Due Process

Due Process:

A note from your psychologist doesn't really count as a medical diagnosis, let alone adequate due process for stripping someone of civil rights.

Two high-profile politicians today called for sweeping reforms to the nation’s mental health system that would prevent individuals deemed ill from legally purchasing firearms.

"Deemed" ill? Is that somewhat like "deem-and-pass"?

Giuliani said among the problems that led to the shooting spree, which left six dead and 19 injured, is the nation’s “inability to deal with mental illness.” He urged policy “adjustments” that balance things like an individual’s constitutional right to own firearms with keeping guns out of the hands of unstable people.

Better: but just how do we balance these issues? What is the due process that could work here? The diagnosis process, as I understand it, is largely an Occam's razor process -- that is, you look at reported symptoms and determine what is most likely. There's no lab test. No one can be sure the diagnosis is right.

There's also no meaningful appeal. Presumably, since the diagnosis has no force, you could simply get a second opinion. However, why would anyone give you one? They can't be any more certain of their diagnosis than the original doctor. That puts them in particular legal jeopardy if they give you the 'all clear': if they say you're good and they're wrong, they are personally liable for the harm you do. If they concur, or give a report that is noncommittal, they're safe. Why would they take the risk?

You might answer: "Because they believe in individual liberty." In that case, though, how can we rely on their clearance? Let us say that the ACLU were to set up a shop of psychologists who took it as their duty to clear everyone possible, in the interest of civil liberty. (Or say it was the NRA; whoever.) Now you really do need due process, to decide between the competing reports.

On what basis, though, would a court decide? Something as sentimental as the judge's personal sense of whether or not you 'seem normal'? A jury's? Shall we pursue a foundation for our fundamental liberties no more certain than that?

All of this suggests to me that we're far better off absorbing the occasional shooting -- and preparing ourselves, as individual citizens, to resist it -- than accepting this kind of restriction on basic liberty.

Yes, it's terrible. The responsibility to be prepared to stop such a thing is our own, though: it cannot reasonably be delegated to the state.

Gone

Gone

I had to help him go in the end, after all. We buried him where we're going to plant a new apple tree.

Guest

Lady Charlotte Guest:

I knew her, as you probably do as well, as the translator of the Mabinogion, which brought us the old Welsh tales of King Arthur. It turns out she was also an industrialist, first as a partner to her husband and later as a widow; and a knitter of wool comforters for the cab drivers who were, in those days, exposed to the weather. She apparently also built a shelter for them near her home, thus ensuring their comfort and her easy access to a cab if she needed one.

I Stand Corrected

I Stand Corrected:

How many spaces go after a period?

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace.

I was of the last class of my high school to take "Typing" instead of "keyboarding" as an elective. For that cause, I was taught that two spaces were proper after every period. I'm sure every single post on Grim's Hall adheres to that rule.

Oops?

Gut old Hans

Good Old Hans:

Talhoffer, that is. National Geographic has been working on a story regarding his fightbook. They've re-enacted certain scenes from it, including the ones we've discussed here that involve women fighters taking on men in judicial combat.

The photo series is here.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics:

Via xkcd.

There is an additional comment, if you leave your mouse hanging over the original, which reads: "Eäendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well."

This is why physics is incomplete without metaphysics. Physics tells you what the rules are; metaphysics is the study of why the rules are as they are. Without philosophy, therefore, physics doesn't understand its own lessons.

Consider this, which suggests that the universe has gone through multiple big-bang events, dying and being reborn. Yet each time, there is less entropy. That is to say, in every subsequent rebirth, there is less chaos and more order.

That's sort of interesting, if you're a physicist. If you're a philosopher, it's hard not to think of the Timaeus.

The universe, he proposes, is the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency. It is the handiwork of a divine Craftsman (“Demiurge,” dêmiourgos, 28a6), who, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe (kosmos).

We could go forward and note the importance of the Timeaus to neoplatonic, Christian, Jewish and Islamic thinking; we could explore the question of which of these models is most promising. It might be enough, for an internet comment, to note it in Plato: and ask the question, "If this is the rule -- that there is more order and less chaos, on a cosmic scale and across the lives of universes -- why is this the rule?"

It may not be a passing thing at all.

Scott Roots Chivalry Marriage

Sir Walter Scott on the Roots of Chivalry's Attitude to Women:

One of the less-well-read works of Scott's is his long-form essay on chivalry. There are reasons why it is not as well read as his books. For one thing, you can learn more about his actual attitude toward the thing by reading his books. In the essay he is careful to criticize, as a scholar should, but the evenhandedness of the essay often gives the impression that there is just as much to be said in blame as in praise. That clearly was not his real sentiment, as his books show us so plainly.

You will also learn more to his credit from the books than from the essay. In his books he is usually generous even to his villains, with only a few of them being without redeeming qualities. In the essay he is more clearly prejudiced, in the just the way one would expect a Scottish Tory of his age to be: for example against the Spanish (who are 'Oriental' in character, he says, and better at feeling than thinking) and Catholics generally (the faith is lowered in quality by superstition, such as reverence for saints and the Virgin Mary).

Nevertheless, it's an interesting essay for those of you who might have time to spend on it. One particular passage that struck me was his writings on how the Germanic nations had a kind of proto-chivalry toward women in their attitude toward polygamy and chastity.

[T]he opinion that it was dishonorable to hold sexual intercourse until the twentieth year was attained... must have contributed greatly to place their females in that dignified and respectable rank which they held in society. Nothing tends so much to blunt the feelings, to harden the heart, and to destroy the imagination as the worship of the Vagus Venus in early youth. Wherever women have been considered as the early, willing, and accomodating slaves of the voluptuousness of the other sex, their character has become degraded, and they have sunk into domestic drudges and bondswomen among the poor -- the captives of a harem among the more wealthy....

Hence polygamy, and all its brutalizing consequences, which were happily unknown among our Gothic ancestors. The virtuous and manly restraints imposed upon their youth were highly calculated to exalt the character of both sexes, and especially to raise the females in their own eyes and those of their lovers.

Scott is relying on Tacitus here. I think it is fair to say that he is slightly overstating the case on polygamy, as we will see; but if anything he understates Tacitus' remarks on the exaltation of women in Germanic marriage. Compared with the Roman or the Greek conception, the barbarians are much closer to our own view about the relationship between husband and wife.

Almost alone among barbarians they are content with one wife, except a very few among them, and these not from sensuality, but because their noble birth procures for them many offers of alliance. The wife does not bring a dower to the husband, but the husband to the wife. The parents and relatives are present, and pass judgment on the marriage-gifts, gifts not meant to suit a woman's taste, nor such as a bride would deck herself with, but oxen, a caparisoned steed, a shield, a lance, and a sword. With these presents the wife is espoused, and she herself in her turn brings her husband a gift of arms. This they count their strongest bond of union, these their sacred mysteries, these their gods of marriage. Lest the woman should think herself to stand apart from aspirations after noble deeds and from the perils of war, she is reminded by the ceremony which inaugurates marriage that she is her husband's partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and to dare with him alike both in in war. The yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the gift of arms proclaim this fact.

Lars Walker has occasionally written against the proposition that Tacitus put forward; rather than excerpt his argument, I'll let him forward it himself. Tacitus is clearly writing with influencing his Roman audience in mind, more than he is trying to present a perfectly accurate picture.

There's a lot here that is highly relevant to many discussions we are having about our own society today. I'll stop with this, for now, and see what you think.

Good Post

Mr. Brooks on Civility:

In all the recent fulminating about civility, I haven't seen anything of worth until today. Mr. Brooks' column is a good one.

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Civility on this model is an expression of humility; and that is surely part of the answer. There is surely a positive quality to it as well. It isn't just that we recognize our own weakness, and are kind to others who are as weak (or weaker).

However, we also know that bullies are very often people who are keenly aware of their personal weakness. Their violence against others is also a reaction to that awareness, just as much a response to this dynamic as the civility Mr. Brooks advocates. It is also directed against those as weak, or weaker, than themselves.

What causes us to get the one and not the other? More and more I feel inclined to pose these questions rather than answer them: I already know what I think about it, after all. What do you think?

Congress Doesn't Care

Congress Doesn't Care:

How well do you know the Constitution? Presumably, most of you will join me in scoring 100% on this embarrassingly easy test. But:

When the Republican House leadership decided to start the 112th Congress with a reading of the U.S. Constitution, the decision raised complaints in some quarters that it was little more than a political stunt. The New York Times even called it a "presumptuous and self-righteous act."

That might be true, if you could be sure that elected officials actually know something about the Constitution. But it turns out that many don't.... those elected officials who took the test scored an average 5 percentage points lower than the national average (49 percent vs. 54 percent), with ordinary citizens outscoring these elected officials on each constitutional question.

Thus the TEA Party's focus on the importance of the Constitution. The sense driving that focus has been that the government simply doesn't care to abide by the limits -- or to fulfill inconvenient responsibilities, such as actually declaring war when they want to fight a war, or actually amending the Constitution to seek new authority instead of pretending that they already have the authority they want.

Turns out, it's not that they don't care about the limits. It's that they are ignorant of the limits. There is no excuse for that, given the brevity of the document and its wide availability. In a just world, every Congressman who failed to achieve at least 80% on that test would be subject to automatic recall proceedings, and replaced with someone more fit for the office.

Arts & Sciences

Arts & Sciences:

The interaction between the arts and the sciences is sometimes noteworthy:

It was Galileo who conclusively swept away the idea that the sun revolved around the Earth, who dismantled the looming edifice of Aristotelian physics. Unlike others of the age, the Italian steadfastly refused to hammer the square pegs of discovery into the round holes of conventional wisdom. Through an unremitting dedication to observation and experiment, it was he who ushered in the age of modern science.

Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But... one of Galileo’s crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante’s Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.

The description of the debates about the Inferno among Italian thinkers of the 14th century is highly amusing, but one wonders if they have any equals today. Though I have never been involved with one, I know that there are people making all sorts of virtual-world video games: do any of them have anything like the knowledge to ensure that they don't come up with impossible features? Do they care, as Galileo manifestly did care, that the rules of physics hold?

I agree with the final claim of the article, which is that such play may be highly valuable in just the way that Galileo's play bears a resemblance to the wilder play of quantum physics. "The world’s first true scientist, the professor tells us, understood that it takes a man of reason to provide the proof, but only a fantasist can truly reimagine the universe."

That's one thing we are being called to do now. We'll be well served by the man who can do it.

Time To Go Out

Time To Go Out:

Snow and ice are still on the local roads. Georgia doesn't quite know how to deal with that. All the same, I've got to head out onto the roads today. Should be fun.




...except with ice. Think I'll take the .44, just in case.

Tea Party History, Memory

The TEA Party, History, and "Memory":

Dr. Jill Lepore, historian, has written a new book scorning the TEA Party.

Throughout her book Lepore’s implicit question remains always: Don’t these Tea Party people realize how silly they are? They don’t understand history; they need to learn that time moves forward.... Following one of the several examples she cites of the cruel way the eighteenth century treated insane persons, tying them up like animals, she comments: “I don’t want to go back to that,” as if the present-day Tea Partiers do. How foolish can they be? After quoting an evangelical minister who in 1987 expressed confidence that Benjamin Franklin would not identify with the secular humanists of our own time “were he alive today,” she can’t help mocking the minister. “Alas,” she writes, Franklin “is not, in fact, alive today."...

She believes that the jurisprudential theory of originalism is all part of the “kooky” thinking of the Tea Party. “Setting aside the question of whether it makes good law, it is, generally,” she says, “lousy history.” We have all heard loose, ignorant polemics claiming the authority of the “original” intentions of the Founders. But Lepore seems to have little idea of what the interpretative doctrine of originalism really means and can only dismiss it as “historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.”

The reviewer was not impressed with this last claim.

Originalism may not be good history, but it is a philosophy of legal and constitutional interpretation that has engaged some of the best minds in the country’s law schools over the past three decades or so. It is basic to the mission of the Federalist Society (an important organization of conservative and libertarian jurists, lawyers, law professors, and students), and at times it may have as many as four adherents on the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia’s book A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (1997), which staked out an originalist position on statutory interpretation, was taken seriously enough to generate critical responses from Ronald Dworkin, Lawrence H. Tribe, Mary Ann Glendon, and myself, all published in Scalia’s book along with his replies. In other words, originalism, controversial as it may be, is a significant enough doctrine of judicial interpretation that even its most passionate opponents would not write it off as cavalierly as Lepore does in this book.

Actually, he wasn't all that impressed with the first claim.

Indeed, one implication of T.H. Breen’s impressive new book, American Insurgents, American Patriots, is that the American Revolution itself may have been an ancestor of the modern Tea Party. Far from being a movement instigated from the top down by celebrated elite leaders separated from the affairs of the common people, the Revolution, Breen contends, was a popular uprising from below against a distant imperial government that had lost its legitimacy and its representativeness. In the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence tens of thousands of colonists boycotted British goods, created committees of safety or inspection, drove Crown officials from office, and intimidated and abused their loyalist enemies.

These ordinary Americans organized their resistance without bothering to reflect on the abstract political theories of John Locke or John Adams that allegedly justified the rebellion. “Not that the insurgents did not have ideas about politics,” says Breen. “They did. But these were ideas driven by immediate passions; they were amplified through fear, fury, and resentment.” Confident of their God-given rights and driven by anger against officials of a British government that had treated them as second-class subjects, the insurgents reacted passionately, spontaneously, and mobilized their communities into action. Not unlike the Tea Partiers of the present, these common people were often way out ahead of their so-called leaders.

What really interests me is the discussion in the last third of the piece, over the distinction between what they are calling "critical history" and "popular memory." We can accept the first category, but the second one seems to me to be misidentified. He even uses the right word in the piece, but doesn't recognize the importance of it.

What is that word? I won't excerpt the last part; read the whole thing, if you would. It's an important matter for understanding how we look to the past, and why we do.

Eek!

"Eek!"

So says writer Lenore Skenazy, about men:

Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.

Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. "In fact," Ms. Adkins said, "he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening."...

A friend of mine, Eric Kozak, was working for a while as a courier. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood, he says, "I got lost. I saw a couple kids by the side of the road and rolled down my window to ask, 'Where is such-and-such road?' They ran off screaming."

It seems to me that a person who can't change diapers is probably not qualified to work at a day care center. We can't quite bring ourselves to say, "You're disqualified because of your sex," though, so we see idiocy like this instead.

Faces

Oh, Sure:

I see how it is:

[W]omen in their fertile phase are more likely to fantasize about masculine-looking men...

Meanwhile, a man's intelligence has no effect on the extent to which fertile, female partners fantasize about others, the researchers found. They say the lack of an observed "fertility effect" related to intelligence is puzzling

Uh-huh. It's just shocking that brains aren't the real issue.

Fortunately, I am set.

Dangerous Ideas

Dangerous Ideas

From a commenter at Ann Althouse: "Anyone else find it creepy that the new standard of what we may and may not say is: How will it affect the behavior of an obviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?"

The Virtues of Obedience

The Virtues of Obedience:

A great deal of discussion has arisen about the article "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." Cassandra sent me an interesting response; here is another.

First of all, filial piety requires me to say that it should be obvious that Southern mothers are the most superior. I assume we all have such duties, so everyone gets to make a one-off statement of this type in the discussion below before we tackle the serious issues.

Issue number one: Does growing up under strongly directed authority limit your ability to be spontaneous as an adult? Shannon Love thinks so:

Noticeably excluded from her children’s activities is any kind of team activities. The secret of American’s collective success as a people is our ability to self-organize ourselves on both the small and large scale into highly effective teams. The relative inability to self-organize into teams is why China and some other cultures have lagged behind...

This was the Duke of Wellington's point when he spoke of Waterloo being won "on the playing fields of Eton." Nevertheless, I'm suspicious of it as deployed against China. The Chinese seem to have an excellent structure for forming themselves up into working teams. The problem China has had over the last fifty years has not been its inability to form such teams, but that the teams that form are culturally encoded to "look up" for direction, rather than to "look around." Thus, the Red Guards could appear throughout the urban regions in short order, and function effectively; the Communist party could rather quickly spread to control all aspects of life.

What hurt China was the lack of spontaneous systems of resistance to authority. It wasn't that they couldn't form spontaneous teams: it's that the teams that formed tended to point the same direction.

That may be a problem of this style of "leadership" (insofar as domineering counts as leadership). There is another problem with top-down direction, which is this one:

I once read somewhere that American conservatories graduate over 300 pianists a year, and I would guess that the fraction of them who go on to careers in classical music, other than giving lessons to the next generation who in turn won’t enter the field, must be very low. Chua is setting her kids up for failure; and if it’s argued that music lessons are a good in themselves, which they may be, why does Chua treat them like a matter of life or death, making her kids and herself miserable over them?

The chronic cycle of shortages and price-destroying-surpluses that plagues Communist-type systems arises from this feature. You don't have to be a Communist to suffer from it, though: all you have to be is a central planner. You and I and Bob can look around the world, and we all see basically the same problems (e.g., there is not sufficient wheat being produced). Thus, we all call for basically the same solutions. Six months or six years on, those solutions are now the problem: we all directed our systems to produce wheat, and now farmers can't make a living off the price of the stuff.

The first problem was that the people were starving; the new problem is that the farmers are. So we let some of the farmers do something else, and subsidize the rest: but we all do that, so that the supply of wheat suddenly drops sharply, while residual low prices cause it to vanish. Starvation again!

None of the decisions we've made are bad. In every case we've made precisely the right decision. Centralized planning has this negative quality, even when decision making is perfect. This is true for mothers as well: if every Chinese child is raised to play the violin, the marginal value of violin-playing is going to be even lower than it already happens to be.

You might argue that violin-playing is valuable in its own right, as a way of expanding the mind and developing its faculties. Very good! I agree. Music is a wonderful skill for just that reason. So, though, is drama, an activity that the self-described Chinese mother abhors:

Her scorn for drama takes on a sinister cast when we find out that her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, studied theater in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School from 1980 through 1982.

What does drama teach? Two things, chiefly: exposure to the plays of Sophocles or Shakespeare develops a deep capacity for understanding and sympathizing with humanity; while the experience of playing a role -- or, even more, of directing several actors each trying to play a different role -- develops the faculties of understanding human emotion. You are learning to convey it, but you are also learning how to read it from others. This can make communication easier, develop your ability to understand body language, and generally improve your ability to work with and care about others.

I think we should distinguish, again, between China and this particular "Chinese mother." Obviously the Chinese do not have any problem reading body language, or understanding the intricate unspoken signals at work in a social situation. They are excelled at this set of skills only by the Japanese, and only because the Japanese have a more homogeneous culture. I think this is more an eccentricity of this particular lady than it is a quality of "the Chinese," who love drama and have several fully-developed theatrical traditions of their own.

A generalized point, which seems to underlie the whole discussion: is it important to teach children to obey authority, or to resist authority and follow their own conscience? The answer is: "Yes." The skill that really needs to be taught, though, is the skill of distinguishing which of the two responses is appropriate in a given case. That judgment can be quite difficult to make; it's really what we were discussing in the post on violence and politics, the other day.

Privacy

Privacy

A neighbor sent me an alarmed email about a new site, www.spokeo.com, where you can type in a name and get all kinds of personal information. The email was wasted on me, because I never worry about privacy. I'm sure that anyone who can figure out anything important about me is someone I can afford to trust. If I worry about anything, it's that I'm too opaque.

For grins, though, I typed in my name. My correct address and phone number popped right up, and even my husband's name, but after that the accuracy fell off. The purported satellite view of my house was off by a half-mile or so. The reported value of my house was a serious laugh -- especially since that information is easily available in the online county real estate records. For some reason, the site reported that my household includes three people, including my husband's brother. Nothing so interesting going on here.

The site thinks my major hobbies are travel and cooking. OK, I'll buy the "cooking," but "travel"? Hardly anyone hates travel more than I do. I practically never travel.

I think the programs that sort through our electronic traces to discern our identities still need some work. The things that Amazon and Netflix come up with on their "stuff you might be interested in" pages are a hoot.

I couldn't think of a good image to accompany a post on privacy, so here's a cheerful picture of the fire we just lit, enabling us to deal with our sub-Arctic weather (actually just drifting below 40 before dawn for a few days). Yes, I know, the stockings are still hanging there. I'm getting to it.

"Let's Roll"

"Let's Roll"

No one actually said that, of course, but I take some comfort in reading that three men and one woman had the presence of mind to overpower Jared Loughner physically before he could reload. One man heard the gunshots from a neighboring Walgreens and must have been moving pretty fast, because he got there in time to be useful. He and a 74-year-old retired Army colonel each grabbed an arm and wrestled the gunman to the ground, just after someone whanged him with a folding chair. A 61-year-old woman who'd hit the deck after the first shots found that the gunman was now next to her on the ground, so she grabbed the magazine he was trying to reload with, while someone else grabbed the gun. Then she helped one of the men pin Loughner's legs down while the other two pinned his head and torso.

I'd have been happier if someone had returned fire, but this was decisive action for a group of Safeway shoppers taken completely by surprise.

A young man with medical experience provided some useful first aid, too.

Snowfall

Snowfall:

It's just starting here, but I hear reports of four inches closer to Atlanta. I spent the day sawing wood -- not to lay in firewood, which I have plenty of already, but to deal with trees likely to fall on the house in an ice storm. I think we should be set to ride this out with ease, now; though if we lose power, we'll be a long way from the top of anyone's agenda.

That's OK, though. It happens that I now have even more firewood. I wonder how many people with "useless" educations like mine know how to use and maintain a chainsaw, or split wood with a double-bit axe? More, I'd guess, than most would expect.

UPDATE: Looks like about an inch so far, as of 12:40 AM.

Politics & Violence

Politics & Violence:

I have written a small thing on the subject at BLACKFIVE.

Theory & Practice

Theory & Practice:

We all saw the strange rants about grammar yesterday, from the odd mind of the shooter. Apparently there's a guy named David Miller who concocted this basic theory, along with a fake language. He claims it is actually the only true language; he also claims he is King of Hawaii.

Philosophy of language does contain some genuine puzzles, but a few minutes' review suggests that none of them are going to be solved along Mr. Miller's route. In the meanwhile, I would like to note that 100% of court cases in which people have employed his methods have failed. This is my favorite:

Lindsay, who presented himself as David-Kevin: Lindsay, argued that he was not a "person" as defined by Canada's Income Tax Act. He said he had ceased to be a person in 1996. The judge refused to let Lindsay opt out of personhood.

Sometimes things sound so good in theory, and just don't work in practice. Here's a case where the theory is bad, too!

Rep Gif

Representative Giffords:

I imagine that we all wish the Honorable Representative Giffords a speedy and complete recovery.

VCDL notes: "There were reports that at least one citizen returned fire and that the murderer was caught and held by citizens. This was first reported by an Arizona paper and the Fox News story below alludes to it as well. The armed citizen(s) stopping the criminal has not been confirmed yet[.}"

A number of statements from elected officials denounce the shootings, stating that it is never legitimate to use violence against elected officials. One is not surprised at their concern.

A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

I recommend The Word Detective for his frequent columns about obscure word usage. If you subscribe, you get periodic emails that apparently include material that hasn't yet been posted on the blog. My December issue has been sitting in my inbox until I could find time to read it. I see that it contains a very useful suggestion how to make golf more interesting. The WD reports:

The late Hunter S. Thompson, in his last column for espn.com, announced his invention of a fascinating variant on the game, which he called "shotgun golf." It's a simple (but very loud) game for two players: one player, using a conventional club, lofts the ball toward the hole, while the other, using a twelve-gauge shotgun, attempts to blow the ball out of the air with buckshot.

December's Word Detective blog-post expresses the conventional surprise that Christmas is upon us. It seems like only yesterday, he says, that we took down the lights outside, but it was really back in May. Which reminds me that I have a tree to take down, as the NPH has been mentioning with increasing frequency lately. I'm very tempted to use the ill-gotten gains from my recent Herculean labors in the legal stables to hire a local teenager to pitch in with the wrapping and boxing of a million ornaments. Is that wrong?

Finally, in the spirit of attention-deficit entertainment, since I'm bouncing around this morning like a recently-freed pinball, here's the incomparable Firesign Theater in "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers," with the Fifty-Voice St. Louis Aquarium Choir. He's been up for a week, but he's coming down! And on the inside, it's delicious.

Arise Ye Dead

Arise Ye Dead

Boy, it's nice to rejoin the living. Lately even my dreams have been full of finicky footnotes to authority. I'm visiting websites I haven't even glanced at in almost a month.

Here's a link to one of those interesting time-lapse graphics about the birth and death of empires, via Assistant Village Idiot. (I see AVI also linked the "human shields" article, which lots of people have noticed at First Things.) The point of the empire map is to put Zionism into perspective, but I was also struck by how few empires in the last several thousand years have made any inroads into the Arabian peninsula.

I see that much of the country is expecting heavy snow again. Here, we'll probably just dip into the mid-30s for two or three days. Tomorrow night we're due for some kind of low-pressure system out of Mexico, which they think will put thunderstorms on top of us for eight hours straight overnight. Around dawn, the wind is forecast to shift from 15 mph out of the southeast to 18 mph out of the northwest, just as if a low-grade hurricane eye had passed over. We could sure use the rain. After a soggy summer we've had a dry fall and winter so far.

Human Shields

Human Shields

It was an "I am Spartacus" moment: Egyptian Muslims who were horrified by the recent attack on Coptic Christians showed up at their Christmas Eve mass services, sending the message that anyone who wanted to attack the Christians at their services would have to come through Muslim Egyptians to do it.

There are few things lower than using someone else as a human shield against his will, but few things more honorable than protecting an innocent victim with your own body. We're meant to make choices, and then to take the consequences of our choices onto ourselves.

H/t Lars Walker at Brandywine Books.

The Fifth

The Fifth:

We saw this performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a gymnasium in Hangzhou, China. They were very professional, and took no notice of their Chinese hosts not having the same concepts about turning off cell phones during the performance. At one point someone's dinner -- a still very much alive rabbit -- escaped across the stage, without the orchestra missing a beat.

Here is the fourth movement, which is my favorite.

100 Years

One Hundred Years:

Hail and praise the Colt 1911, one hundred years old this year.

I am sure that Doc Russia will be celebrating!

TSA Opt Out

The Great TSA Opt-Out:

Who was the genius who wrote this law?

Thanks to an “opt-out” provision written into the Act, these contracts are a viable alternative to the current federal screening workforce provided by TSA. Eighteen private contracts have already been awarded to various U.S. airports and heliports, working efficiently and safely for over five years.

That's some amazing foresight right there. The article mentions one Rep. John L. Mica (R-FL). If he's the responsible party, the hat's off to him.

More than the specific example, the basic concept looks very solid. Insofar as the Federal government employs or develops new internal police powers, give localities/states/airports the right to opt out of the 'protection.' That's a powerful hedge against these kinds of forces turning toward tyranny.

Useless

Useless:

An education shouldn't be useful, argues The Public Discourse.

For the most part, though, books and articles discussing what has gone wrong in the American universities appear to have done little to seriously investigate the ancient and medieval origins of universities themselves....

In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates defended knowledge as sought after “with a view to the beautiful and good,” contrasting someone who deals with numbers for the sake of buying and selling with one who contemplates the mystery of numbers themselves. Aristotle perpetuated this liberal tradition (as opposed to servile tradition), defining ‘liberal’ as “that which tends to enjoyment… where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.” Education’s end, for Aristotle, was the pleasure of knowing itself. Cicero agreed, adding that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was “a condition of our happiness.” Such truth, he suggested, is the first thing pursued “as soon as we escape from the pressure of necessary cares.” This enterprise, as systematized by Marcus Varro and fortified by Augustine and Boethius, generated Western civilization’s curricular DNA, which we know as the liberal arts. Probably the best modern articulation of this tradition came with John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which—I am sorry to report—seems to have made no appearance at all in our current harping about the humanities. Newman, without requiring religious commitment, articulated the Socratic inheritance exquisitely:

Truth has two attributes—beauty and power; while Useful Knowledge is the possession of truth as powerful, Liberal Knowledge is the apprehension of it as beautiful....

Should this principle—knowledge for its own sake—be understood, the amount of time it takes to obtain a degree in the humanities comes into focus. Menand complains, “You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.” But it is here that the medieval perspective illuminates, making nearly a decade of study seem not ridiculous, but just about right.

If a decade of intense study produces nothing but enjoyment, then it is rightly priced at the cost of a hobby: people often pour endless hours and cash into hobbies for mere enjoyment.

However, it seems to me that we know the arts are greater than that. They may have no point other than seeking the true and the beautiful, but that is not to say that they are good for nothing. Indeed, the ancient and medieval tradition -- which seeks and believes it can find the True and the Beautiful -- proves to be good for everything.

This is because truth and beauty are "transcendentals," qualities that belong to all categories instead of one only. That is as much as to say that all the categories belong to them. To know something about the true and the beautiful is to know something about everything.

You will rarely find in history a man of great accomplishment who has not taken this road at least a little way.

"Well," you may say, "fine for the medieval mind, or the ancient one; they were fools who believed that we could actually get (at least closer to) the 'True' and the 'Beautiful.' Today, of course, we are smarter and know better!"

That points the way to a useless education. Notice that the difference is really a principle of faith.

Misconceptions

Medieval Misconceptions:

Yesterday both Dad29 and xkcd directed our attention to some documents that fight common misconceptions.

Dad29 points to Myths about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Myth.

xkcd pointed us to Wikipedia's List of common misconceptions, which includes several Medieval items.

Why does this matter, and how much? I would say it matters a great deal, because it alienates many today from one of the richest and most important parts of our Western tradition. A Christianity is much poorer if it is uninformed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, and so many others. A Western culture that loses the logic of Abelard, or the valor of Robert the Bruce, is likewise impoverished.

It is also less attractive to many, if they believe that Christianity or Medieval Europe had a history of hostility toward science. That is probably the most crucial misconception to fight.

On a slightly-related but more amusing note, my wife tells me that this reconstruction looks like me. Except, I hope, for the stupid expression.

Done it!

Ha-Ha!

I think that's done it!

You will notice a pair of icons, one red and one white, above and below the Chesterton poem on the head of the sidebar. Mouse over the red icon, and you return to the old burgundy scheme. Mouse over the white, and you shall have this scheme.

I have tried it in Chrome and IE, and it seems to work. T99, let me know if it works in Firefox; and if anyone has trouble with it, shout out.

Crunchy & Soft

Hard & Crunchy on the Outside, Soft & Chewy on the Inside

Like the old joke about the igloo. This article makes you wonder how long the tigers had been waiting for one of those morsels to step outside the bus.

Psalm 23:

Today is the day for the 23rd Psalm.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever. (KJV)

Poll

Time for a Poll:

Today's question: Is the philosophy of chivalry that I espouse misandrist or misogynist?

Misandrist or Misogynist?
	Misandrist! I mean, come on: "White Knight?"
	Misogynist! After all, chivalry is, like, sexist or something.
	Can't you be both? I think you hate everyone.
pollcode.com free polls

Against the Drug War

Against the Drug War:

This is a pretty good argument:

Now, one thing Darnell could do is get his GED, and meanwhile get a job stocking shelves at Staples. Or working at a shoe store or supermarket. He could get vocational training of some kind, with a small loan it wouldn’t be hard to get. But that’s not what a lot of his friends do. The way they make money is by selling drugs....

There is a quiet community norm: young men who drop out of school and do not take jobs, because they can keep money in their pockets by selling drugs on the street. Hardly all young men do this in the community. Most don’t, in fact. But many do – enough that to Darnell, there is nothing unusual about it.

He sees people going to prison for this: but that’s seen as a badge of manhood....

Of the options open to him for having money in his pocket, the most attractive one is the one that gives him the most flexible schedule, allows him to be with his favorite people, and lends him an air of the soldier besides. The question is not why he would choose to sell drugs, but why he wouldn’t.

Darnell is not on the corners because it’s all society prepared him for: that is a melodramatic, antiempirical, leftist cliche. [His brother the air-conditioner repairman] Eugene's doing fine and the community has as many Eugenes as Darnells. Darnell had choice. His choice makes perfect sense for someone like him, where he lives, having had the only life he knew.

What the article misses is that this is not a moral choice. Selling drugs is harmful, predatory, and there is no account made of that.

Yet one could give an account: Darnell probably uses drugs, as well as selling them. He probably enjoys it. Thus, he doesn't see himself as preying on the weak, but on providing a service to people who have the same desires he has himself.

Lacking this opportunity for easy money, the author thinks Darnell would stay in school. I find that harder to believe. Perhaps it's true, but there are still good reasons to drop out of the kind of schools that mostly exist in these neighborhoods. Those other opportunities -- vocational school, small loans, and so forth -- may still prove adequate to entice young men away from bad schools.

So what, though? Vocational school leads to honest, honorable work. It would be a great improvement if more chose that path.

The author finally hints at the destructive power of the police on black neighborhoods. On this point I am wholly in sympathy. The drug-war type of policing is indeed destructive, not only to the community but to the basic civic structure of the United States. We would all be better off without it.

Readability

Colors and Readability:

Grim's Hall has been around since 2003. In those nearly eight years, I suspect my eyes have gotten worse. This web site seemed easy to read when I started doing it; but more and more I have trouble reading it because of the light-text-on-dark-color scheme.

I thought I would try this alternative scheme for a bit to see if it's easier to read. I apologize for the change, as no one likes changes.

Let me know what you think. As always, I'm open to suggestions.

ERA

ERA:

I am looking for reports of Justice Scalia's remarks that cite the never-ratified 'Equal Rights Amendment' (ERA). Here's what Scalia said:

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don't like the death penalty anymore, that's fine. You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn't mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

Here's what the ERA said:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Obviously the 14th Amendment was followed by the 19th. Therefore, in the early 20th century, the 14th's equal protection clause clearly was not taken to have the force to set aside the power of the law to distinguish between men and women.

I have noticed that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have published opinion pieces that cite 'a slew of rulings since 1971' that interpret the 14th as protecting against sex discrimination. That's fine, but the question acknowledged the existence of that tradition: it was asking whether the tradition was mistaken as a point of Constitutional interpretation.

Meanwhile, the ERA was passed by Congress in 1972. The ratification debate progressed through the several states, with 35 states voting for ratification (although some rescinded their ratification: based on the 14th Amendment's own ratification process, though, I think the precedent is that Congress can accept or reject a state's right to change its mind at Congress' own pleasure).

What I take from all this is that:

1) Scalia was right about the original intent of the 14th.

2) In spite of the competing judicial tradition starting in 1971, even feminist activists believed in 1972 that the Constitution needed to be amended on just this point.

3) Thus, it is right for an originalist to say that the Constitution does not currently prohibit discrimination based on sex.

That is entirely different from the question of whether the Constitution should prohibit discrimination based on sex. I think it should, with a Constitutional exception for the military -- we've discussed why I think the military is a special case re: civil rights often enough that I won't rehearse it again at this time.

The remedy here is not to pretend that the ERA had actually been ratified; nor is it to pretend that it was never needed. It's to put the thing back up again. I think the left is correct to argue that society's thoughts and feelings have changed on this subject quite a bit over the last forty years. Probably there would be no problem about passing and ratifying the amendment (or a variation of it) today.

That's the right approach to this problem. A Supreme Court that is judged competent to create rights with a wave of its hand can wave those same rights away. That isn't what the Court is for, as Scalia correctly asserts.

The Ur-Road Trip

The Ur-Road Trip

I'm coming up for air briefly while the people for whom I've been madly writing a brief finally look at it before we get it ready to file next Monday. Between this unaccustomed spurt of paying work and the rigors of the holidays, I've scarcely had time to draw a breath for many weeks.

In the meantime, my husband sent me this story, linked by Instapundit or someone, about the first private cross-country jaunt in a self-propelled vehicle. In 1888, Bertha Benz of Mannheim, Germany, sneaked out of the house with her two teenaged boys to pay a visit to her sister and new niece 65 miles away in the Black Forest. Why sneaked? Her husband assumed she would be taking the usual train, but she'd decided to test-drive his new-fangled Patent Motorwagen (yes, that Benz): a 200-lb. steel vehicle that produced 2/3 of a horsepower at 250 rpm from a one-cylinder engine. (For some reason, it delights me to read that the German for "Imperial," as in "Imperial Patent Office," is "Kaiserlich" -- meaning "super-kingly.")

This model had a fuel tank, a dashboard, and brakes. It didn't have what you'd call off-road tires, having been driven only on city streets to that point. Ms. Benz prudently stuck to the hard old Roman Roads when she could, especially the Via Montana or "Mountain Road" once she left her home in the Neckar River Valley. She refueled at drugstores. Late-nineteenth-century Germany had a oil industry, which produced mostly kerosene, but also threw off by-products including a substance called "ligroin," traditionally used as a stain cleaner. The drugstore where she stopped now boasts of being the world's first self-serve filling station.

The travelers had some trouble on steep grades and had to ask a farmer to push them over one pass. When she got home, Ms. Benz asked her husband to install a second set of reduction gears so the engine could keep running at an efficient speed while the car slowed down. So was born the stick-shift.

Literature

Why Literature?

The point is raised regarding the new... ah... "translation" of Mark Twain. What is the point of literature?

For example, does the point include conveying a vision to your audience? If it does, is there some obligation on future scholars not to obscure that vision? Mark Twain -- who has come in for criticism here on other grounds -- did extraordinary work in exposing the ugliness of racial hatred. How bold should we be in walking away from what he gave us, to soothe our sensibilities? It was offending racial sensibilities that he intended all along: and we should not forget how powerful, and how good, was the effect.

Abduction

Glorious Abduction:

UPDATE:

And if we're doing this sort of thing tonight, I don't think I've ever referenced the greatest of all of these:

Fornication

Morale:

I suspect this is the sort of thing we'll look back on with regret.

Phil dead

Philosophy is Dead. Long Live Philosophy!

Dr. John Haldane notes with amusement the statement by Dr. Stephen Hawking and company that 'philosophy is dead.' It accompanies their own departure from empirically-verifiable facts, and into metaphysics. In other words, they're doing philosophy: and not very well.

My favorite part of this assertion is that it follows the form: 'The "argument for God from the magnificent design of the universe" is dead, because there is no need for design. This is because the universe is the kind of thing that can create itself and bring forth life spontaneously.'

That's quite a design!

Psalm 7

Psalm 7:

So, since some of you were interested in this, here's the first thing that really catches my attention in the book. Psalm 7 says:

...si reddidi retribuentibus mihi malum et dimisi hostes meos vacuos
persequatur inimicus animam meam et adprehendat et conculcet in terra vitam meam et gloriam meam in pulverem conlocet semper.

...if I have requited my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause, let the enemy pursue me and take me, and let him trample my life to the dust. (RSV)

So here's the question this engenders in my mind: are we meant to believe that it's OK to plunder one's enemy as long as there is due cause? That's a license I did not expect.

28,000 Dead in England

28,000 Dead in England:

And on a single day.

George Goodwin, who has written a book on Towton to coincide with the battle’s 550th anniversary in 2011, reckons as many as 75,000 men, perhaps 10% of the country’s fighting-age population, took the field that day.

They had been dragged into conflict in various ways. Lacking a standing army, the royal claimants called on magnates and issued “commissions of array” to officers in the shires to raise men. Great lords on either side had followings known as “affinities”, comprising people on formal retainers as well as those under less rigid obligations. These soldiers would have been among the more experienced and better-equipped fighters that day (foreign mercenaries were there, too). Alongside them were people lower down the social pyramid, who may have been obliged to practise archery at the weekend as part of the village posse but were not as well trained. Among this confusion of soldiers and weaponry, almost certainly on the losing Lancastrian side, was Towton 25.

The archaeologists have done some impressive work on the site. They mention having learned something from the recent work at the Little Bighorn. If you're interested in reading about that research, this article is relevant, though I think it is not the same effort.

There was another English find recently covered by Smithosonian magazine, this one of a Viking mass grave in England. It is thought to be linked to the St. Brice's Day massacre of 1002, when Aethelred the Unraed proved he was ready enough.

Psalms

The Book of Psalms:

I will be reading the Book of Psalms this month; I am to read five a day, so that we can get through the whole book in one month.

While we've been talking about religious issues more lately, probably because of the holiday season, this is not a religious blog per se. As such, I don't intend to blog the Psalms (and anyway, far wiser men have written far more interesting things about it that you should read instead). However, I thought I'd mention the project so that any of you who wanted to do so could read along. If it's something people are interested in doing, I don't mind to host discussions of some of the more resonant psalms.

I Have Got To Get Me One Of These

I Have Got To Get Me One Of These

I ran across this on Power Line http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/028038.php . Follow the this video link, also; John was unable to embed that one.

Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsDi5UZ0Ao&feature=player_embedded

There are a number of things Corliss could do to streamline his suit so as to achieve higher speeds.

Aside from that, though, I need to do this. His rush is to magnify his experience of the speed by staying close to the obstacles. My rush would be the flying itself, so I'd be looking for whatever updrafts I could maximize the lift from to fly for greater endurance. But I have to fly that crack in Switzerland, too (some call it a canyon: it's a crack). In either case, this takes great shoulder and thigh strength and endurance.

Eric Hines

Going to Kill

"As I Was Going To Kill and All..."

Happy new year.

You know who sucks?

You Know Who Sucks?

Modern-day Olympic crew teams, that's who.

Hard

It's So Hard:

...to understand the Constitution. After all, being 'over a hundred years old' (and indeed over two hundred) it's practically ancient.



We are all wasting our time, ladies and gentlemen. Thank goodness our wise companions on the Left were there to save us. I suspend all further activities of prying into ancient or medieval history and philosophy; why, some of that was a thousand years ago, or even more!

From now on, we shall stick to the things we can see in front of us. Let us commence the study of this beer glass. Hm, empty: we shall have to fill it, in half an hour or so when the clock is right for that kind of thing.

You see? Practical benefits flow at once, as soon as we leave off these foolish pursuits and turn our attention to the moment.

Brain Science

Politics and Brain Size:

Conservatives have bigger brains... well, at least, the primitive parts of the brain are bigger.

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates.

So, conservatives are primitive and emotional, and... wait a minute, didn't we read something else about the amygdala this week?

So what does the amygdala actually do? "[It's] strongly connected with almost every other structure in brain. In the past, people assumed it was really important for fear. Then they discovered it was actually important for all emotions. And it's also important for social interaction and face recognition," Barrett says. "The amygdala's job in general is to signal to the rest of brain when something that you're faced with is uncertain. For example, if you don't know who someone is, and you are trying to identify them, whether it is a friend or a foe, the amygdala is probably playing a role in helping you to perform all of those tasks."

That actually fits perfectly with existing research, showing that conservatives are more likely to perceive threats. This suggests why that might be true. It also suggests a direct physical unity between the adaptive quality of threat recognition and humanity's preferred method for dealing with threats. How do you deal with threats? You form a stronger troop: either a bigger one, or one with more complicated bonding structures to hold it together in the face of danger.

Marriage

The Benefits of Marriage:

Is this what you would expect to hear?

Compared with those in the early sex group, those who waited until marriage:

* Rated relationship stability as 22 percent higher
* Rated relationship satisfaction as 20 percent higher
* Rated sexual quality as 15 percent better
* Rated communication as 12 percent better

Win Some, Lose Some

Win Some, Lose Some:

Proven: dogs are very, very smart!

A border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of 1022 items - more than any other animal. She can also categorise them according to function and shape, something children learn to do around the age of 3.

Some dogs, that is.

Swords Point

From the Sword's Point:

Did you ever wonder what these guard-changes look like from the sword's point of view? One of the Swedish groups tried it out.



A commenter at YouTube remarks, "In Soviet Russia, sword controls you!"

Faith and Reason 2

Faith & Reason, Part II:

Continuing with this interesting article, we find another set of arguments. He began by explaining that he believes monotheism is a reaction to Greek philosophy, especially to the idea of Thales that there are natural laws that can reliably explain things. This created a borderland between the natural and the supernatural that had never been there before:

This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. They’re the ones not included in us. In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them. We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July 2009, when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god.

The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world. These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses. When Odysseus incurs the enmity of Poseidon, the sea god rouses himself in a terrible storm and wrecks Odysseus’ ship. Odysseus spies land, but Poseidon’s waves cast him violently up against the sharp rocks before hurling him back out to sea. With the help of his ally Athena, goddess of wisdom, Odysseus gathers his wits enough to swim along the shore, desperately looking for a place to land. Exhausted, at last he comes to “the mouth of a sweet-running river” that offers shelter from the rocks and wind. Odysseus prays directly to the river: “Hear me, Lord, whoever you are,” he addresses the river, asking it—or rather asking him—to grant Odysseus sanctuary from Poseidon, the sea. And the river “stayed his current, stopped the waves breaking, and made all quiet in front of him.”

This new idea, Thales' idea, creates the border that separates the seen from the unseen. Before the unseen and the seen were assumed to be in the same space, but now we know there are some natural laws that are at work in the world, and they produce reliable results. Reason lets us understand these laws.

The problem, the author asserts -- I hope that our friend Joe is about to read this part of the article, which I believe he will love -- is that this reliability on the part of natural law destabilizes the powerful in society. They react by throwing up a religious structure that does something new: it doesn't merely beseech, but requires declarations of faith. By "faith," he means here 'fidelity to the conceptual structure of the religion.'

He suggests that this was an important psychological hedge to the certainty that reason offered. We needed faith to assure us that we didn't understand.

[T]he key concept in faith seems to be the assurance that nature’s regularity is illusory—precisely how being less important than the assurance itself. That’s the opposite of the case with explanation, which is, of course, all about “precisely how.” From this perspective, the phrase “secular explanation” begins to seem suspiciously redundant. Explanation and secularism may actually take in the same territory.

Where reason finds regularity in nature, faith extols miracles that overturn that regularity. In place of skepticism, faith exalts credulity.

This seems to me to be precisely wrong. We can see why by looking again at Avicenna, whose account of emanation offers a very clear and rational explanation for the structure of the universe. Avicenna doesn't ask us to believe that we can't understand how the universe works: he wants us to believe that we understand exactly how it works, even where we can't see it.

Avicenna turns not to faith but to reason to assert that we can't predict things accurately -- and not because of a psychological need, but because of actual observations. If the world was ordered in imitation of a perfectly rational Necessary Existent, why would there be evil? There shouldn't be, right? Insofar as our reason leads us to natural, logical laws that order the universe, why would there be irrationality, wickedness, or chaos?

Avicenna's explanation of this is perfectly rational, and falls back on the chaotic nature of matter. As we get farther down the chain of emanations, the lesser ordering intelligences are less capable of bringing chaotic matter into accord with the divine principle. Thus, he can explain the irrationality he observes in the world -- but not by reference to faith. The world is irrational just where it begins to depart from God.

Aquinas has the same problem, but follows Augustine in simply declaring that there is no evil. In this, though, they are both doing exactly what the author says they shouldn't be doing. They aren't using faith to assert that the world is irrational. They're using faith to assert that it is even more rational than we understand it to be. Both of the saints assert that there are reasons for bad things and apparently irrational things: we just haven't learned what they are yet.

Now, that isn't to say that the author is entirely baseless in his assertion. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides does make a run at assertions of the type the author suggests. He does so for something like the reasons that the author suggests, too: he attacks Avicenna's astronomy-based metaphysics using appeals to ignorance, for the purpose of preserving divine providence and prophecy. (Having done so, however, he asserts that this providence follows according to normal and natural forces that are obeying the normal and natural laws -- the parting of the Red Sea by just the right alignment of natural forces to create the right combination of wind and tide, for example.) Dad29 points to the Islamic school of thought that does so as well, going all the way to the pole that the author suggests. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard also goes this route.

Still, I don't think it's correct to say that this is what "faith" is for (or "belief" -- he seems to muddle his terms a bit). Faith can be used that way, but it can also be used the other way. It can be used by those hoping for an exception to natural law, but it can be, and has very often been, used to exalt reason and natural law.

In the final post in this series, I will examine how I think faith and reason are related. I think it may be right to say that reason is prior to faith; but we will save that for the next post.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam:

Rest in peace Dr. Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily. We've all benefited from his work over the years: I don't think there has been any other website of more value to this Hall, unless it was Cassandra's.

I am grateful for his work, and therefore, for his life.

12thC SciFi

12th Century Science Fiction:

I was reading The History of the Holy Grail tonight, which is the first part of the Prose Lancelot -- that massive 12th-century story that was Sir Thomas Malory's major source for the Arthurian legends. I've spent a bit of time with the Prose Lancelot before, but I skipped the early parts because the Holy Grail bits of the legend are frankly a bit tedious for modern readers (being chiefly allegory). I've mostly read the later parts of the story, which pertain to the king and his knights.

Reading tonight, though, I came across a chapter on something called "the Turning Isle." This is a remarkable piece of what is literally science fiction: that is, it's an attempt to take a theory of physics and construct an interesting setting.

The physics are, of course, Aristotelian. The story starts with the creation of the world, wherein God separates heaven from earth and so forth. Now, anyone who has studied Aristotle's physics knows that there are four elements (five, in his later accounts -- the celestial fifth element does not enter this story). These are earth, air, fire and water.

One thing the author also knew about physics was that if you mix earth with fire, at least the iron will smelt. And if you mix iron with water, it will rust. When God was done separating the fire and earth and water, he would have some rusty iron, and some smelted iron -- stuff that couldn't be purified, in other words. It wouldn't be proper to put this in heaven, which is pure; and, yet, because it partook partially of heaven's fiery nature, it was too good to subsume into the earth.

So, he put it all together in a ball and let it find its natural place. 'Natural place' is another core concept of Aristotle's physics. We all know that fire goes up, while rain and rivers go down. Earth also goes down, so what happens if you drop a rock in a river? It sinks to the bottom. Thus, all the elements have a natural place they will go to if they are not constrained by some external force.

Well, this big ball of stuff was heavier than the heavens, so it couldn't fly away. But it was lighter than the water or the earth, because it was mixed with the stuff of the heavens (again, fire). So what would it do? It would float!

So it floats around the oceans until it comes to this particular place near the Port of the Tigers, where there are large deposits of lodestone. Well, the author already told you that the stuff was mostly iron, so of course it comes to stay there. It is floating, so it's an island; but because it is partially of the heavenly element, it also turns about, because the heavens turn every night.

What that gives us is a floating iron island that bobs on the surface of the water, while slowly rotating about every day.

This isn't a fairy tale. A fairy tale would simply have said, "On the sea near the Port of the Tigers, there was an island of iron that bobbed on the waves. It was made of iron that fell from the stars, and turned in place every night as the stars do."

Rather, this is pure science fiction: an attempt not simply to offer a fantastic space for an adventure, but to account for it according to the laws of nature. It's entirely preposterous, of course, but it's completely plausible if one assumes the correctness of the physics of the day.

Mostly I thought you'd be amused by the story, but it does make me wonder what other parts of our own science fiction will seem equally preposterous to the readers of the future.

Faith & Reason

Faith & Reason:

We were discussing this very topic just a bit below, and today Arts & Letters Daily posts an insightful article on the subject.

It's very interesting reading; I might want to take the arguments slowly, over several days. I like the author's concept, but I think his argument is troubled. Let's start with just the first few parts of it.

We all know how things turned out, of course. An angel appeared, together with a ram, letting Abraham know that God didn’t really want him to kill his son, that he should sacrifice the ram instead, and that the whole thing had merely been a test.

And to modern observers, at least, it’s abundantly clear what exactly was being tested.... God was testing Abraham’s faith.

If we could ask someone from a much earlier time, however, a time closer to that of Abraham himself, the answer might be different.

That's one of the reasons to study Medieval as well as ancient philosophy. We often think of ourselves as living in a particularly rational time, heirs to the Enlightenment and all that. In fact, the Medievals were often much more rational than we are. Because they believed in God, they assumed that the world was rational. The problem was in figuring out how to use our reason to understand the puzzles -- but the puzzles were assumed to have answers, rational answers that led to God. Of the great princes of rationality in modern philosophy Hegel was no more rational than this; Kant rather less so.

Let us continue, though.

The usual story we tell ourselves about faith and reason says that faith was invented by the ancient Jews, whose monotheistic tradition goes back to Abraham. In the fullness of time, or—depending on perspective—in a misguided departure, the newer faiths of Christianity and Islam split off from their Jewish roots and grew to become world religions in their own right. Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated series of events, the rationalistic paragons we know as the ancient Greeks invented reason and science. The Greek tradition of pure reason has always clashed with the monotheistic tradition of pure faith, though numerous thinkers have tried to “reconcile” them through the ages. It’s a tidy tale of two pristinely distinct entities that do fine, perhaps, when kept apart, but which hiss and bubble like fire and water when brought together.

A tidy tale, to be sure, but nearly all wrong.

So, the "Jerusalem v. Athens" problem proves to be... well, a tidy tale. What corrections need to be made? The author proposes several. Let's do just the first three for now.

1) The Jewish road to monotheism was traveled much later than most people believe. The transition to pure monotheism was late enough that it appears to have been informed by Greek thinking.

2) The Greeks' approach to the question came from their rational analysis. There is a proposal that creation tracks to a unitary principle by the time of Thales; a unitary God appears first in Plato, not the Bible. Jewish philosophers like Philo learned the idea of pure monotheism from Plato.

3) Therefore, faith and reason don't have to be reconciled. Reason is prior to faith, and gave rise to it. Not only are they in harmony by nature, but reason -- also by nature -- is in the driver's seat. The author puts it thus:

So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. It’s surprising for us, looking back, that reason came first. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One.

Let's start with the fact that the author of this review is wrong on two significant points around assertion #2.

First, the demiurge of the Timeaus is not a unitary god. He is in a sense responsible for the order of everything that exists in the moving universe of time, but he is (a) not making these things, just ordering them: prime matter is prior to his ordering it; and (b) is doing so not just in imitation of the Forms, but rather to make a shrine for them. Thus, Plato's myth is not really unitary: there's one agent, yes, but he is making a shrine to honor many Forms. (It is possible -- Plato sometimes seems to suggest -- that all Forms finally participate in the Form of the Good. That still gives you two, not one.)

Second, Aristotle's unmoved mover was not unitary either. Aristotle rejects Thales' framing argument that all things 'boil down' to water; he has five elements in his system (earth, air, fire, water, and the celestial element that makes up the stars; this was a later addition, though, and in his earlier works he had only the first four). More importantly for monotheism, Aristotle isn't sure about the number of unmoved movers, but suggests it is around 57. It is later philosophers -- Avicenna, for example, followed by Aquinas -- who assert that there is one unmoved mover, and that one is God.

Avicenna, however, wasn't really able to make the unmoved mover function as a unitary god. His "necessary existent" doesn't have any relationship with anything in the created world, aside from bestowing existence upon it. It functions like the Form of the Good for Plato: the model of everything, but not the actual maker of the world of time and motion. It is the intelligence of the first emanation, like Plato's demiurge, who orders all this chaotic prime matter in imitation of the beautiful Necessary Existent. Daniel De Smet and Meryem Sebti, in a close reading of Avicenna's commentary on Surah 112, assert that he actually assigns the name Allah to the first emanation -- not to the Necessary Existent. Allah comes in second! He is therefore able to serve as the maker of the world; but he isn't the ordering principle of the world. He's just the workman putting things in order, in imitation of something more beautiful and perfect than himself.

(Aquinas is able to have a God that is both the unmoved mover and the actual causal agent of reality, because God is rather more interesting in his reading. We'll come back to that later.)

In any case, I think these flaws derail the review's conclusion, in (2). Monotheism didn't arise from reason alone; Plato's ideas don't lead to it in any sort of direct or necessary fashion. In fact, as Avicenna demonstrates, it's kind of hard to get there. Islamic doctrine wants an absolutely unitary god (this is the principle of tawhid), but what Avicenna could give them was a god in two parts.

The loss of (2) puts (3) in jeopardy, though I would like to salvage (3) on other grounds. Let's talk about this much first.

Syzygy

Syzygy

Christmas morning at mom-in-law's house. The three pups in back are ours, the one first in the row of three being the one in precarious health -- I never thought I'd still have him for Christmas! But he still gives every impression of happiness and comfort. The dog who broke the syzygy pattern is one visiting for the holidays. All the dogs behaved reasonably well throughout their visit. I'm not sure how many dogs I'd have to arrive with before my mother-in-law banned me from future Christmases, but I suspect I'm about to find out.

The weather turned cold but by no means frigid: I stayed in my usual sandals and added a light jacket. Just to show we know how to get in the snow spirit down here in torrid South Texas, though, I've added this picture that our neighbor across the road (who lurks here) took of a once-in-a-century Christmas snowfall six years ago when we first were starting to build.