Why Opposites Attract

By most measures, I have a large vocabulary. There are times in my day when I can't actually find the word I'm looking for, simply for having a glut of options. A large vocabulary is a good tool to have in dealing with people, dealing with books, dealing with just about anything.

But...a vocabulary, like any tool, can easily enough be turned into a weapon. It can be abused. Words can obscure, they can deceive, they can make labyrinthine the paths that they should render straight. Which is a long-winded way of saying that words, like everything else in the human experience, have a taint of darkness to them.

That's why there are certain settings in which it's imperative to be as simple and direct as possible. You don't want to create a zone of ambiguity when you're describing the physical tolerances of an aircraft. Neither do you want a blurry region around the method of producing an important pharmaceutical. These are important matters...what I believe the experts call "serious shit."

What's interesting to me is that those of us for whom material considerations, while important, are not at the top of the proverbial heap, don't seem to be quite as rigorous with our own brand of important considerations. Yes, yes, theologians - the good ones, at any rate - are very rigorous and precise when it comes to their language. But they're also not all that accessible, because their language, while precise, tends to be a little technical at best. At worst...well let's just say there's a reason I don't voluntarily read Heidegger and leave it at that.

Which is why I'm glad we have someone in the head expositor-of-theology position who can use small words and distill this stuff down. Don't get me wrong, the last couple of occupants were great, but if you were to compare the language of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis the Roman-Numeral-less, there's a pretty stark contrast in terms of accessibility.

Let's start with Exhibit A, from the soon-to-be-saint Pontiff of my childhood:

If we wish to speak rationally about good and evil, we have to return to St. Thomas Aquinas, that is, to the philosophy of being. With the phenomenological method, for example, we can study experiences of morality, religion, or simply what it is to be human, and draw from the a significant enrichment of our knowledge. Yet we must not forget that all these analyses implicitly presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being and also the reality of being human, that is, being a creature. If we do not set out from such "realist" presuppositions, we end up in a vacuum.

Yuh-huh. You lost me at "phenomenological method." Mainly because I haven't had to worry about the phenomenological method for almost ten years now, and they've been a good ten years on balance. Call me old-fashioned, but when I was a kid, we didn't need phenomenology to figure out how to live.

Now I am just a little bit German, so I was happy when one of my own took over steering the ship. But he's a bit of an academic, too, and so there's a level of abstraction in his writing which is not fully satisfying:

Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.

That's great and all, but it doesn't really...connect all that well. And who the heck uses "compenetrate" in a normal conversation, anyway?

Now, contrast that with Pope Francis:

We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord. When we are not walking, we stop moving. When we are not building on the stones, what happens? The same thing that happens to children on the beach when they build sandcastles: everything is swept away, there is no solidity. When we do not profess Jesus Christ, the saying of Leon Bloy comes to mind: "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil." When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.

There are three things that strike me about this guy: 1) nobody should have any difficulty with the language, it is very clear-cut; 2) he speaks in the communal sense of how not just an impersonal "one" ought to act, but how "we" ought to act; and 3) he really pulls no punches about actions, consequences, and how they all tie together in the way we live our lives. In short, he is a teacher. Not the abstract sort of teacher you run into in a classroom, but the very earthy, hands-on teacher that you hopefully encounter in the pulpit and in the confessional.

If not, you have this guy now. And that ain't nothing.

The Answer to the Trad (and Liberal) Mindset

I haven't really had occasion to talk about my view of Pope Francis. That's mainly because I've known him for, what, a few weeks now? I don't want to be hasty. But then this caught my eye:

Havana Prelate Shares Notes From Cardinal Bergoglio's Pre-Conclave Speech

The above-linked article is fascinating in that it serves as a poster work for what I have always defined as "orthodoxy". In a world where polarity defines one's position in politics, society, and, yes, even religion, it's nice to be reminded that there are people who simply refuse to use the world's yardstick at all.

"Orthodox" is not a synonym for moderate. They may live in the same neighborhood, and their kids may hang out in the cafeteria, but they are fundamentally different positions.

A moderate takes in all sides, examines every angle, before making a decision. Moderation can be a virtue when coupled with humility, allowing one to recognize that he probably doesn't have all the answers. But it carries with it a sense of lacking conviction if adhered to in every case.

Orthodoxy is, above all, convicted. It knows the fundamental framework under which moderation's inquiry ought to proceed - and, indeed, when it is warranted that an inquiry begin in the first place. It shares moderation's affinity for humility; prideful orthodoxy is about as helpful as a car made of ice in Arizona on the 4th of July. Humble orthodoxy says, "This is the answer. It doesn't come from me, but I have received it and am commanded to share it. You may accept it or not as you will, but it is the truth."

The thing I like about the orthodox label is the total lack of obligation to anything but the truth. I don't have to love a thing just because it's old, nor do I have to despise it. I can look at it squarely and say, "You are a timeless treasure, an ingot of beautiful Truth handed down over the generations"; or conversely, "You come to us from men, and at the time of your begetting you served a purpose and served it well; but today you have outlived your value and remain only vestigial. Let us recognize you for your accomplishments, but burden you no more from use."

It's a liberating place to live. And it feels like the new Holy Father will be brutally orthodox. I'm excited.

Getting Old Testament on Gotham

Scott's comment on my last post got me thinking a bit on my approach to the judgment of Gotham in Nolan's TDK narrative cycle - and by extension, to our own culture. The struggle is between Batman's fixation on saving Gotham, of refusing to write it off as nothing but decadent and corrupt, on the one hand; and of his various adversaries' finding of fault with Gotham on the other. The former, as stated here and elsewhere, is very Christological. In my reply to Scott's comment on the last post, I see the latter as somewhat Old Testament, in the vein of the judgment of Sodom or the Ban placed by God on the various Canaanite tribes.

At least, that's how I thought about it initially.

The real tension, though - at least for me - is between the individual, Christological approach to society and culture, versus what I've long seen as a consistent cycle in history. It's not my insight, this cycle, but it's pretty well documented. Civilizations rise, blossom, grow corpulent and self-destructive, and then fall. The story picks up again, somewhere else, but always it seems that for the greater good of mankind, civilizations will collapse before they can do lasting damage. "Providence," some would call it. The nature of the movement of  history, others might say. And, what I find particularly interesting, is that there is no moral conflict that I can find, obvious or otherwise, between our mandate to desire the redemption of mankind and the recognition that by some agency of Providence, history comes with its very own fail-safe against destructive human behavior. Or, I should say is that there shouldn't be.

In the case of TDK, the moral problematics arise from the fact that this historical force is personalized - not just made of men, but men who are actively pursuing what they see as their task. There's a massive difference in the quality of judgment rendered by Providence and the judgment rendered by Ra's al-Ghul. This is okay for fiction, because we know that in real life there's no Ra's or Bane trying to reset civilization; there's not even an agent of chaos like the Joker trying to make things interesting by giving us a "better class of criminal" who just want to see the world burn.

I suppose at the end of the day what I feel conflicted about is about rooting for this inevitable - from my view - Providential correction. I would like to see society's disease cured, but the practical side of me says that a collapse is far more likely and far more feasible, so why not root for that. And if there were a real-world Bane figure who could show up on the scene and hurry things along, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Am I Rooting for the Wrong Team?

A friend of mine in meatspace recently mentioned to me that Ra's al Ghul - as portrayed by Liam Neeson in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight narrative cycle - was almost precisely what he would define as a hero. This took me a moment to process, but almost more off-putting than his statement was the realization in my own mind that I kind of agreed. I love Nolan's movies and re-watch them sporadically. I've always liked the character of Bruce Wayne for the fact that he confronts evil and injustice from both the standard criminal element as well as the corruption and apathy of the society he is ostensibly protecting. It's a satisfying fantasy that, in some manner or other, somebody is meting out justice in this life; that somebody's uppance will come before Gabriel blows his horn. I'm not saying I'm on the verge of donning a cowl and batarang, but part of having a sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice hard-coded into your nature as a human being is that you don't like seeing malfeasance going unpunished. I doubt that there's anyone who would argue strenuously with that logic. Sure, there are the issues about going outside the law and excessive force and yada yada yada, but any honest person is not going to pretend that he doesn't take some secret satisfaction in the idea.

What is a bit odd to me is that I should feel such a strong affinity for characters who by every regular measure are villains. Ra's tries to cause a city he sees as a symbol of social degradation to destroy itself. The Joker...well, the Joker is like one of my old favorites, Tyler Durden - shaking things up is sort of his reason for being. Bane, in a way, fuses his two predecessors, incorporating an affinity for chaos with wiping corruption clean. There is a common thread that runs through each of these characters which is eerily similar to Batman's motivation: the burning desire to wipe out what's seen as wrong, as false, as evil. It's as if there's a moral in the story that good and bad, outside the structural controls of the law, are perhaps more tenuous concepts than we might be comfortable with. Both are less restrained, more violent, whether it's Batman or Bane. The truly disturbing thing to me about it as I look at the two sides in my own mind is that I'm not sure that they are two different sides, and I'm not sure whether Gotham is worth saving.

And given that Gotham is a metaphor for all of us, that bothers me more than a little bit, indeed.

Wow This is Hard

"This" being more verbosely described as "writing without injecting excessive bite into the equation." Seriously, this is not easy. I had the perfect thing lined up to write about today, too. I ran across a fairly nutty situation in Missouri that, when I read about it, just screamed to me that, yes, the experiment of representative government has failed and we may as well pack it in and go home and...you get the idea. I've managed to burn through a week's worth of days writing and rewriting things and ultimately giving up because the result was just a bunch of acerbic noise. I need to find a way of doing this that doesn't drag me into that endearing scorched earth approach to marking my territory by trying to set my neighbors on fire.

I'm having the discomfiting realization that writing, and in a fashion that is more than just wrath wrapped in wit, will be a trifle more difficult to achieve than I thought it would be. Oh, well. Tomorrow will be better.

40 Days

Well, another year, another Lent.

I've been away, stuck in my head for too long. It's not like I've been doing nothing...I've been doing a lot of reading, but I'm starting to think it's possible to do too much reading. Or, at any rate, doing a lot of reading, unaccompanied by verbalized thought, is proving to be un-salutatory to my frame of mind. So this Lent, I have decided that among my myriad feats of asceticism, I will also be forcing myself back into the habit of actually talking about the ideas in my head. Every day, I must take a total of 30 minutes to an hour to write. The rest of the day I can ruminate however much I want, but for that half- to full-hour I have to actually bang something out.

Don't worry, you aren't going to suffer through a post every single day. But I am damn well going to post. I have that thread of a manifesto I can pick up. I'll probably come up with something else on the side. Maybe somebody will pick a fight with me. That would be fun. We'll see.

Happy Ash Wednesday. Let's see how much fun we can make this Lenten season.

Why I Will Likely Not Be Watching the Debates Tomorrow Night

The Pittsford Perennialist has a pretty good way of summing up why I hate presidential debates:

By current standards, Lincoln and Douglas broke every rule of political discourse. They subjected their audiences (which were as large as fifteen thousand on one occasion) to a painstaking analysis of complex issues. They spoke with considerably more candor, in a pungent, colloquial, sometimes racy style, than politicians think prudent today. They took clear positions from which it was difficult to retreat. They conducted themselves s if political leadership carried with it an obligation to clarify issues instead of merely getting elected.

My bar is, clearly, set way to high. I'm just not interested in watching grown men debase themselves in a naked pursuit of raw power. Because don't fool yourself, that's what the debates are about. What other than that most strident drive and motivation could induce men with such egos (and, one presumes, self respect) to engage in the ridiculous exercise of distilling legitimately complex issues into 30-second soundbites, and obfuscating their positions on simple points with a cloak of over-complexity? And let's not forget that these paltry excuses for circuses are brought to us by the very same people who own the primary platform of information distribution in the first place, and who therefore consider it their right to frame the debate on any given issue with whatever verbiage seems most meet to them.

No, thanks. You want an interesting debate? Give me three hours, unilateral control over questions, and a pair of electrode hookups that have the ability to channel ten million volts of electricity into whoever surpasses their BS allotment first, and I'll show you an interesting debate.

...And that's why they call it "live"...

Iosue had a longer quote from which I pulled. I recommend heartily absorbing the entire snippet. As he might suggest, tolle, lege.

Square One Needs a Square

It occurs to me that the last post might have sent the wrong message about what location I'm taking as my starting point for this little deconstructing-then-reconstructing-my-worldview exercise. I haven't been in an academic setting for some time, and my sense of fealty to any particular thinker's system of terminology had more to do with professorial rigor than personal preference even when that sense of fealty wasn't dead. It's a failing you all will simply have to bear with. That said, it dawned on me that the overall tone in which I expressed my plans lends itself to a rather Cartesian interpretation. I want to distance myself from that. This project isn't the undertaking of radical doubt; really it's more like radical poking. There's nothing that I anticipate less excitedly than descending into the sub-basement of philosophy and spending an hour explaining my level of conviction concerning the fact of my own existence. That sort of thing is why axioms exist.

So let's lay down some axioms and give some definition to our starting point.

I'm not Descartes, so we'll assume for the sake of the argument that I exist. Not only that, but I'll do you the favor of assuming that you exist as well. In fact, let's just agree that the universe as such, and the entities in it, all exist and aren't figments or holograms or whatever is trendy to blithely assert these days. I don't keep up.

To keep things simple, let me just lay down these propositions as axiomatic:

1. Existence of the self
2. Existence of the world/universe
3. Contingency of the world/universe (i.e., no infinite regression, as it is insanely boring)

These seem pretty common sense to me. It's not that they're axiomatic in the strictly philosophical sense, but the arguments have been done to death, and honestly I don't think the discussion is worth having unless we can agree that we're there to have the argument, surrounded by a real environment, and that causation doesn't extend back ad infinitum (which argument I see not only as boring, which I have already mentioned, but exceedingly silly). From these three, I will posit the following, additional corollaries: there is such a thing as objective truth, and it is knowable by human beings. I feel comfortable with that assertion because if we can be confident that there are individuals living in a finite universe, then we know the basic truth that they exist; and once we get that far, we find ourselves able to say things about the manner and trappings of that existence, so that the conversation going forward takes a very ontological tone.

All of this sounds fine by me. Now to take a couple of days to see if there are any objections, sort them out, and move on to more complex propositions.

By the way, if there are any suggestions or preferences out there as to what precise direction to go in, I'll entertain any reasonable suggestions. I've left the field deliberately broad, in case someone has a preference.

See you in a few.

Assuming Nothing

I've had a lot of blog posts clanging around in my head for a good while. I was actually starting to think that there was such a tangle developing in my head that it was the volume of thoughts themselves that were leading me to seize up ever time I got a keyboard in front of me. That, and all the lightsaber duel videos. (On an unrelated note: if you can build me a 1-1/2 length lightsaber housed in a claymore hilt, you are automatically my best friend.)

Of course, neither my debilitating creativity nor the Internet's singular ability to offer me things to beguile the time were entirely to blame. Honestly, I'm most inclined to blame my new favorite atheist-turned-convert blogger, whose linear progression from the Other Side of the Fence to my own side is narrated in such a way as to have forced a realization on me subconsciously, and which has only now occurred to my conscious mind; to whit, that this whole blogging thing is most interesting to me not when I'm broadcasting my own opinions, but when I'm deconstructing ideas - whether my own or others' - and reconstructing them to see if they actually fit together as advertised. This realization came to me as I read, unfolding before my eyes, the mental process of an unbeliever coming, in bits and chunks, and through reasoning, to a point where belief simply made more sense.

How has this been putting a damper on my own writing? Put simply, because it's making me realize that I have of late been falling into the trap I so frequently accuse others of falling into, and assuming far too much in framing my positions. I'm not doubting my positions, mind you. It's just that, as any good builder will tell you, before you start building your grand mansion, let alone gloat about how grand it is, you damn well better be sure the foundation's been laid correctly. You might make a cursory glance at the thing and assume it's okay, but unless you actually inspect the masonry, you can't be guaranteed that somebody isn't going to come along with a well-aimed sledgehammer and bring the whole work down.

So with that in mind, my major project for the foreseeable future is going to be deconstructing the foundation of my thinking, then rebuilt it. I know I want to start with the moral continuum, and after that I may wander into politics, but I'm open to other avenues of exploration. Hopefully after going through a couple of these exercises, the creative juices will start flowing and I'll come up with other things to pick apart.

In the meantime, keep looking for that light-claymore.

The Feedback Loop

This is going to be one of those reflections, on a blog, about blogging - hence Mr. DiCaprio's gracing of us with his presence. I'm neither excessively masochistic nor sadistic, therefore this is not an abstract reflection. Think of it as a medium-winded explanation of why what was once a full-on fire hose of output here has slowed down to nary but a trickle.

It's not for lack of trying, believe me. I haven't given up on thinking, and by my nature thoughts don't want to be bottled up inside. They haven't made it through the intertubes to this virtual page for a couple of reasons. The first is due to a grave miscalculation on my part relating to parenthood. Doubtless someone who has experience in both breeding and rearing of variegated spawn would have been able to set me straight on my error, but I genuinely believed that once the Cub started to emerge from his initial state of infans into one of more autonomy and ability to communicate, that I would be able to manage him at times from a distance. Those of you with offspring of your own can get up off the floor and stop laughing now, please. And, yes, the fact of the matter is that with increased mobility and dexterity - and having entered into his 2nd year of extra-uterine existence very recently - he has also seen a spike in his seeming appetite for destruction. This tends to put us in conflict, as the things he targets for disintegration tend to be thinks that I would rather stay, well, high on the integration scale.

So, yes, I am blaming my inability to get a blog post up in part to my toddler.

It's not just him, though. I've found that of late my thought process has been accelerating, for lack of a better way to describe the phenomenon. The conception and development stages of an idea are reaching full fruition sooner, causing me to develop a collection of would-be posts. Couple that with the reduced availability of free time to actually write, as well as the fact that blogging is not the only thing I want to do with my occasional free time, and you can see how this can become a bit of a problem.

I'm working on it, though. Just need to find a way of structuring things so that it's less reliant on topical events. That one really seems to be my undoing.

Anyway, just keep checking in. I'll be back shortly.