For those new to the Wood:

Most people know about Pooh’s Think because of my blogging ten years ago. I stopped blogging in 2008, and soon after, the database was hacked and destroyed. So what you see here is a less eventful carrying on, for no very good purpose. The original blogging was a story about the slow expulsion of my family from a thriving religious and educational community in Moscow, Idaho. I told the story in real time, as the turbulent events unfolded, but this telling quickly became part of the drama, part of what was driving the drama. A strong local readership made this possible. My writing, and my hosting of the work from others, was my way of acting in community, even shaping that community.

I hope to better introduce this in the near future. For now, I refer you to the Praise for Pooh’s Think page to the right for comments I received in 2006 and 2007. These comments give some sense of the story.

It is not my intent to start blogging again, at least not any time soon, certainly not of the kind necessitated in 2006. I have been writing two books since 2008, one of them a Memoir, and I have been able to do this largely in the comfortable privacy of my home, or, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, minded by nothing more than a handful of seagulls. I plan to keep it this way.

However, I have been unable to put out of mind Douglas Wilson’s current bullying, shaming, threatening, and libeling of Natalie, a recent member of his flock. That alone I might have walked away from, but Wilson is offering all this as direct reprisal for Natalie’s public comments about the abuse she endured from one of his ministerial students – abuse that was just obliquely confirmed by a letter from Peter Leithart. So what to do?

I have decided to offer some of my experience with the other child rape scandal, involving pedophile Steven Sitler. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple people have asked for my thoughts on Pastor Douglas Wilson’s latest platform-building success. The current buzz regards Jamin Wight’s and Steven Sitler’s inclination to rape young children in Pastor Wilson’s care. One of the victims, Natalie, has taken a remarkable public stand about the care she received from Pastor Wilson after the abuse was revealed. In 2006, I refused to mention Natalie’s story on Pooh’s Think, and I have so far left Natalie and her abuser Mr. Wight out of my Memoir altogether. After all, Pastor Wilson might have had a point about Natalie the Seductress – as her pastor, he would know – and not too much blame can be given a young man allegedly thrown a-top a virgin by her own parents. I had my doubts about this narrative, but I was too embattled and too weak to investigate and risk further reprisal from Pastor Wilson.

Natalie was Sapphira, dead and buried, forgotten by the world, and I was one of the many fools that helped shovel the dirt. But somehow, Natalie managed to resurrect herself, taking on the pain and the remembering, demanding the world to listen. As of two days ago, my wife having mentioned this post of Natalie’s, I am finally listening too. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous installment, I asked the obvious questions about the intangible, heinous, and inexorable social power of the Islamic State:

Is this power derived from religious faith? If so, is it only Islam we should fear, or is this just one more iteration of the violence endemic to all classic monotheism?

I ventured the suggestion that George Packer has, the last week, brought us close to the beginning of an answer: the Islamic State’s indiscriminate massacre and torture are acts of purification, and the Jordanian pilot’s slow death by fire the ultimate sacrifice. The blood and dread serves to excite, unite, and grow the new community.

But before traveling further down this explanatory path, I want to back up for some context setting and take a look at what is, or at least should be, the larger debate.

There is no better place to start than new atheist and cognitive neuroscientist Sam Harris, who has more than anyone helped galvanize the post 9/11 American imagination. In his best-selling End of Faith (2004) Harris announces that Americans should fear “the fall of civilization” given the new close proximity of religious fanatics to weapons of mass destruction. Religion – more exactly, religious faith – “has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years” and the “most prolific source of violence in our history” (26-27). “The problem is with Islam itself.” The reason Osama bin Laden intended to kill innocent men, women, and children is obvious.” Bin Laden believes “in the literal truth of the Koran.”

Some of Harris’ arguments are quite persuasive. Consider this one:

Today, Google celebrates Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 148th birthday. I appreciated the nudge, since it called to mind Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. According to historian Jennifer Burns, although she “took no public credit, Lane was essentially a coauthor of the best-selling Little House on the Prairie series,” weaving “libertarianism delicately through the nostalgic books.” Google’s prod also revealed that it was not until this year that Wilder’s autobiography published, describing life as it really was: Pioneer Girl

As for Lane, she is known as one of the three founding mothers of the American libertarian movement and had the privilege of corresponding with Ayn Rand when Rand decided to move forward with her Atlas Shrugged. But as much as Lane tried to understand and embrace Ayn Rand’s developing individualism, she found herself opposing it at its core. Describing a typhoid epidemic on the prairie, Lane writes to Rand:

People ‘helped each other out,’ that was all . . . It was just what people did, of course. So far as there was any idea in it at all, it was that when you were sick, if you ever were, the others would take care of you. It was ‘common neighborliness.’ . . . The abnormal, that I would have thought about, would have been in its not being there . . . There IS a sense of ‘owing’ in it, of mutuality, mutual obligation of persons to persons as persons.

This way of thinking about moral deliberation and the role of ‘reason’ in our knowledge of the good is surprisingly similar to some of my work at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. What is ‘normal’ in our social environment disappears. It is not really ‘there for us’ in terms of conscious thought and deliberation. It is not positive perceptual stimulation that gives rise to what we explicitly see in the world. Rather, conscious engagement is provoked by the absence of the normal. What is ‘there for us’ is what unsettles, the new.

This is good company to have. Lane was skeptical of any talk of ‘rights’ that implied ‘dualism’ (which wasn’t as easy to do then as it is now) and she is known as one of the few intelligible libertarian moral philosophers of the 20th century.

All quotes are taken from Jennifer Burns’ fantastic book on the life behind the work of Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Market. (I have also mentioned Burns’ work on Rand here.)

Making use of hidden cell phones, the Islamic State’s sex slaves have made contact with the outside world. There are thousands of them – young Muslim women, some just over 12 years old, snatched from the lifeless arms of their butchered mothers. The brutality and disorientation they continue to suffer – between beatings and rape they hear sermons on why God does this to vile unbelievers – requires removal of all means of suicide. Stealing a moment for a private call, one of the women begs for the merciful bombs of American fighter jets. She does not want to hear that beautiful rumble from high to see her captors punished or that she may once again be free. She begs for the bombs simply so that she and the other women may die. Envious of the 41 women she knew who were successful at suicide, she pleaded, “Please call the plane, we want them [to] kill us, we want to kill ourselves.”

After spending time with refuges Angelina Jolie asks, “What do you say to the 13-year-old girl who describes the warehouses where she and the others lived and would be pulled out, three at a time, to be raped by the men? When her brother found out, he killed himself.”

Even after months of now a billion dollar air campaign by the U.S. military has had little impact on the Islamic State’s control over its people and it ability to recruit and grow. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, has sought unconventional sources of expertise in trying to understand the Islamic State’s social power. “We do not understand the movement, Read the rest of this entry »

More than one person has approached me about Doug Wilson’s commentary on the scandal surrounding Vision Forum’s Doug Phillips.  I had no desire to visit Wilson’s blog, but I was curious enough about the scandal to google ‘Doug Phillips.’  At the very top of the search results was a precarious blogger I knew from years ago.  Second on the list was a recent Huffington Post series.  A little further down, I found a hard-hitting, albeit tardy, article from the evangelical World Magazine.

‘This is what Wilson is talking about?’ I thought to myself.

So I read Wilson’s blog too.  I was not disappointed.

After briefly acknowledging Phillips’ misconduct with three words, “tragic, sad, and humbling,” Wilson goes on at some length praising Phillips for the way he resigned from Vision Forum Ministries.  More than a few words are also spent castigating Phillips’ public critics.  God’s thoughts about them are obvious: “the enemies of the Lord can be readily identified.”

Because of my investigative endeavors while on my way out of Wilson’s inner ring (2005), I do not find this response surprising, or even curious.  Yet, there is something about this new scandal, which is now partially constituted by Wilson’s chosen response to it, that finds important intersection with some of my current writing.

My interest regards foremost the extent of incoherence in the person and work of Doug Phillips.  Phillips was not your average down-the-street preacher.  He was passionate about a highly specific cultural vision of chastity and marital fidelity, and this vision defined his core identity, both public and private.  Further, his recently exposed naughtiness was not a ‘two ships passing in the night’ affair.  The relevant rendezvous, many not explicitly sexual, spanned over a decade, often in the broad light of a Sabbath day.  Please see Julie Ingersoll’s reporting at the Huffington Post for an introduction to Phillips’ alleged long-term oppression of the young lady that here concerns us.   Read the rest of this entry »

The goal of Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Darwin’s Doubt, seems straightforward: clear an ecumenical path for the scientific viability of Intelligent Design. Of interest to me was Meyer’s detailing of allegedly non-Darwinian theories recently spawned from within the scientific establishment, the inevitable response – so the argument goes – to the still unexplained proliferation of new animal forms during the Cambrian period. Given Meyer’s humble underdog appeal, patient tutoring, and respect for the relevant sciences, I even found myself appreciative of his eventual philosophical argument for the classification of Intelligent Design as a ‘scientific’ theory.

But I wondered. What would the ‘other side’ have to say about all this? Gareth Cook’s review for the New Yorker satisfied some of my curiosity. Cook tells us that the “aim” of Meyer’s book is to “rekindle the ‘intelligent design’ movement” [all emphases here are mine]. The theory of intelligent design is “Probably best understood as the central element of a cunning legal argument,” for which the “engineers” of intelligent design “improved the disguise” of creation science. “Their agenda” was setback in 2005 when a federal judge declared intelligent design a “religion.” Darwin’s Doubt is “pseudoscience.” Meyer “appears” serious and reasonable. Those “who sense that science is a conspiracy against spiritual meaning will find the book a thrilling read.” The most “honest moments” come at the very end of the book, when Meyer offers a few personal reflections on meaning and the universe. “Here, at last, Meyer is not pretending to be a scientist.”

If Cook was after an accurate and informative book review, he failed. That may not have been his goal, however, in which case, he perhaps succeeded brilliantly. But I have saved Cook’s most striking comment for last:

Most absurd of all is the book’s stance on knowledge: if something cannot be fully explained by today’s science—and there is plenty about the Cambrian, and the universe, that cannot—then we should assume it is fundamentally beyond explanation, and therefore the work of a supreme deity.

This is decisively not the book’s explicit stance on knowledge. Meyer offers his theory as the ‘best explanation’ according to ecumenical criteria such as falsifiability and the ability to make predictions. I think the New Yorker owes a correction, and given the word “absurd,” perhaps also an apology.

If this is what the ‘other side’ has to say about Darwin’s Doubt, then I encourage everyone to buy Meyer’s book and read it.

But I pause. Crucial to Meyer’s argument is the satisfaction of this criterion: our scientific theories must appeal to causal connections observable in the world today. Meyer argues that good science can talk about design by non-physical Intelligence, even if we have no idea how this could work, since this is the explanation we give every day for the information-rich products of our own conscious, intentional acts. I do not think this argument works. Read the rest of this entry »

I do actually intend to blog again.  It’s just that the surfing keeps getting in the way. . . . perhaps if I blog about the poetics  and philosophy of surfing?   It has been a watery world for our household: reading through Moby Dick,  inching through the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and 10 hours over Cardiff Reef each week (dolphins, seals, whale spouts . . .).

I do happen to have news regarding the events of 2005, the same events that gave birth to the original Pooh’s Think of 2006 (hacked and destroyed by the opposition a while ago, sorry).  I have just completed a letter to my friends: an introduction to the American Kirk and the story behind the story — some of you might recall I promised this some years ago.  If you do not receive this and are interested, please shoot me a note.

While exploring a bit of American literature last year, I stumbled onto a topic that many folks today would call “homeschooling.” I was surprised by the author who provided the occasion: it was Paul Ryan’s preferred sage, the extravagant Ayn Rand.

I have inferred from Jennifer Burns’ outstanding autobiographical work on Rand (Goddess of the Market, Oxford, 2009) that Rand’s cultish authoritarianism, her drugs, her infidelity, and her own irrational rage—while protesting anti-rationality—have not entirely eclipsed  her greatness, and her legacy they never could (you might recall Ted Turner’s 248 billboards asking, “who is John Galt ?”).  Perhaps some social conservatives will consider the truth of this suggestion after venturing the following passage from Atlas Shrugged (page 785 in my Plume by Penguin, 1999):

She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four.  They seemed to face life as she had faced it.  They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.  The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

“They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,” said the young mother. . . . “They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world. . . . I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband’s profession, but for the sake of my own.  I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings.  I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror.  You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart?  Yet the cause is so simple.  The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”

I am still writing my book.  I have been writing it for about five years. If you have no idea what book I refer to, this post might not be intended for you.  This is a friendly update for those who periodically check in.

The five classes I now teach (Philosophy and Humanities) have permitted me a day each week to continue the book steadily, although this might change with my firmer commitment to philosophy and cognitive science research.  I hope to have at least a rough-draft proposal by July 2012.  I do not, by the way, begin addressing The Kirk until Chapter 7.

The book has taken on different forms and sizes and purposes—in my imagination, in my notes and outlines, in the actual drafts spanning a number of genres. Last summer, after wrapping up some research on cognitive neuroscience, metaphor, and philosophy of freewill, I had some time to work on the book at Steamboat Springs’ public library, which provided me a more than sufficient setting of geography and architectural space – river rolling down from the last bit of melting snow, just outside the library window . . .   We also made it back to Moscow, Idaho for the first time (May/June) and our five weeks there was important. I enjoyed daily liturgical progressions through University of Idaho’s beautiful campus (running into The Beast on one occasion – ‘good to see you’, etc.).  I spent some time in Evan Wilson’s library, of course (and in the home of some Kirkers), and I regularly walked to Bucers for some note-taking time as the northern winter came to an unusually slow halt.

I will be attending this year’s Cognitive Science conference  in Boston: CogSci 2011 (33rd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society).  I am looking for an economical room sharing opportunity for the nights of July 19th to July 23rd.  Please contact me if interested or, if you are so kind, please direct me to folks who might be interested: michael.p.metzler@gmail.com

(I am presenting a poster on Action, Imagery, and the N400)

Thanks!

Well, for a second time I forgot I had a blog. Don’t believe me?  Look at the date of the last entry for supporting evidence. But then, last week, I needed The Wood for a quick search—‘oh, yes, my blog-the-database-thing’ I said to myself.  Since this recollection I have been tempted to make another post, most recently an entry relating the new neuroscience findings reported in the New York Times. But why do a thing like that? That might lead to some readers, which could lead then to another readership, which would then lead to the unconscious itch to feed more material to that readership, and then I would have a blog again. But I do not at the moment want a blog. So instead, here is one piece of information I intended to make available for the last year but never got around to, my picture:

Last night, I completed Glen Beck’s The Overton Window, although I am not sure why – light reading that was just sitting there, perhaps, to punctuate my progress through Gone with the Wind.  In many respects, I did enjoy the book. No doubt less noble material currently sits on the shelves of the local book store. Yet, I was left confused over just what precisely I had read.  Still sorting it out, here are some timely thoughts. Today is the day before Beck’s “Restore America” event.

Beck is not a conspiracy theorist, he tells us.  Read the rest of this entry »