in general (a mindset from which I scarcely exempt myself).

It also sheds a bit of light on Belloc's contempt for the "abolition of Homer"; Aristotle speaks of him quite definitely as one, quite real man (and he does not do this in the manner of one who declines to dispute some commonplace notion; he speaks of Homer's magnificence in quite a fannish-sounding way, which implies a very definite opinion as to Homer's existence. Though I've heard that the Poetics, in turn, have their own dubious passages; whether this all really came from Aristotle I don't know), and it displays a certain arrogance to simply brush aside this certitude. After all, neither he nor any of his contemporaries were ever asked to defend their view that Homer was real - what crushing proofs might they have offered, against the scholarly objections to his existence? It is absurd to say that merely because men have applied certain analytical techniques to the Illiad and Odyssey, that we are better-placed than Aristotle to pronounce on such a matter. Even in linguistic concerns they had enourmous advantages that we lack; ancient Greek was a living language that they knew with an intimacy which simply cannot be replicated today. Furthermore, in considering deviations in style, it is obvious that we must know the degree of eccentricity typical in a single writer, or the degree of variation typical between writers; of these, the ancient Greeks had a vastly superior knowledge.

Thursday

2005-07-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

I don't usually worry about what's going to become of our civilization; what point is there in doing so, after all, unless some specific course of action suggests itself? Yet when we hear about what happened today in London, I wonder - how long will these attacks continue, and if it be much longer, how well can we endure it?

Since the invention of explosives, attacks of this sort have been possible, yet they have generally not been a danger - I seem to recall that anarchist groups committed a number of bombings in Edwardian England, and likewise in other parts of the civilized world they have occurred at various times, but for the most part bombs have not been used in public places by civilians, and not because of technical difficulties but because this sort of thing "wasn't done".

Now, there are apparently a good many savages who are willing to do it - for how long? It is not impossible to restructure our societies so that attacks of this sort cannot happen, but this would require a radical upheaval and many difficult concessions on our part, and so for some time we will all be vulnerable to such bombings. There will be terrorists willing to take advantage of this - but how many? Will they become less numerous, or more? And if more, what will happen? Will we simply try to weather the storm, or will this become impossible as the deaths increase? Will we institute such draconian security measures as would actually prevent such mass murders? Or will we take the path of appeasement? The last course is the most frightening possibility, yet all of them are repugnant.

Wednesday

2005-07-06T19:33:00.000-07:00

Back when I read science fiction all the time, I also read a bit about science fiction, which naturally introduced me to an (in ordinary circles) highly-obscure magazine editor from the 30's and 40's named John W. Campbell. To his "stable" of American science-fiction writers, he was practically a father-figure (Robert Heinlein being a notable exception; for all his blind spots, grotesqueries and obsceneties, Heinlein possessed the only noteworthy intellect among the sf writers of the day - he was something of a belated American "answer" to Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells - and was not overawed by the great editor). Campbell inspired or simply provided many of their story ideas, and taught them (inasmuch as they ever learned it) the craft of writing. One of them returned the favor by inventing his own religion and converting Campbell, along with the Canadian sf-writer A.E. van Vogt - this was L. Ron Hubbard, inventor of "Dianetics", later renamed "Scientology". But enough history; the point is that Campbell often urged his writers to write about "something that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man." It was not something at which they were particularly successful.

The main reason that anyone would find this a tall order, of course, is that if you want to think as well as a man, you often do have to think like a man. Trying to find some sort of "alternate way of thinking" is not merely difficult through the alienness of what one is trying to imagine; it is difficult because it is impossible.

Of course one can imagine an intelligent being whose passions and appetites are very different or absent. But this is different. And I think that a lot of the controversy over "metaphysics" has much to do with the belief that it really is possible to think differently from a human being in some very fundamental ways. After all, Kant's question about whether "such a thing as the metaphysical is at all possible" (sorry, don't know original German) is quite silly; anyone who doesn't believe in "the metaphysical" doesn't believe in mathematics. To be sure, there are plenty of people who claim not to believe in mathematics, and consider it merely a human construct whose conclusions reflect no absolute truth but are merely the "results" of playing by certain "rules". Some of these people are mathematicians themselves, but this does not make them any less absurd. Their opinions are manifest sophistry and can be dismissed for our purposes, and so the fact that there are non-physical things about which we can make true statements is not seriously questionable.

The question is whether our classifications and divisions are subject to the same standard of absolute truth or falsity, or whether they are merely conveniences got up for the occasion, no more true or false than a wrench is true or false. Three pertinent questions are: do people classify things in the same way? If they don't, are some of them just doing it wrong? And if they do, is it still possible some differently-constructed mind could adhere to a different scheme and get along just fine? Not to belabor the obvious too much, but we generally divide the world into different substances or "things", their parts, and their qualities. We sort all these into genera and species - that is, "general" classifications, "specific" classifications within the genus, and substances which belong to the species.

It is plain enough that if a creature thinks of the world in the same way, it more or less "thinks like a man"; such a creature could understand us, and we it. It is also fairly clear that while clever people may "talk a good game" against this scheme of operation, insisting that divisions are false and all is one, or that classifications are false and all is sundered, they still divide and classify when they are not lecturing us on evils of same, and even when they are. They say that it is merely a matter of "convenience" that they make such "provisional statements" or some such, but is there any conceivable situation where these provisions are unnecessary? Or where these "provisional statements" must not be provided on much the same lines as human beings have always provided them? And if certain habits and laws of division and classification are invariably necessary to thought, it is a mere matter of words to insist that division and class are still not "absolute" and that the "metaphysical" is still just a lot of moonshine.

In light of all this, it is interesting to consider the various attempts of ambitious sf-writers to hypothesize a creature that thinks along entirely different lines, whether an alien, or a human being treated with Special Formula X - if you are not familiar with the latter story, allow me to summarize it:

Day 1: the doctors have advised me to keep a journal of my progress as they begin the injections of Special Formula X.

Day 7: I impressed my physician considerably by singing the libretto of "The HMS Penafore" backwards. Special Formula X appears to be having unusual effects. I do not think I have yet reached my full potential.

Day 17: from the manner in which my doctor scratched his earlobe, I immediately deduced that in 17 minutes a man named George with a brown - no, rust-colored, yes rust-colored - mustache will knock me over the head and take me to a laboratory where my brain will be pickled and cut into little slices. Breaking out of the hospital was of course child's play; I am currently fleeing the governments of several countries - not that this is difficult or anything.

Day 25: human problems have ceased to interest my gigantic intellect. I think that I will take up golf.

Day 30: attempting to express my thoughts in human language is excruciatingly painful and absurd; I feel as if I am trying to weave a tapestry with an inch-thick needle while wearing greased oven mitts. However I will continue bloviating in this vein until some sort of dramatic resolution is reached.

Day 35: some sort of dramatic resolution is reached.

Anyway, the "different ways of thinking" that they devise, seem only to reinforce the conclusion that as far as rational thought is concerned, it's largely our way or the highway. Whenever the alien scheme diverges from our own, it is manifestly riddled with logical and practical flaws. But at least these writers deserve credit for attempting, albeit unsystematically, to consider the question "what other metaphysical framework could possibly make sense?" instead of blithely declaring that "metaphysics" is somehow invalid because it is a "human construct", without honestly considering if any other construct is possible, or if this construct is in fact dispensible - or in what sense an inevitable and indispensable "construct" is really a construct at all (certainly it is, in some sense, inasmuch as metaphysical terms and so forth were invented by men), and in what sense it exists outside of any human "construction".

Monday

2005-07-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Well, Blogimus is now recognized by the United States government as really, really completely grown-up (so long as he isn't running for president). The purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages by said Blogimus is now permitted in all states of the Union.

In celebrating the conclusion of my twenty-first year, I dined on a refined repast of bratwurst, hamburger, New Castle beer (or ale or whatever it is), fruit salad, tortilla chips, cake & ice cream, and two glasses of Irish whiskey (thanks to a friend who presented me with a bottle of Jameson's). That and lots of coke (including some to cut the whiskey when I wimped out of drinking it straight). I was a bit quiet and slightly-off balance afterwards, so I'm probably not constituted for heroic feats of alcohol consumption, but I don't seem to have inherited the complete non-tolerance for the sauce that some family members exhibit.

Verdict: beer and whiskey both have their virtues, but hard liquor still reminds me a bit too much of the solvents in organic chemistry lab. I suppose this is an accident of history, and if I'd gone to college later, non-polar organic solvents would remind me of hard liquor. Anyway, unless you're one to get excited about a reduction in car-insurance rates at age 25, this is the last big milestone except for the "excuse to get mopey over rapid passage of time" birthdays that end in zero. Hooray, I think.

Friday

2005-07-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

Deo gratias - Lynn's daughter is doing much better.

Now some time ago I talked about the perspective of a convert - which is not very possible, since our perspectives are often quite different on account of where we came from. But there is more to conversion than just a perspective.

There are two great tasks with which a convert is confronted, closely-linked but not identical, though alas (as was much the case with myself) the convert may not recognize them clearly. The first, is progress in virtue; this is not a task that he accomplishes himself, but in which he must co-operate with God's grace. Through Faith, Hope and Charity we have a voice, as it were, with which we praise God; without them, we are mute when we sing His praises. And so, like all Catholics, we must cultivate this voice, and those of our brothers and sisters; this is the task of our life on earth.

But there is a second task which is, learning to think with the Church, to "think Catholic". While most of us are not going to be perfect in virtue anytime in this life, the latter goal is not merely attainable, but regularly attained - yet regularly unattained as well, even by cradle Catholics nowadays, but of course converts must be especially zealous in adopting the ways of the Church who adopted them.

Now how do you go about doing this? Hah, this is a blog, not a book. Be realistic. But supposing, as inevitably happens, that some converts (like me) are not yet "all there" in this regard, I have a few ideas, whose value you must judge for yourselves, on conduct towards and from these persons.

On the one hand, if one of us should say something that betrays a lack, in depth of understanding, which could probably or definitely be attributed to his status as a recent convert, then a cradle Catholic should be circumspect in criticizing this. Not, mind you, to the point where such circumspection would be harmful - but as an analogy, consider the circumstances and the manner in which you would (or would not) inform an ugly person that he is ugly. For the situations are alike, in that the fault of both, is essentially not a moral fault. This is important, because in spite of our instinctive dislike for rebuke, a just person will accept a just rebuke regarding his conduct. But unless a person is very virtuous indeed, he will be much wounded by an earnest criticism of a non-moral fault, and not without cause, when these criticisms are framed as rebukes. Rebukes are meant to reform conduct, and thus rebuking a man for his ugliness is unjust - even were he responsible for his own ugliness, and could end it, yet it is strictly speaking his fostering of ugliness rather than the ugliness itself that deserves rebuke, so that even there, some sting of injustice may remain in such criticisms.

Now if an ugly person were making a fool of himself under the supposition that he were beautiful, it might be best to take him aside and explain to him, gently if possible but frankly if necessary, that his mug is not an especially winsome one. Likewise a recent convert who has become "puffed up with knowledge" and thinks himself qualified to advise those from whom he should instead receive advice (nobody like that on THIS blog, fortunately...ermmm), should be taken aside and etc. etc. But if the convert express some silly but harmless opinion, then it would be unkind and pointlessly provocative to say, "when you've learned a bit more, you'll think differently." It is not, after all, converts alone who become puffed up with knowledge.

On the side of the converts, the obvious advice - do not seek to instruct, but to learn, and so forth - is obviously good. Do not dismiss, or even criticize, what you do not understand - but this is insufficient, as we may convince ourselves we understand something when we do not. Instead I would say, do not criticize whatever is foreign to you in the Church, unless it be some obviously improper intrusion. Our doctrine is beyond criticism, so that any imagination of error in this cannot be tolerated; I speak rather of what is not essential to the Faith. Weird practices in piety, overly (as you see it) rigorous or lax theological opinions - some things you will recognize as intrusions of the world you so gladly left behind, and the convert need not feel reluctant to dismiss Haugen/Haas music or Liberation Theology or any of the other reams of worldly nonsense we must put up with nowadays; the example of many cradle Catholics earnestly defending these things need carry no weight with us. An infant baptism and a youthful confirmation are no guarantor against folly. But that which is new to us, and clearly "a Catholic thing" in the sense that you will find it nowhere among unbelievers (though it need not be a good thing for all that) yet also repulsive to us or simply dull and unappealing, we should not judge, unless reason itself most clearly condemns it - and even then, we would do well not to stray beyond the conclusions of more experienced Catholics than ourselves.

And readers asking the question, "and what on earth would this blog look like if Blogimus followed his own advice?" will be shot on sight (Lynn is exempted from this on the grounds that she would shoot back).

Thursday

2005-06-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

Lynn's daughter is in the hospital after getting into the medicine cabinet; please keep her and her family in your prayers.

Wednesday

2005-06-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

It is a relief to hear that I am permitted to shut up during Mass, but I feel so awkward and sullen in doing so that (except during the "Communion hymn") I generally pick up the hymnal and sing along. Not always with ease, however. The pitch ranges are, indeed, not ideal for the male voice; I didn't realize how "non-ideal" until it occured to me, during a hymn that ranged from middle e-flat to high e-flat, that I was not singing an octave below the notation, but two octaves. For a man with the same range but less of an ear for pitch, I can't imagine this would be easy.

While on the subject of masculinity, I found through this post by Domenico Bettinelli Jr., this other post on the vice of effeminacy. It is a subject on which, to put it mildly, our culture has many popular misconceptions.

Now it is true, as is often said, that not all effeminate men are homosexual, and perhaps the converse is true as well - that is, there are certainly homosexuals who do not lisp, or adopt a repellent smoothness of tone, but whether they still display this vice in less overt ways, is another matter. But sodomy and effeminacy are closely linked, this much is clear, and it is hardly sufficient to say "they are not the same, though often associated." Obviously they spring from the same root, which is an attachment to pleasures, not merely to some particular pleasure, but an unwillingness to forgo pleasure per se. Now a consequence of this is that the effeminate indulge in even minor pleasures, that others would hardly so much as notice, because a sort of low-level "drone" of pleasure is necessary to them. Hence the peculiarities of manner and voice - a plain and manly manner and voice are not especially pleasing, and so these are "embellished".

Whence, however, comes this attachment? Obviously through the encouragement of the will, but it is equally clear that some types of men are more susceptible to this vice than others. These are those who are, firstly, unusually sensitive to pleasing sights, sounds, etc., and hence the stereotype that the effeminate generally have much better taste than normal men.

Yet it shows the perversion and lowness of our culture, that men would therefore disparage the more refined arts, as being unworthy of manhood. Were any of these "macho men" to travel back to, say, the 19th century (I admit that this is a somewhat unlikely contingency), they would do well to keep these opinions to themselves, lest some fellow with a fondness for opera, for dancing, and for fine wine happened also to enjoy boxing, or worse yet fencing or shooting (nor would this combination be an oddity). In a healthy culture, the most masculine of men may yet be initiates in the most cultivated arts - there is a reason that such things are called "cultivated", since in most men they must indeed be cultivated carefully. In a culture that despises beauty, only those few who can acquire unaided a love for these arts, will learn them.

Thus if we should simply say that homosexuality is a disordered inclination, and stop there, or at best add that it is associated (somehow) with effeminacy, and tell them that they should not "define themselves by their sexuality", the sodomites will consider their own (correct) intuition that this inclination is bound up with many other of their qualities, such that their "sexuality" cannot be separated from the rest of their personality. Our bald repetition of the moral facts, uncoupled with psychological insight, will thus seem to them to describe an unreal situation, and present to them a mere stumbling-block, however correct our statements. Neither were Job's comforters all incorrect, but they are not held up as models.

For someone who is "on the spot" in the matter, such baldness cannot always be helped. But when we have time to think on the matter, we should explain things more completely. It is true that they should not "define themselves by their sexuality", but these disordered inclinations exist for a deeper psychological reason, and which reason determines enough of a person's character that in some limited sense, they may indeed have cause to "define themselves" by that. In other words, in saying that their inclinations are not natural, we should also acknowledge how (in part) the root of these inclinations is in fact natural, and integral to their character. In referring to an atypical sensitivity that characterizes the effeminate, we only begin to sketch out what, exactly, this character type consists of. But it is a start, anyway, to at least focus on the deeper causes rather than the evaluating only specific acts and inclinations towards those acts. Any argument gains in force, the further it traces back the reasons for its conclusion - and if we do not really bother to attempt this, then we are, as it were, throwing our arguments out to avoid blame for keeping silent, rather than earnestly attempting to convince.

Tuesday

2005-06-28T21:08:00.000-07:00

It is a commonplace that those spiritual writings which we least enjoy reading, are those from which we most benefit. But to benefit from those writings that offend us, it is necessary, or at least very helpful, to tame in ourselves that spirit which balks at whatever offense is given, framing plausible objections (clothed always in the air of righteousness, and not of mere self-service) that just happen to release us from difficult obligations.

For those of us who have read enough, that we may privately convict ourselves of learning, this sort of thing is very easy. There are many spiritualities, you say, and the teaching that galls you does not display the sort of spirituality that best suits you. Obviously this type of inference is fallacious; what be the means of determining which spiritual method is "for us" and which is not, I do not know, but it cannot be merely pleasantness, or the absence of bitterness, since any authentic spirituality will demand that we take up the cross - which is always bitter and repellant to our desires, or it is not the cross. Yet it is easy to think this way.

Surely this is one of the reasons that we have Doctors of the Church - did men merely flock to the great teacher, and bask in the brilliance and clarity of his doctrine, the list of thirty-three Doctors would be merely a "best-of" list, meant to direct us to what is manifestly good. But instead, the very qualities that are used to distinguish one Doctor from another, could serve as a guide to what offends us about them. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, teaches with the passionless serenity of an angel - which many find comforting, and one could wonder, who would object to the angelic? Yet angels do not have passions, or any frailty of the flesh. I am often tempted to shout at him "stay! Stay! Have you no human feeling? Your conclusions are crushing to mere flesh and blood such as ourselves!" And thus, no doubt, have cried out many - but it is exactly when his humble and angelic mind has concluded in something stern and harsh-seeming, that we should most value his instruction. And St. John of the Cross, the Mystic Doctor - what could be wrong with the mystic, who is consumed in his love for God? Yet if you can read him without a frequent unease, without murmuring "surely I don't have to do this, do I?" then you are a much better person than I, which is likely. Perhaps their status as Doctors and Doctors of the Church - not Doctors of "persons with this sort of spirituality", but simply of "the Church" - is partly a check for those of us who would otherwise say, "this is what one school has said, but there is this other...."

Monday

2005-06-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I think we all find a bit difficult to examine is the exact way that we think. After all, we're generally not too familiar with any other mode of thought - even if we once had one, we've mostly forgotten it, so it is easy enough to think of our own way of thinking as simply "thinking". To a great degree this is true; if there were not some act "thought" which is performed by all thinkers, we wouldn't all be thinking, now would we?

And I would suppose that correct thought in one person will be rather similar to correct thought in another - taking different paths, perhaps conducted with a different style, but much the same. But while the nature of a thing is one, departures from that nature are many, so that erroneous habits of thought, can make the thought of one person very different from the thought of another - without a realization of this difference coming to either. Or if one of them should realize the gap, perhaps he will attribute it to a mere difference of character.

This is by way of explaining how I - and perhaps others - could, at such an advanced age, fail to notice a problem that has stared me in the face for so long. And as, by the nature of the thing, I have no way of knowing the scale of this problem in society at large (though I have my guesses), I can only speculate that a description of this particular error may be useful to my audience - not so much in correcting their own thought, since I am confident that my readers (and hello to both of you!) are much more clear-headed than myself, but in explaining more general trends.

The error is one that I have long grasped inchoately, but whose definition I have only now realized: the use of the imagination in abstract thought. Note, not "the erroneous" or "the excessive use" of etc., but any use whatsoever. If this statement be thought too sweeping, I can only say that that very sweeping quality is what prevented me from seeing its correctness, yet I think it is plain enough when we consider the things we are dealing with.

Abstract and general things are by definition imperceptible; therefore the imagination is clearly but a hindrance in considering them, since it imitates the perceptible. This seems plain enough - the question, then, is how can we say any person of intelligence would use the imagination in abstract thought, since it clearly incapable of performing the proper service?

While the imagination imitates the perceptible, there are certain representations of the imagination that do not imitate anything perceptible by a human sense organ; although my understanding of psychology is admittedly minimal, I would say that these representations are like in kind to its representations of the perceptible (chiefly because the two are often blended seamlessly - notice the state of the mind when half-awake, where it often mixes an imagination of some visual thing, with some incoherent representation that we cannot even comprehend after waking), so that the nature of the imagination (that it imitates the perceptible) is unchanged by the fact that certain of its representations cannot, in fact, be derived from any extant organ of sense.

So when we are contemplating a concept, the imagination will often form one of these non-visual or semi-visual representations that somehow conforms (as we think) to the concept. And it is surprisingly easy (at least for me) to think that these representations are somehow part and parcel of the concept in my mind, rather than extraneous additions. A person may have the wit to see these representations as imperfections, yet still think of them as imperfections necessary either to the human mind in general, or to his mind in particular. He may try to minimize them in a sort of intellectual embarrasment, but only thereby reduce them to something extremely vague yet quite as extant - more of an atmosphere than an image.

In fact it is my theory (which I will not yet state as a certainty) that they should and can be dispensed with. As for why the formation of these representations, in association with ideas, should be so tempting to some, there is more than one possible answer. For one, they hold forth the allure of self-understanding: when we hold these images in our mind as we think, we may flatter ourselves that we are observing (and regulating, if need be) the very processes of our own thought. Now in my own case, I am the sort of person who is always turning around to make sure he really closed the refridgerator door all the way, etc., so the thought of, as it were, comprehending my own comprehension is a comforting one. I can thereby ensure (or think to ensure) that everything is working properly, the fridge is really closed, the conclusion really follows from these premises, the premises are really correct, etc. This is clearly not a ubiquitous defect, but it may be that other pressures produce the same result: an obvious example would be a simple fondness for the imagination itself, such that abstract thought would be too dull and dry unless associated with indistinct representations, which give it life and color (perhaps even literal color in some degree).

Now what is the harm of these representations? I can see at least a twofold harm, of enourmous magnitude. Firstly, these representations, like all things perceptible, make an impression upon our aesthetic sense. It is, in its way, almost horrifying to consider the absurdities to which a person's thought may descend by this means. For one can, perhaps all unknowing, reject some reasonable school of thought (or beyond that, even the Christian religion) for the literal reason that one finds it ugly, or that it stirs some unpleasant emotion. All because of the picture that one has happened to hang over the idea! And likewise one may embrace some really fatuous idea because one has associated it with an appealing representation (of course the apportionment of pleasant and unpleasant associations is not random but dependent largely on the person's initial prejudices, so that the effect of these associations is to reinforce whatever prejudices he already possesses). When people, for instance, complain of Aristotle and exalt Plato instead, I cannot help but wonder if a mere firing of the imagination is at work, for I remember rejecting (in my pre-Catholic days) St. Thomas for more or less the reasons that I hear urged against Aristotle, while my mind was bound to exactly the sort of imaginative thinking that I here describe.

Secondly, while perhaps no image can be perfectly conformed to an idea, as if we were to paint justice, nevertheless these imaginations, being much more subtle and flexible than paintings, may achieve some degree of consonance with their ideas, even a high degree. Yet if we understand a thing imperfectly, then the representation we conjure up, may only be consonant with that imperfect understanding. So if we should be offered a more perfect explanation of the thing, we may reject it, because it is not consonant with the image that we have created.

This may be particularly dangerous when these imaginations have become "entrenched" in concepts of enourmous breadth - they may then form, as it were, a formidable bulwark against the truth. Suppose an agnostic should have a concept best described as "the universe" or "everything" in his mind, and suppose he associates it with an image rather like pictures of "space", except less well-lit, with vague attachments and atmospheres that no words can describe, perhaps representing the inexorable laws of nature. Propose to him then the existence of a personal God, and he will find it dissonant with his idea of "everything". After a gap of several years, this is the closest that my memory and powers of description can come to describing my own former plight, so this is hardly an idle fancy. Any number of other, equally ludicrous cases may be thought up - and perhaps found in reality.

That this defect of the mind may be harmful in the extreme I have shown, I think. But how prevalent is it, and how may it be combated?

As for combatting the habit, I cannot claim expertise in that area, but I am finding one simple discipline to be of great use: simply say, aloud if softly, everything that I think, while making a conscious effort to avoid imagery. Both are necessary, for one's imagination may perhaps run away while one is speaking, unless it is purposely checked, while if one's discourse is conducted but mentally, one must already use one's imagination to form the words of discourse, and having been "activated", it is all too liable to extend its "range of duties" to the formation of useless associations.

While I have never heard of this exact discipline, I have heard similar advice before - there is a popular maxim (that I've never believed) "if you can't write it, you don't know it"; while essentially priggish, it contains something of the same idea, in that in writing (as, ideally, in speech) we must concentrate on the word, and not on a set of vague imaginings. With a different purpose in mind, St. Anthony (the first one) advised (according to the "Life of St. Anthony") his students to write down their thoughts, and thus spare themselves much foolishness. So I am fairly confident that I am not inventing some random practice with no sound basis - though it is perhaps only suited for a few, and that only temporarily (one would hope).

So far, in any case, I have found this practice entirely beneficial, though it need hardly be said that there are many legitimate employments for the imagination, so I could hardly advise anyone to make a general war upon this faculty - only to restrict it to where it is useful.

As for the prevalence of this problem, I have no conclusive proof, but first I think that many popular theories about the nature of thought, are most easily accounted for by assuming the theorizers to think in the above-described manner. Particularly the idea that concepts are "approximations" of the real things is hardly intelligible to one whose thought is verbal in character, but a mind saturated with images, images designed to conform in an obscure or overt manner to the things of which a given word is predicated - such a mind would easily come to such a conclusion. For the mind that thinks, properly, in words, the concept does not approximate the thing, but defines the thing.

Also, consider how much is made by psychological bloviators of "visual intelligence" and the like. It is said that our constant exposure to a bewildering smorgasboard of images from cradle to grave in modern society, has made us more "visual" than previous peoples - perhaps the bloviators are correct? I would only part ways with them at their absurd idea that this is somehow a good or even tolerable thing; rather, while such a visual "orientation" leaves the practical faculties of the intellect untouched, the power of understanding through abstraction rather than learning by experience, is crippled. But experience is what trains the practical powers of the mind, which is all that gains respect nowadays.

But it grows late, and so if ending here is a bit abrupt, yet my hand is forced. Good night to those brave few who have reached this paragraph!

The Return of Blogimus

2005-06-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

Blogimus returns to daily posting on Monday evening. Perhaps the "sleep" issue has not been entirely dealt with, but sleep or no sleep, he will allow himself no excuses and re-apply nose to electronic grindstone.

Some of you may wonder what has transpired in this intervening fallow period. Well, you know that first part of the new Batman movie -

Or do you?? Perhaps, dear reader, you have not seen this film. Now for the general non-film-goer I cannot criticize this consistent course, but those who (for instance) shelled out for "Star Wars Episode III: No, You Can't Get Your Money Back" would certainly be remiss in declining "Batman Begins". More on this in a moment.

So Bruce Wayne is off in the Himalayas learning to fight evil, or something of that sort. Everyone thinks he's dead, but in fact he only prepares for his triumphant return as...you know who. That's the idea.

This was much the same. More particularly, there is a new and important theme in the Ven. Newman's "Idea of a University" that caught my attention, and on which I wish to expand - but on Monday. Saturday is a day of laziness, and Sunday is a day of rest. So for the remainder of this post, I will discuss nothing profounder than "Batman Begins".

First of all, it is possibly the best-written film since the "Lord of the Rings" movies (although I think they were deeply inferior to the book - another subject for another time). Not that it's a complete literary masterpiece - just that you don't have to evaluate it with a highly-forgiving "movie ear" in order to enjoy it; judge it as sternly as you judge a novel, and in spite of the "erm" moments it will at least survive the examination, which is more than most films can say.

The screenplay is accredited to Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer; Nolan is the director, so the standard conclusion would be that Goyer is the real author and Nolan made enough changes to get screenwriting credit - but I'm not sure if that is true in this particular instance. Nolan also directed "Momento"; Goyer wrote the "Blade" movies. I don't really remember much of "Momento" (not a joke), but I saw an hour or so of the first "Blade" - eh, vampires, Wesley Snipes, blood-soaked sets, no thank you. Wasn't horribly-written though.

The original comic books, too, are apparently an important element in the script (that is, not merely in providing characters and so forth, but even specific lines).

Secondly, Christian Bale is a great Bruce Wayne/Batman. He is not like the Micheal Keaton (??) or Val Kilmer (?!) Batmen; he convinces the audience in both of his identities, as opposed to, say, neither. And aside from Katie Holmes, who looks way too young for her role (one is tempted to think that Gotham City recruits its assistant prosecutors from college sophomores, which certainly does something to explain the rampant crime) everybody seemed well-cast - but this comes largely from the writing, since the actors all have real characters to portray, especially Wayne/Batman (Wayne is an interesting enough character that it doesn't seem right just to call the role "Batman").

Thirdly, the film was very nice-looking - costumes, photography, all that stuff. And while a lot of movies nowadays are sort of pointlessly and extravagantly gorgeous, appearance is really rather important here, because the main character of the film dresses up as a bat to fight crime. That's par for the course in a comic book, but on the screen, it really takes some showmanship to pull that one off without looking really stupid.

But what caught my eye at the time was the moral depth of the film; in that respect it certainly clobbered, say, the Spiderman movies. There were several scenes that might have been subtitled "take THAT, consequentialists!" which certainly doesn't happen in most films.

And there's the interesting fact that Bruce Wayne is, unabashedly, an aristocrat; there's not a hint of just-plain-folksiness about him. This is not something native to the movie; the aristocratic character of Wayne/Batman is integral to his character (and completely absent in the previous awful movies, need I say).

Anyway, definitely a film worth watching. I think I'll even see it twice.

Wednesday

2005-06-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've been absent lately. Work has had me rather occupied and with little sleep to boot. And I've also found something which has eaten up a significant chunk of my time: I have discovered the midi file.

I already had a program called "Anvil Studio", which can be had for free on the web; it's a music-writing thing that lets you create midi files - or listen to them, I suppose, though Media Player or something like that is much more convenient just to listen. But I hadn't known about all the classical music available in this format. A quick overview of upsides and downsides:

Downside: that "special human touch" is obviously not present, since a midi file simply tells you the notes, the "instrument" used, and various other stuff like tempo and volume, and allows your synthesizer to supply its own notion of this or that "instrument". A further downside is that Windows Media Player, Anvil's player, and presumably all the other free synthesizers have some profound deficiencies in their instrument samples. In particular, the solo string instruments sound like kazoos, or perhaps really cheap accordians; apparently this is because there are a great many ways to sound a violin-type instrument, and many important of these sounds are important to the playing of the instrument, and you can only sample one (unless you get a non-free synthesizer, with greater sophistication in sounds). The string ensemble samples are a bit better, but by far the best (I think) is what Anvil calls the "acoustic grand" sample (there are not so many ways to sound a piano as a violin - you push the key, either hard or not-so-hard), and in my opinion the best course with all of these classical midi files is to take the file, open it up with Anvil, and change all the instruments to "acoustic grand" (this is exceedingly easy to do) if that is not the original setting for all the instrument tracks. Think of it this way: it sounds pretty much like a piano, and just about any important (and non-vocal) classical work can be played on one or two pianos quite satisfactorily. Which is a bit suspicious in my opinion, seeing as most composers, at least post-1800, worked with a piano at hand....

Upside: for a great many pieces, that special human touch is shockingly irrelevant! Not only that, but those markings such as "f" and "p" and "mf" that you may have seen on music scores, and whose meaning has apparently been lost to human musicians, are taken quite seriously in many of these midi files. This means that the pianissimo passages, so often the helpless prey of strong-fingered young pianists, are often much more expressive than the human renditions of these things that I have heard.

More importantly, the harmonies can be heard with great clarity, far better than any recording provides. I've been to very few live performances, so I can't compare the quality to that, but for the most part these files are much, much better than cd's in my opinion. Music, unlike painting or poetry, is concerned with subtleties of technique only as a minor, secondary matter; the important things are chords and melodic lines, and if the fine points of timbre and fingering can be sacrificed for a much-improved clarity in the basic musical elements, it is well worth the exchange. This is why, whereas many a painting is rendered almost worthless by transfer to a large color print in a book, and many a poem by translation, a good piece of music can survive very violent acts of transcription. I seem to remember Bach was pretty cavalier about transcriptions, and many a composer has nonchalantly played his symphonies on a piano for the amusement of his friends - this, apparently, Beethoven did with the first movement of his (unwritten) Tenth Symphony. But then I've already mentioned that suspiciously-ever-present piano.

Further upside: because the midi file doesn't record actual sounds, but only directions for producing sounds, it is small and easy to download for non-high-speed-Internet folks such as myself.

Lastly: if you go and download Anvil at the link above, (or some other program if you can find or already have a better one), these midi's basically provide you with a score as well as something to listen to. Obviously not everyone would find that of interest.

Unfortunately, www.classicalarchives.com (I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I'm pretty convinced that this is far and away the best classical midi resource on the web) does, firstly, require a $25/year membership fee if you want access to the compacted zip files and practically-unlimited downloads (1000 files/month cap, but each zip file, which will contain several or even dozens of midi's, counts as just one file - so there's no conceivable reason to exceed that monthly limit); otherwise, their free membership allows you to download 5 files a day - and since most pieces are recorded in their individual movements, this means basically one large work per day. For my purposes, I found that a bit restrictive and shelled out the 25 bucks, but for others this may be more than enough.

Also their Dvorak section is not all that it might be. This site at least provides us with the full Piano Quintet; for the full Cello Concerto I can only pine.... Other composers are also missing important works - however, every Beethoven Symphony, Piano Sonata and String Quartet has made its way in there, I notice. Some passages in the late quartets are much illuminated here; the weird, confusing allegro part at the beginning of the Great Fugue, the first and last movements to op. 132 - and the op.131 presto (movement 5) is simply transformed (op. 131 andante is still 15 minutes of deathly boredom - yes, that's horrible of me, I have no taste). Op. 135 benefits the most overall - though that ridiculous repetitive passage in the vivace is still just as ridiculous. On the piano, Hammerklavier sonata is vastly improved over recordings, Diabelli variations not so much.

But the Dvorak that they do have is just wonderful stuff. I never realized just how good that fellow was. And how very, very strange.

Post-Dvorak composers are mostly absent from classicalarchives.com due to copyrights on the scores, but why one would wish to listen to a post-Dvorak composer is something I can scarcely fathom.

The Boldness of the Saints

2005-06-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

It is a commonplace that the saints are known to make remarks that a pious but less-holy Catholic would shrink from uttering. I think St. John Vianney, when asked with incredulity whether he meant to say that his favorite patroness saint actually obeyed him, said more or less "why not? God Himself obeys me every time I say Mass." Possibly there are translation issues, but in any case this is a perfect example of the sort of thing that I'm talking about, in case you (as constantly happens to me) were suffering from a temporary shortage of particular instances, or did not see exactly what sort of remark I was referring to.

This, of course, is no mere matter of rhetorical eccentricity, but shows forth the difference in simplicity, trust, and understanding that separates ourselves from the saints.

Yet I wonder if some of the problems we have nowadays, result from a sort of infatuation with this boldness, and a desire to posess it for ourselves, without considering it but a minor fruit of a much more important effort - the journey to sanctity. Not so much a desire to make bold-sounding statements, though I wonder if this has motivated some of the odder, technically-orthodox-but-highly-discordant statements that emanate from theologians occasionally. Rather, a desire to live with the sort of open, innocent joy that characterizes the saints and prompts their more striking exuberances, without accepting the only path to this joy, which is the cross. In a happy metaphor, we might say that they want the fruit without the tree. But it is not, I think, simply a desire to have things without effort, but a confusion of cause and effect - as if, by singing happy songs and saying happy things, we will make ourselves happy.

And conversely, I wonder if many complaints about the "bad old days", are not a mistaking of consequence for origin. Thus the sneers about "rules-based" Catholicism, or excesses in piety, or whatever else you care to name - it is possible that these were very real problems, while the criticisms themselves are yet forceless. For a poor trust and understanding of God, will naturally make our religion more formalistic, for instance as we are more stiff and formal with a fellow mortal whom we do not well trust or understand. To attack the formalism as if it were the ill and not the symptom, is like trying to overcome a lack of acquaintance by an exaggerated informality, which is surely quite hideous. Thus, we can either live divorced from the realities of human nature, or say that the only way to eradicate the external flaws of the old days, is go so far as to eradicate sin entirely - which is not given us to do - or else to give ourselves up to something still worse than those earlier faults. But this is the merest speculation, since I am neither an historian nor a spiritual expert, and so doubly unqualified to judge such matters.

Lean Tuesday

2005-06-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

Alas, the lean kine have devoured the fat here at Blogimus Maximus - but this is partly a temporary (I hope) problem arising from lack of sleep-adjustment; I'm now staggering into work about an hour before I was even awake last week. Tomorrow, I'll see if we don't have a bit of grain stored up after all....

Friday

2005-06-03T20:02:00.000-07:00

Alas, the frequent and rather-lengthy posts of this week are akin to the years of gathering to which the Egyptians so wisely applied themselves, to be followed by the corresponding years of leanness. I have a temporary job starting on Monday, lasting perhaps a month, and while this will scarcely prevent me from blogging, it will doubtless have a detrimental effect on my output.

Speaking of months, this is the exact remaining time prior to my twenty-first birthday, meaning that people will tell me, "hey, now you can get drunk!" and I will say, "hrm." Blogimus is probably eccentric enough while sober.

Thursday

2005-06-02T20:53:00.000-07:00

In the past few days I have spoken positively of the Ven. Newman's Idea of a University, but only in piecemeal, with reference to individual parts that attracted my notice. But for those who have not read the book, I must add that the breadth and depth of this work are truly astonishing. I had, all unknowing, passed this work over for the reason that its subject-matter was too narrow, judging from the title. No doubt Universities are all very well, but I could see little profit in reading a book about the idea of one, whatever it was. That I rejected this work for its presumed narrowness is quite comical, as I can see now. This is not simply a book about a university; it is a book about the human intellect, and a prediction of what lay in store for us, did we abandon the principles on which he bases education. We have, and all the things that he, not only warned against explicitly, but implied - in some cases, perhaps unintentionally - as the alternative to his ideal of education, have come to pass.

I consider it an especially useful tool in demonstrating the bankruptcy of our current educational system. For the problem with so many would-be reformers of this system, is that they see the wrongs but fail to see, as it were, the right. That is, they do not realize how wrong we have gone, because they do not know how to go right. In the most public, clamorous proposals for reform, this inadequacy is so crude that even those who have, themselves, a woeful notion of true education, can nonetheless see that the proposed reforms are utterly superficial and insubstantial - these witless reforms involving "improved test scores", for instance.

Most importantly, the impoverished educational ideals of any would-be reformers not only weaken their potential, but weaken their persuasiveness. For since their own ideal system, is but a meagre improvement over the current one, and since most people will have the wit to recognize or intuit this, they will not become particularly "worked up" over it. They may, perhaps, acknowledge that the reforms would improve the schools markedly, but this marked improvement will not seem to them worth the trouble - first, for the direct reason that the proposals are not so great, but also because the proposals, in their unimpressiveness, fail to put the current situation in perspective. That is, if people had in their minds a proper notion of what education should be, the current system would strike them as abhorrent and intolerable; having instead a corrupt ideal, the reality does not strike so horrid a discord.

Yet the greatest virtue in his work is not that it holds forth an ideal of liberal education, for many other authors have done the same; the great virtue of it is that he puts this idea in perspective, and shows its place in the human mind and in human society. If an author were merely to discourse upon the enlargement and refinement of the intellect, and how excellent these pursuits are, then he would leave you with little idea of the importance of these pursuits, but only the general idea that they were good. Yes, he would likely spend much time exhorting you as to the great importance of a liberal education, with many clever and sound arguments to back it, but in the face of such partisanship one would merely be reminded of the mathematician who thinks his subject wonderful, and the economist who (possibly) thinks his subject equally wonderful, et cetera. In discoursing on the refinement of the intellect as one thing among many, rather than as the only thing worth considering, he does not merely convince us by good arguments, but allows us to see for ourselves the importance of the thing. Obviously one could quarrel with the justice of the picture that he paints, but I do not, and in any case this is a different matter from quarrelling with some individual line of reasoning.

An excess of arguments will often produce mere confusion in the mind; the greatness of Cdl. Newman's work in general, and this work in particular, is that in giving his reader such a broad and just perspective, he brings us above the obscure maze of controversy, allowing us a clear vision.

Note from the Ombudsman

2005-06-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

From the desk of the Ombudsman Maximus:

It has to be admitted that our principal writer Blogimus is quite careless with the facts - his, alas, is an imprecise and immature intellect. We would search for a replacement, but since he is willing to write all the posts and fiddle with the template for absolutely nothing, it is doubtful that this project would be profitable. So we just try to keep the fellow in line, and correct whatever errors are brought to our attention. As it happens, we must turn our editorial gaze upon this fellow:

This post brings to our notice that an earlier reference in this blog to the "godless Brahms" is open to criticism. No doubt our blogger's information was gleaned from some secularist biographer who, like so many of his type, was eager to make retroactive converts. Blogimus still trusts said biography to the extent that Brahms was an anti-clerical, but he will not wiggle away from our stern scourge of correction. If only it were possible to dock his pay - the perils of volunteer labor!

However our editorial opinion on his music (one of considerable approbation) remains adequately represented by the statements of Mr. Blogimus.

Thank you for your time,

The Ombudsman

Blogimus at the Movies

2005-06-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I should mention that I, too, have seen the new Star Wars movie. Eh. It was better than the previous two, but this is not a particularly high standard. There were still some howlers; the dialogue, the names ("General Grievous"? That's like a pro-wrestling name). And it was generally just kind of...eh.

Then, of course, there's the "Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious [another great name]=Bush" interpretation, according to which "Revenge of the Sith" is really about Bush and the war on terror. There was certainly one thing that weighed pretty heavily in favor of that reading: Anakin/Darth Vader's line about "If you're not with me...then you're my enemy!" I'm not sure if the writer shied away from the obvious "then you're against me" to avoid such a close paraphrase of Bush, or to avoid putting such a close paraphrase of Our Lord into the mouth of a villian.

Anyway, if you do try to read the film as a political allegory, it comes out as a wacko tinfoil-hat leftist allegory, since Palpatine/Sidious (Bush) is the instigator of the very rebels (Al Qaeda) that he uses as an excuse for assuming emergency powers. Yet read as such an allegory, it works fairly well except for one thing - where's the oil? If it's really a leftist allegory, it's missing the incredibly-important "war for oil" trope. Allow me to unveil my own suggestion for retroactive improvement of "Revenge of the Sith":

They needed another Sith lord (the Sith lords are the bad guys, and they're all named Darth, at least when they get together at the Sith country club and hobnob). They needed "Darth Halib-Urton", the Sith lord obsessed with putting an oil pipeline through planet Husseinia (hard and crunchy on the outside, 100% dark, chewy petroleum on the inside). Not only would it have completed the allegory, but it would have allowed all sorts of spiffy new dialogue:

Yoda could counsel young Anakin: "Anger, fear, aggression, crude oil - the dark side are they!" Or when Yoda confronts Palpatine: "Too much faith in your young apprentice you have - and in your oil futures portfolio!"

Alas for the great film that could have been....

A Form of Infidelity of the Day

2005-06-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

Now here is a section of "Idea of a University" that every Catholic should read. The whole thing is engrossing, but in particular I urge you to click ctrl-f and type in "Camarina", and read on from the heading which begins shortly above that name. Knowing as little as I do about the time in which he wrote it, it is difficult for me to say, to what extent his foresight is remarkable. But it is definitely foresight.