In a recent article for Slate,  Farhad Manjoo offers a critical look at WikiLeaks through the lens of the release of Afghanistan war logs. Manjoo asks, “Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity?”.  With total anonymity of sources, which means that even WikiLeaks does not know and cannot know the sources of the leaks it provides, WikiLeaks has become “an opaque, insular organization” and has “shrouded itself in secrecy.”  As if the pejorative ‘insular’ and ‘shrouded’ and ‘secrecy’ were not enough, this is “a problem” Manjoo informs us, since “most whistle-blowers” have “some sort of agenda” and this agenda is “part of the story” and “could provide valuable context.”  Manjoo concludes, “would many leakers balk if WikiLeaks began asking them simple questions? Let me offer a few suggestions: Who are you, how did you find this document, and why are you leaking it now?”

As one who has been on the WikiLeak side of this kind of criticism (an experience originating a mild theme for my book in progress), I felt compelled to offer a reply.  I have not in the past spent much time on the political.  Perhaps I am finally getting drawn in, or perhaps it is not just politics at stake here. This issue regards our appreciation, or lack thereof, for the endearing role totalitarianism has played through human history, particularly with respect to the gruesomely attained discovery of that still globally rare and precious form of life we call freedom.  Freedom to think, freedom to know, freedom to talk, freedom to act.  Freedom from unknown microphones in one’s bedside phone and freedom from imprisonment and torture for failure to whoop it up for the local big-mouthed pathological monomaniac.  I speak of a Freedom not only for the guru or the state sponsored saint or the patriarch or the dear leader or all those deluded murderous tyrants we apparently cannot live without. I speak of a Freedom of the human mammal, which, by categorical definition, possesses some extent of at least a rough similarity to my own consciousness, emotions, and nervous system.

In answer to Manjoo’s question then—and I am glad he asks it—‘NO’, I do not think many leakers would “balk.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Even with the six dependents of spouse and children, I attempted the life of a gypsy after moving from Cardiff-By-The-Sea a couple months ago. After only two weeks of camping the attempt failed. There have been so far too many ‘house sitting’ opportunities in residences that outdo what had been my own. As I write, I sit with windows to my left that overlook rolling hills and a meadow with a winding stream. A darker mountain ridge stands further up, backgrounded by storm clouds. We are in the mountains of Colorado, ten miles out of what is already a fairly small town.  As I pause and look now, cattle roam, a green tractor mows a large field at a distance, and two horses graze nearby at the foot of the hill on which I am perched.   To my front is a view of a barren hill that towers just above the house roof on which I see the three horses of this household—brown, white, gray—walking casually side by side. Two friendly dogs, at all times on this acreage somehow omnipresent, are still felt and seen in the abstract.  On the way here, we passed through what a sign labeled ‘open range’, a phrase I understood only after swerving to the left of the paved road so as not to rudely disturb the cows grazing on the road’s edge and for fear that a cow’s lazy decision over what side of the street to munch could end in its instantaneous death.

For some days or some weeks I had forgotten that I ‘have a blog’. Read the rest of this entry »

“So, it would seem, then, you love this . . . young man?”
“No-no-no! I can’t stand . . . your young man, I can’t stand him!” Aglaia suddenly boiled over and raised her head.  “And if you ever dare again, Papa . . . I’m serious; do you hear? I’m serious!”
And she was serious indeed; she flushed all over and her eyes gleamed. Her father faltered and grew alarmed, but Lizaveta Prokofyevna gave him a sign behind Aglaia’s back, and he took it to mean: “Don’t ask questions.”
. . . [a bit later] “Well, what’s the meaning of this? What do you think?” Ivan Fyodorovich uttered hastily.
“I am afraid to even say aloud,”  Lizaveta Prokofyevna answered as hastily.
“But, in my view, it’s clear.”
“And in my view, it’s clear.  Clear as day. She loves him.”
“Not only loves; she’s in love with him!” echoed Alexandra . . .   (559-560).

In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, routine social events and conventional loves and hates are depicted with an intimacy that reveals their life and death significance. The reader is pulled into the social situation to accept without question the cosmic importance of a dying young man’s bitterness or a young girl’s prideful and fickle attachments.

As I gave myself to this text I began to muse: is not this dabbling in a bit of vain anthropomorphism, at least from the point of view of the serious minded philosopher and scientist?  At the very least, these romantic, imaginative constructs of the poet do not help get us at the hard science of the human animal, do they?

But I was also reading, it so happened, another book: Strangers to Ourselves (2002), by Timothy Wison. T. Wilson admits that key points of his thesis are considered controversial. For example, his thesis regarding our inability to accurately introspect our own psychological states has received even more skepticism than his sympathy with Wegner’s (2002) wild thesis regarding the illusion of conscious will. This was of interest to me since I took both claims, mildly construed, to be persuasive, and this all without doubt pertained to the more serious issues of science and philosophy – as hard and bizarre as they might be to our comfortable folk conceptions. I was therefore struck – with a chuckle, considering the mild discomfort I felt over Dostoevsky’s anthropomorphic craft – by the seminal role that literature plays throughout T. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves. These ‘controversial’ claims are introduced, for example, in the very first two pages of the book through a discussion of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past:

These words: ‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!’ had expressed themselves in my heart in the form of an anguish so keen that I would not be able to endure it for any length of time.  And so what I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life, How ignorant we are of ourselves.”

T. Wilson goes on to talk about a friend, Susan, who thought she was in love with a man, only to realize a year later what her friends had known all along: that she had never been in love with this man.   T. Wilson then notes how Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, could not “exactly define” her feelings for Mr. Darcy (2). Later, a short story by Mary Kierstead is cited (118), involving two cousins that come to realize that they had always hated Topper, a pony, even though they had been, for years growing up, “conned into loving him”. T. Wilson notes William Carpenter’s over a century old observation that young people often have “unnoticed” feelings, powerful attachments “between individuals of opposite sexes, without either being aware of the fact” (129).

T. Wilson admits that these stories are “just anecdotes” and appeals to the empirical evidence “for the idea that people can possess one feeling while believing they have another” (130).  But appeals to literature do not end. A short story by D. Eisenberg (150), and then one by Julian Barnes (163), are made useful.  In Barnes’ narrative, a man and a woman infer from a distance, based on cues given by others, their own love for one another, until their private personal narratives come in contact with a concrete meeting years later, at which time they to learned they did not even know one another (164). Proust is then analyzed further (169-170), and the book concludes with a personal narrative from Joan Didion (219-220).

Indeed, just yesterday evening down the Highway 101, John Perry appealed to an interesting story in answer to Paul Churchland’s question about how private thoughts might play a role-based way of managing information.

So: My tentative conclusion, based also on the continuing analysis of Melville’s The Whale and my more recent opening of Dickins’ A Tale of Two Cities, is this: The human psychology that novelists of 150 years ago took for granted cross-culturally – throwing the mysteries and complexities of the human mind up on stage to probe before a watching world – is now considered by American academics within philosophy, law, and psychology to be novel and controversial.  Given my continued interest – nay! my unfailing commitment as a soldier preparing for battle! – given my interest, I say, in metaphor and narrative, this tentative conclusion places a new shining edge on the old, largely failed battle ax of doing philosophy through literature – whatever this might be intended to mean, precisely.  Hats must be tipped to Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (Oxford, 1990) when noting such an idea, but with some reservation, given her courageous yet curious attempt at arriving at the necessary and sufficient conditions of an emotion in Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge, 2001); and one cannot forget her unblushing reference to ‘propositional content’ either. This result might have been inevitable though, at least after Nussbaum leaves aside Lakoff and Johnson’s revolution of embodied cognition and embraces an obscure and superficial substitute:

. . . we have at least a roughly demarcated category of phenomena before us that can be scrutinized to see what their common features might be, although we should be prepared, as well, to find that the boundaries of the class are not clear and that there are noncentral cases that share only some of the features of the central cases (24).

To my delight, I find something importantly different with T. Wilson, who crucially employees the word ‘narrative’ without trepidation or theoretical baggage when addressing the relation between the conscious and unconscious mind.  One cannot help but think of Lakoff and Johnson’s objectivism while reading T. Wilson’s concluding discussion – surprisingly simple and philosophically cogent – of narrative and truth (216-218).   T. Wilson’s success is found, I think, in the ability to self-consciously approach ‘personal narrative’ as an important analogy (162), and he notes that the “narrative viewpoint is perfectly compatible with the archaeology metaphor” [my emphasis].  T. Wilson makes no reference to Lakoff and Johnson. However, an entire chapter of Metaphors We Live By (1980) is dedicated to these sorts of ‘Complex Coherence across Metaphors’ (97-105), and the last chapter of Metaphors We Live By (four pages before the end of the book) foreshadows T. Wilson’s over-arching thesis:

But any really deep understanding of why we do what we do, feel what we feel, change as we can change, and even believe what we believe, takes us beyond ourselves . . . it comes out of our constant interactions with our physical, cultural, and interpersonal environment . . . The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself (232-233) [emphasis mine].

And so now I see another error in my thinking that crystallized about five years ago: Nicholas Maxwell led me astray by pitting literature against science according to the tension between the human world and the physical word, consciousness and matter.  But literature is a powerful tool in understanding the unconscious mind as well as the conscious; we perhaps have much to learn from the novelists of 150 years ago who wrestled with the physical complexities of being human despite the availability of a comfortable, conficting narrative of the Cartesian theatre.

Taken from Penguin Books, 1992; 625 pages.  Key Conceptual Metaphors: MAN IS LEVIATHON; THE WORLD THE WHALE

In this series you will discover, through understanding world and self in terms of the unspoiled surface of the deep and its great Leviathan, that genuine morality requires unconscious, non-responsible action, and that also conscious will – at least as conceived according to pseudo-philosophical lore – is largely an illusion, and further still, that the Sperm Whale likely has two separate spheres of visual consciousness, in contrast to the result of the two mutually reinforcing visual portals of the human mind. As if this was not quite enough, there is much more to be gleaned from Melville’s narrative on The Whale, which happens to be the greatest novel produced within our envied American boarders.

I provide only brief selections, in the order they appear in the extant text, marked by interpretive headings and indexed by the number of the page from which they are taken, and in a way that will not spoil the plot for those yet to embark on this historical journey.

_____________

Opening line (a note on precision):

Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little to no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world (3).

On the Illusion of Conscious Will (already quoted here):

Now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment (7).

Some demotic, old-fashioned literary craft:

 . . . while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy (17).

Breaking the spell, 1 (preliminary fearful fixation on the savage):

 . . . I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which I has so long been bound (25).

Breaking the conscious spell, 2:

What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself – the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.  Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian (26).

Breaking the unconscious spell, 3:

For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrible spell would be broken (29).

Analyzing the half-civilized cannibal:

But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state – neither caterpillar nor butterfly (31).

Faith:

But faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope (42).

Soul & Body:

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.  Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot (42).

Obeying God (from the sermon) [making a good man bad -MPM]:

But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do – remember that – and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.  And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists (48).

Situation of moral and legal censure (from the sermon):

Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless (49).

The strong humility of Dear Leaders (from the sermon):

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility . . . “I am a greater sinner than ye. And how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa.  But God is everywhere . . . God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom. . . and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. . . . the whale . . . vomited out Jonah . . . Woe to him who seeks to pleasure rather than to appall! . . . Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!  . . . Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway! . . . Delight is to him [4 times repeated -MPM] who acknowledge no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven” (53-54).

The Heathen, Consciousness, & True Philosophy:

. . . having left the Chapel before the benediction some time . . . humming to himself in his heathenish way . . . I saw the traces of a simple honest heart . . . a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan . . . But savages are strange beings . . . at first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic Wisdom . . . content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.  Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy . . . perhaps to become true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving.  So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester” (56).

Embracing the World & The Splintered Heart:

I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.  This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.  And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me.  I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy . . . he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be (57).

Idol Worship and a religious reductio:

I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church.  How then could I unite with this wild idolater in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I.  Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth – pagans and all included – can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? – to do the will of God – that is worship.  And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me – that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man.  And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? . . . ergo, I must turn idolater. . . we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.

Ishmael dusts his feet; a foretaste of Captain Nemo:

. . . how I spurned that turnpike earth! – that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records (66).

Genuine Morality requires non-Responsible, unconscious action:

The poor fellow . . . was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic . . .  Queequeg stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap.  For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog . . . through freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.  The greenhorn had gone down.  Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg now took an instant’s glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm sill striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. . . . From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such unconsciousenss?  He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.  He only asked for water – fresh water – something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself – “It’s a mutual, jointstock world, in all meridians.  We cannibals must help these Christians” (68).

The Hermits of the Sea, untouched by even the wrath of God:

And thus have these naked Nantuckerters, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders . . . The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.  There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China . . . With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales (70-71).

The Pequod:

She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies . . . A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that (78). 

Implicit Bias:

I saw that under the mask of these half humorous inuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard (79).

Speaking of animals and the law, I know of no where else to first turn but Melville:

Most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside.  In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men (The Whale, 570).

And vice versa. A San Diego fellow just last year met his watery grave by fooling a poor Great White (flapping as he did a ways out in a black wet suit).  When one thinks he is biting into a nice macaroni noodle, behold! a plastic coated worm!

But as with seals, so with pigs.  The posh Christopher Hitchens attempts an almost identical theory for the timeless trepidation over the pig:

The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropological root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human (god is not Great, 40).

But here now is the thesis: Is not there a dispositional reason for our denigration of the pig? Is not there just something swinish, something messy, muddy, and chaotic, in their very nature? They cannot help but do otherwise, right?  As with humans, so with pigs; their freedom of character lies mainly in their inherited situation:

Orwell actually did dislike pigs, as a consequence of his failure as a small farmer, and this revulsion is shared by many adults who have had to work with these difficult animals in the agricultural conditions.   Crammed together in sties, pigs tend to act swinishly, as it were, and to have noisy and nasty fights.  It was not unknown for them to eat their own young and even their own excrement, while their tendency to random and loose gallantry is often painful to the more fastidious eye.  But it has often been noticed that pigs left to their own devices, and granted sufficient space, will keep themselves very clean, arrange little bowers, bring up families, and engage in social interaction with other pigs.  The creatures also display many signs of intelligence, and it has been calculated that the crucial ratio – between brain weight and body weight – is almost as high with them as it is in dolphins.  There is great adaptability between the pig and its environment, as witness wild boars and “feral pigs” as opposed to the placid porkers and frisky piglets of our more immediate experience.

Hitchens, for some narrative reason only known to my unconscious intuition, provides this information on pigs before getting on to the business of god without any trace of explicit theorizing on Situationism. Yet it is this peculiar note on pigs that betrays Hitchens’ adoption of the general thesis. And as with pigs, so with cattle. Clarence Darrow made exactly this argument regarding cattle, as provided by the recent entry  of the Situationist:

Some of you people have lived in the country. It’s prettier than it is here. And if you have ever lived on a farm you understand that if you put a lot of cattle in a field, when the pasture is short they will jump over the fence; but put them in a good field where there is plenty of pasture, and they will be law-abiding cattle to the end of time.

Not content with metaphor and analogy, Darrow went on to draw a scientific correspondence between human mammals, cattle, and in fact the rest of the animal kingdom. Darrow addressed the prisoners in the Chicago jail:

The human animal is just like the rest of the animals, only a little more so. The same thing that governs in the one governs in the other. . . . nine-tenths of you are in jail because you did not have a good lawyer and of course you did not have a good lawyer because you did not have enough money to pay a good lawyer. There is no very great danger of a rich man going to jail. . . .  I will guarantee to take from this jail, or any jail in the world, five hundred men who have been the worst criminals and law breakers who ever got into jail, and I will go down to our lowest streets and take five hundred of the most hardened prostitutes, and go out somewhere where there is plenty of land, and will give them a chance to make a living, and they will be as good people as the average in the community. There is a remedy for the sort of condition we see here. The world never finds it out, or when it does find it out it does not enforce it. You may pass a law punishing every person with death for burglary, and it will make no difference. Men will commit it just the same. In England there was a time when one hundred different offenses were punishable with death, and it made no difference. The English people strangely found out that so fast as they repealed the severe penalties and so fast as they did away with punishing men by death, crime decreased instead of increased; that the smaller the penalty the fewer the crimes. Hanging men in our county jails does not prevent murder. It makes murderers. And this has been the history of the world. It’s easy to see how to do away with what we call crime. It is not so easy to do it. I will tell you how to do it. It can be done by giving the people a chance to live — by destroying special privileges. So long as big criminals can get the coal fields, so long as the big criminals have control of the city council and get the public streets for street cars and gas rights, this is bound to send thousands of poor people to jail. So long as men are allowed to monopolize all the earth, and compel others to live on such terms as these men see fit to make, then you are bound to get into jail. The only way in the world to abolish crime and criminals is to abolish the big ones and the little ones together. Make fair conditions of life. Give men a chance to live. Abolish the right of private ownership of land, abolish monopoly, make the world partners in production, partners in the good things of life. Nobody would steal if he could get something of his own some easier way. Nobody will commit burglary when he has a house full. No girl will go out on the streets when she has a comfortable place at home. The man who owns a sweatshop or a department store may not be to blame himself for the condition of his girls, but when he pays them five dollars, three dollars, and two dollars a week, I wonder where he thinks they will get the rest of their money to live. The only way to cure these conditions is by equality. There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out, there would be no more criminals than now. They terrorize nobody. They are a blot upon civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed.

You can read the entire address at the Situationist here.

Lest the reader think they have the full truth of what transpired during this address, consider H.L. recounting of Darrow’s speech at the Scopes Monkey Trial:

You have but a dim notion of it who have only read.  It was not designed for reading, but for hearing.  The clanging of it was as important as the logic.  It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.  The very judge on the bench, toward the end of it, began to look uneasy (The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1925). 

But comparing man – the crowning jewel of creation, created from the dust of the earth to take dominion over everything living and non-living thing; comparing this lord of creation to the mere beast of the field; this will no doubt be ludicrous and shameful to many contemporary Americans, and with certainty, to an even larger percentage of our beloved yokels.  And so it remains true that, at times, the looking at nature objectively, and the  intellectual progress sure to follow in its wake, will not be permitted in our great country. The same was true for Darrow’s own close environment. Yet, this was no cause for locking truth away in the libraries of the elite. Darrow spoke of man qua animal boldly.  In fact, Darrow had to deal with this very issue formally while confronting William Jennings Bryan, a circumstance that very well could have contributed to Bryan’s close trailing death. Menken, an eye-witness, recounted the scene:

Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars.  Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor half-wits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards.  His own speech was a grotesque performance and downright touching in its imbecility.  Its climax came when he launched into a furious denunciation of the doctrine that man is a mammal.  It seemed a sheer impossibility that an illiterate man should stand up in public and discharge any such nonsense.  Yet the poor old fellow did it. Darrow stared incredulous.  Malone sat with his mouth wide open.  Hays indulged himself in one of his sardonic chuckles.  Stewart and Bryan fils looked extremely uneasy, but the old mountebank ranted on.  To call a man a mammal, it appeared, was to flout the revelation of God.  The certain effect of the doctrine would be to destroy morality and promote infidelity.  The defense let it pass. The lily needed no gilding. (July 17).

And so as it is, American law, reverently obeying demotic Custom, has been wed to American Religion.  If man be an eternal soul with disposition to either do good or to do evil, bound for either eternal bliss and reward or everlasting torture and condemnation, either right now fully of the world or a God-filled saint of the universal ecclesia, then it follows plainly that man cannot be a social animal.  And if not a social animal, bound by the same laws as pigs and cattle, then society can continue resting content with a convenient and comfortable two-tiered universe: Us and the Other; the Good and the Bad. 

As a social animal, however, Darrow’s opinion of ‘justice’ might well be described by an alternative dualism; as Melville had it, man is as the great Sperm Whale, once yanked from its natural social environment and enslaved: to be, in the eyes of the law, either a Fast-Fish or a Loose-Fish (434-35):

Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession?  But often possession is the whole of the law.  What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? . . . What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of 100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers . . . but a Fast-Fish? . . .  What was American in 1492 but a Loose-Fish?  What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish?  What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?  What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?  What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and Fast-Fish, too?

A conservative Christian family member recently sent me Ravi Zacharias’s book The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists (2008) and asked that I offer a reply.  The following is my reply.

_____

1.  Introduction

1.1  The Author
Ravi Zacharias, born in India and now a Canadian/American, is a well known “international” Christian apologist. Zacharias preached in Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam war, participated in Harvard’s first Veritas Forum, and has given presentations at Princeton. He spent a brief time as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and is currently a visiting professor at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. In all other respects, he appears to enjoy the general career of the apologist: books, website, ministry, conferences, and radio.

1.2  The Occasion
The End of Reason (2008) is Zacharias’s response to Sam Harris’s bestselling Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). As indicated by the subtitle (“a response to the new atheists”), Zacharias intends to also implicitly address Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins.  These other authors are explicitly noted intermittently: Zacharias refers to “Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and a few others” (16), “Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett” (30), “Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris” (43), “Christopher Hitchens, a man too intelligent to write a book as base as The Missionary Position” (101), and “Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others” (126).  Dennett is on my view the most interesting intellectual out of the four (Hitchens the most notable), yet Zacharias has nothing to say about him. Dennett remains lurking in the evangelical shadows of “and others”.

_____

2.  The Opening Tale

2.1  Paragraph One
On my view, the most intriguing part of The End of Reason is the opening five paragraphs (13-15), the first two serving as the foundation. Here is the opening paragraph:

A university student arrives home and informs his parents that, after reading a popular atheist’s book, he has renounced his family’s faith.  His mother, particularly, is shattered by the news.  The father struggles to engage his son in dialogue, but to no avail. The deepening grief causes them to distance themselves from their son.  When the game of silence does not work, the mother is plunged further into depression and despair.  The grandparents become involved, watching in anguish as beliefs that have been held dear in the family for generations crumble.  Before long, this family that was once close and peaceable is now broken and hostile.  Abusive words between mother and son are exchanged with increasing frequency and intensity, and the siblings blame their brother’s new strident atheism for the rift in the family. After a long night of arguing with her son, pleading unsuccessfully with him to reconsider his position, the mother takes an overdose of prescription medication and ends her life, unable to accept what she interprets to be the destruction of her family.

This is certainly a sad tale.  But can even the discerning, charitable reader predict what the moral of this story will be?  This short narrative entertains some events that are unquestionably fanciful, such as the son’s declaration that he has “renounced his family’s faith” and the fact that it is the religious father who “struggles to engage” in “dialog”. It is improbable, if not incredible, that a University student would refuse to dialog about an influential book he has just read. With these narrative details put aside, however, the rest of the story appears to me sufficiently realistic given the level of ‘dysfunction’ in many families. It seems reasonable to suppose, for example, that parents as characterized generally by this story would naturally cling not to the seeking after what is empirically true, enlightening, and that which promotes the common good of society, but rather, to the “family’s faith”. Similarly, it is not implausible that grandparents are watching on as traditional beliefs held “for generations crumble”. This appears to be, in fact, a universal story of the conservative mind meeting a changing world.

All we know about the son from this short story is that he was sincerely convinced, after reading a book, that God does not exist, and further, that he is willing to confess this to his parents. The level of grief experienced by the parents is therefore not what we might consider a healthy response.  That it is the parents that distance themselves reveal a particularly unhealthy, albeit common, set of social habits. I appreciate Zacharias’s willingness to include the real possibility of unjust and irrational shunning that often takes place in social situations like this. Zacharias calls this shunning “a game of silence”, implying some level of intentional manipulation. This increases the injustice of the parent’s initial response exponentially. Given this shunning, game of silence, and despair on the part of the son’s parents, the larger family unit becomes “broken and hostile”.  The mother is willing to engage in “abusive words” with her son, which the son now, apparently, begins to offer back. The parents are willing to allow their son’s other siblings to blame his new sincerely adopted and studied beliefs to be the sole cause of the family’s suffering. The university student is therefore unjustly accused by his immediate peers under the oversight of his very own parents.  Even after all this, the parents take it upon themselves to berate  their son long into the night, “pleading” with him.  The mother is apparently unwilling to reconsider her manipulative game of shunning her own son and unwilling to stand up for her son against the unjust accusations from her other children. Rather, so determined that her son’s new beliefs have been the sole cause of the “destruction of her family”, she commits suicide.

2.2  Paragraph Two
So what, then, is the moral of this story?  Why did Zacharias open the book with precisely this moving narrative?  Did the father or mother do anything wrong?  Is there anything they might have done different?  Did their other children respond in ways that were unjust?  Should the parents have rather corrected this problem between their children? Is the shunning, the game of silence, and the accusations against the ‘black sheep’ of the family the target of the forthcoming lesson? As it turns out, none of these issues are to the point of the story.  Rather, the point is that the book that this university student read that helped lead to his new beliefs should not have ever been written.  The person who wrote the book is immoral and deluded. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey! Our friend Eric Schwitzgebel is in the New York Times, which you can find here.  Eric hasn’t yet advertised this fact; I had to find out from the recent entry  at Mind Hacks.

The sociology contained in my book ( The Kirk: Mother of War ) is thus far of folk origin. I began writing to chronicle my personal experience within the Kirk and to continue the social analysis I had already began promulgating for Pooh’s Think, Part 1. But I originally had little to guide me as I sought to understand my eventual expurgation. Fairly cloistered from the news media, I was influenced largely by bits and pieces of my philosophy education over the years – notably from graduate education at the University of Idaho, which began soon after the launch of Pooh’s Think, Part 1. I received highly concentrated help towards the end of my expurgation from the new start up of Harvard Law’s The Situationist, which remains an important resource for me.

More recently, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and George Lakoff have been highly influential – although Dennett’s intentional stance has been a thorn in my side since 1997. I am shy to begin enumerating the others, fearing I will mistakenly leave someone out, but I will here venture what comes immediately to mind: H.L. Menken, George Orwell, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael O’Rourke, John Bargh, Onora O’Neill, Phillip Zimbardo, Patrick Hogan, and my were-local discussion partners at Moscow’s Vision 2020  list.

Likely, my folksy sociology will remain largely in tact, as it so far seems consistent with my new explorations. Yet, more research is in order. In many ways, the first inchoate version of my book was the completion of a vigorous, painful research experiment that lasted 15 years. But now I find myself at the beginning of an exciting new project that was given birth through the death of that first book. As time allows, I hope to investigate the new academic and journalistic work on religion, power, violence, communitarianism, and war. This is what I hope to accomplish on the side of still other work that is likewise already on the side: work in consciousness, the sophistication of the unconscious mind, cognitive science, metaphor, narrative, and neurobiology.

I am inclined to begin with some books on the ‘new book’ shelves at the University of California down the road (San Diego). The following is a short introduction to 7 of these books. Perhaps I can at some point actually read them cover to cover!

1) Timothy Longman’s Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge, 2010).

Longman lived in Rwanda from 1991 to 1993 while working on his dissertation regarding church-state relations in Africa. He returned in 1995 to work in the field office of Human Rights Watch, the year after the infamous three month genocide infiltrated Rwanda. He has finally published his findings after comparing two local Presbyterian parishes in Kibuye. On page 312, Longman writes:

Ultimately, church leaders embraced ethnic chauvinism not only because they supported political authorities who adopted an anti-Tutsi ideology but because it was a means of co-opting people back into the patrimonial network. By defining Tutsi as a threat, church leaders were able to appeal to their members along lines of ethnic solidarity and shatter the emerging class solidarity that was challenging their control.

The introduction page explains that “Although Rwanda is among the most Christian countries in Africa, in the 1994 genocide, church buildings became the primary killing ground.” My Kirk brethren might be inclined to see my interest in this book as just more whining. I am after all the ‘sucking chest wound’ version of the bleeding heart and the reports about what happened in Rwanda sound very much like the glorious routs of the Old Testament. Take for example Philip Zimbardo’s report in The Lucifer Effect (2007): “One of the young men told a translator that they couldn’t rape them because ‘we had been killing all day and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning’”.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a Tutsi and “former social worker who lectured on women’s empowerment” could have helped her people, but she instead led the village of Butare into a trap, promising help from the Red Cross. “They were machine-gunned, grenades were thrown into the unsuspecting throngs, and survivors were sliced apart with machetes. Pauline gave the order that ‘Before you kill the women, you need to rape them’.” According to Zimbardo, the U.N. reported that at least 200,000 women were raped during the three month massacre.

2) William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford, 2009).

Cavanaugh challenges the social-political research of the majority, arguing that “there is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion and that essentialist attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent.” The prevailing concept of religion “that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state.” Cavanaugh challenges as incoherent “the argument that there is something called religion . . . which is necessarily more inclined toward violence than are ideologies and institutions that are identified as secular” (4-5). While I will likely take issue with the more provocative features of this thesis, I would be surprised if I do not find a wealth of wisdom to be gained in taking issue with essentialist and timeless concepts contracted for ideological and political purposes (such as the timeless notion of ‘covenant’ in reformed theology, a thesis still unique to me as far as I know). Canvanaugh notes that the religious-secular distinction was not established through argument, but “through violence” (7).

3) Marc Hetherington & Jonathon Weiler, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics (Cambridge, 2009).

Front, introductory material reads:

Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews – what guides people’s view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in . . . authoritarianism. . . . [D]ifferences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues. . . reflect differences in individuals’ level of authoritarianism.

After reading the first few pages, I suspected that Lakoff (2008) influenced this thesis. While not acknowledging influence, Hetherington and Weiler note on page 192 the correspondence:

George Lakoff’s (1996) treatment of morality in contemporary American politics tracks helpfully with our analysis in this regard . . . His conception of conservatism, which is premised on a ‘strict father morality,’ is closely related to our conception of authoritarianism.

 

4) Brett Whalen, Dominion of God (Harvard, 2009).

On page 6:

Ambivalence characterized the idea of Christendom, which formed a limitless community of the faithful, a cosmic congregation, but also an earthly society of believers in the here-and-now. Christendom had borders and was universal. It could be spread by the righteous power of the sword or by the spiritual grace of God . . . Within this apocalyptic ethnography, both Christian and non-Christian peoples had roles to play in the realization of history. The expectation of Christian world order relied – somewhat paradoxically – on mutually reinforcing languages of exclusion and inclusion, on the identification of God’s enemies and the promise of their ultimate redemption, or at least their opportunity to be redeemed . . . The pursuit of Christendom . . . engaged . . . the sensibilities of medieval Europe’s ecclesiastical elite, sometimes including popes themselves, who anticipated the ultimate triumph of their sacerdotal authority on the grandest of scales.

5) Michael Ryan & Les Switzer, God in the Corridors of Power (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 2009).

My introduction: This book’s 500 pages appear to be a thorough analysis of the role that conservative religion has played in the religious and non-religious political Right. Ryan and Switzer, together representing American Protestantism and Catholicism, offer an abundant set of tools, from demographics to American history. Topics include media, conservative conceptual worlds, the constitution, abortion, sex, gender, science, Darwinianism, terrorism, militarism, and the contemporary Christian life.

6) Bayne, Cleeremans, & Wilken, The Oxford Companion to Consciousness (Oxford, 2009).

My introduction: This 700 page tome looks to be an excellent long-term resource. I see a good deal of mind science, and the selection of entries reveals an unusual interdisciplinary flavor. Bayne, Cleeremans, and Wilken have included an entry on ‘wine,’ and I found the latest answer we have to the question my son posed the other day: “why can I not tickle myself?” Recent experiments are detailed in an entry titled ‘tickling’.

7) David Thompson, Daniel Dennett (Continuum Publishing Group, 2009).

My introduction: Although not important research material for my book, I recommend this to the average visitor of the Wood. This appears to be an excellent introduction to the work of Daniel Dennett, written by a retired Canadian philosophy professor. I even noted a subtle play between the epistemic and phenomenal use of the word ‘seems’  in the section on Heterophenomenology.

 A motion-picture is worth a thousand words:

That is just so like Palin.  You know?  But I refuse to resign my dignitity as an alumnus of the Universtiy of Idaho. Palin, as you can certainly see, is an alumna (We were both taught by the distinguished Dr. Roy Atwood too).

Newsweek has responded to the poltical noise generated from this cover.  But you can hear a pin drop as you turn the page to this edition’s article  by Christopher Hitchens. Please read. It is ambrosial – and true.  Hitchens somehow punches numerous 10d nails all the way in with one swing of the hammer.  Palin best not comment on the actual written content of this week’s issue.

I worked with a couple guys last year who said they voted for Palin. She was “hot”, they explained.  They invisioned a movie called “Nailin’ Pailin”.  Not that’s sexist, if you ask me.

Update: For what appears to be an excellent, scientifically informed response to these illegally obtained emails, see Real Climate’s original entry and their subsequent entry  intended to provide proper context to key issues and players. Will Powerline and other head-in-sand political hacks apologize? Doubt it.  Will the spin-scum cleric quoted below retract his statement about “fraud”? Of course not. They will all, as Hitchens once said, “just keep talking”.

_______

Powerline’s analysis of the emails illegally obtained from a leading climatic research center appears to be somewhat meretricious (if you search my blog, you will not find anything on global warming). You can see the primary, leaked documents here.

Powerline’s first post  explains:

Someone hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre, one of the main centers of anthropogenic global warming research. The hacker downloaded 62 megabytes of data from the server, consisting of around 1,000 emails and a variety of other documents.

I was eager to observe groupthink and system justification tendencies within a small scientific community, and although I do find some interesting data, I was disappointed in the largely innocuous material that was “cherry picked” by Powerline from 1000 emails. With such robust resources at hand, I would have hoped for more intriguing results, considering that scientists are only human mammals. Yet, Powerline seems to admit more than intended by the comment: “They are remarkably candid; these individuals talk to each other with the knowledge that they are among friends.” Powerline proceeds to build a vague case for the mass readership, equivocating between natural mechanisms of bias and intentional fabrication of facts. Compare the two statements:

1) The emails I’ve reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax.

2) . . . this story was told about accountants: A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, “What is two plus two?” The first two candidates answer, “Four.” They don’t get the job. The third responds, “What do you want it to be?” He gets hired. The climate alarmists’ attitude toward data appears to me much the same . . .

But Powerline concludes with the hedging disclaimer:

The language is certainly suggestive. . . but it’s possible the words used could have a relatively benign explanation. The surrounding emails do not provide context that sheds any light on what those words mean.

Determined to take a “political” stance on this issue, instead of providing an impartial analysis of these emails and what they broadly suggest in their entirety, a second post  was made, revealing very little not already made public through corporate scientific investigation and journalism.

This is perhaps one reason why it is illegal to procure information in this fashion: it leaves sensitive, private correspondence open to irresponsible hacks. Yes, I know these hacks at Powerline are practicing attorneys. (Perhaps I could just say that I rest my case – although they are well published, and one was trained at Harvard Law).  In turn, these hacks then provide further meat that anti-science, anti-civilization spin-scum clerics can throw out to their philistine admirers, as can be seen here :

And what we now know is that global warming is not just an egregious scientific mistake (which it always was). It is a mistake that certain dedicated true believers are prepared to persist in, by means of scientific fraud as necessary. . . . the thing will be completely over. Stick a fork in it; it’s done.

All the while, ultra-conservative leaders continue to warn their followers of the liberal bias and lies of big media. Hopefully, a more responsible story comes out of all this. I bet it does.

Update: An attorney from the Alliance Defense Fund sent a letter  to the CEO of the rocket center on the behalf of their “client” Vision Forum. The CEO of the rocket center in turn welcomed  the use of the facilities.

_____________

Doug Philips’ new movie  The Mysterious Island was banned after initial go-ahead from the theater of the Davidson Center Auditorium at the United States Space and Rocket Center:

a government-run agency and taxpayer-subsidized venue which is open to the general public for private rentals and screenings. According to federal law, it is not supposed to discriminate on the basis of religion.

Phillips claims that officials “have rejected the film which is critical of Charles Darwin, as being too controversial.”  While not doubting the unscientific propaganda in the movie, my past experience with Phillips would suggest that this report is accurate.

I do not have time to investigate. Any comments or information welcomed.

 ”Speaking for the motion, Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe MP. Speaking against the motion, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry.” To watch all five segments of the debate, go here.  I have embedded the second segment below (press ‘HQ’ if you find pausing):

The audience was polled before the event: 678 people thought the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. 1102 poeple thought that it was not. 346 people were undecided.

After presentations were made by all four speakers, another poll was conducted: 268 people thought that the Catholitic Church was a force for good, and 1876 thought that the Catholic Church was not a force for good in the world. Only 34 remained undecided.

It has not been my habit to post pictures of my family, a consequence, in part, of a veiled threat from a racist kinist (see Mathew Chancey’s work  for a sampling of the journalistic exposure that generated this kinist backlash). But all that seems well settled, and although Douglas Wilson is much more plodding and patient, he gives me little worry now that I am far removed from north Idaho’s Geneva. Wilson has been of the opinion that John Calvin was wrong in casting the vote for the torturing to death of Servetus, which he likens to the attempt at “killing ants with a baseball bat” (talk at U of I campus, November, 2005). Wilson has bigger plans for Enlightenment and Cosmopolitan Civilization and just recently has been beside himself in smiles and polite giggles while dining with the arch-blasphemer Christopher Hitchens, the thongs of whose sandals Servetus is not worthy to untie. Wilson, in fact, refuses to state that Hitchens’ belief and life is at all immoral. The censure – or more accurately, the rape and maiming – is reserved for the weak and powerless directly under Wilson’s pastoral care. So here’s a picture – a couple years old.

This is a wonderful and insightful note from one of my original opponents during the days of Pooh’s Think, Part 1. (For contrast, also note the recent comments  from a current Kirker.)

Michael,

I’m not sure if you remember who I am, but I left several comments on Doug Wilson’s blog when the whole Saint Peter thing was going down, defending Saint Peter’s session and (often personally) attacking you. As an ex-member of Saint Peter (you know the drill: started reading Eastern Orthodox writers, started discussing the possible validity of Orthodoxy with friends of mine in the church including Laurence Windham, eventually left, was shunned and “excommunicated” by those whom I considered dear friends), I wanted to apologize for my ignorance and insensitivity towards you and your views. It’s easy to attack someone when you’ve never been in their position. Frank Schaeffer was right when he said, “The only answer to who you are is, ‘When?’” Now that I have gone through an experience comparable to yours, I wish I had listened to some of your comments and insights. The pain my wife and I went through was considerable (it nearly destroyed our marriage) and it was astonishing to see people that we thought we would be friends with forever abandon us overnight. The most painful for me was Laurence’s public denouncements (both of me and of Orthodoxy), which were so ill-informed as to be regarded stupid. He and I were astonishingly close for many years. Being, as a Saint Peter member once described it, “viewed as two faces of one body,” and having him lash out the way he did was a blindside to say the least. A big one.

So, you were right and I was wrong. But you knew that already. And, to be honest, that isn’t what this email is about. I ought to have empathized with your position rather than springing to the blind defense of those who, in the scheme of things, didn’t need defending. Regardless of what I thought, I should have regarded you as a fellow human being rather than disregarding you as the abstract proposition of, “These guys who I love are douche-bags.” But, hindsight, 20/20, clarity, and all that. My comments toward you were belittling. For that I ask your forgiveness.

Ultimately, I don’t blame these guys. I believe that they think what they did (and are doing) is right, and they did it because of that conviction. I don’t believe there was any intentional malice (though what was done was malicious). There’s no bitterness here. However, there is a deep hurt which I don’t anticipate will be resolved any time soon. Thanks for your work.

On a radically different note I was wondering about the Bayly post you made a couple days ago. You had mentioned that you tried to Google some of the quotes that Bayly used from the article concerning Calvin College and homosexuality and were unable to find results. I’m not sure if Bayly updated his post due to your comments, but I was able to find the article quickly using Google. I’m not defending him in any respect (one of them wears a bow-tie, for heaven’s sake — the very definition of douche-bag), but was just asking for the sake of clarification. In case you haven’t found the link to the article it’s from Christianity Today and can be found here.

Thanks again for your work. Knock out that book. Looking forward to reading it.

Cheers and all the best,
Matt Clement