Likelier Things

The Catholic Church is Not a Liberal Institution

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:09:00 +0000

The Catholic Church is not at all some sort of ideally liberal institution, and while she is 'liberal' in a somewhat-Classically Liberal sense, it is not because she thinks that such is the nature of man. There is no absolute, non-culturally- and non-socially- relative line which we can draw between “public acts” which fall under the jurisdiction of the community and might get punished by the state and “private acts” which any decent right-thinking person keeps his nose out of just so long as the shades are drawn.

The liberal principle of Catholic social teaching starts by asserting that error and evil have no rights, absolutely speaking. The sword of the state is there to punish wickedness in general – potentially any wickedness – for wickedness in general affects us all, but that there is some evil the correction of which would cause more harm than good. This was the Church Fathers’ reason for continuing to allow slavery, even though almost none of them thought it was a good thing in itself. To abolish slavery would at that time have brought down the entire economy and cast thousands upon thousands of former slaves loose in the society without adequate social, political, and familial ties that would allow them to live decent lives. (This was also the reason why SS Thomas and Augustine argued against outlawing prostitution: another evil we’ve been able to get rid of -ish.)

But of course the Church has never considered slavery a positive good, just a necessary and tolerable evil, so when the moment arrived that the economy of the world no longer relied upon it, she cheered on those who worked to abolish it. And we today consider it a good thing that slavery is outlawed and no longer part of our society and economy.

So the judgment of which evils we tolerate and which evils we do not is relative to the amount of harm we would cause in a particular society by attempting to stamp it out in that society. Our judgment of the nature of a particular evil is not relative, but our judgment of the tolerability of that evil quite definitely is.

So to be frank, given the right sort of society and the right situation, we should probably vote to outlaw fornication, whether between man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, or what-have-you, and punish it by some power of the state. But it’s pretty clear that we don’t live in that society, nor anything like, so people knockin’ da boots in the wrong bed don’t really have to worry about Christians trying to enforce that bit of the moral law.

But let’s stop pretending that the Catholic Church has ever said that the state has “no business” telling people what to do about particular things. She has said quite the opposite, over and over again.

A Comment on Mark Shea's Blog about Americans and Law

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:04:00 +0000

The Latin conception of law is to make rules about everything and then list all the possible exceptions and leave still more leeway for ordinary human variety if that doesn’t cover all the bases. [...] In contrast, the normal Anglo-American conception of law is "Make as few rules as possible and then enforce it, even if it’s absolutely stupid to do so."
- Mark Shea

I’ve been saying this for years. I first came up with it trying to understand why half the Evangelicals in the church I grew up in were lapsed American Catholics who while growing up had experienced their still-very-European church and its "rules" not as an instrument for structuring a beautiful Christian way of life in the society of the Church but rather as an arcane system for guaranteeing personal salvation in which the slightest misstep was subject to severe condemnation. When a huge percentage of the Church experiences the sacraments not as Grace but as a condemning Law then you know there’s a mixup somewhere.

Rules and laws are properly the ground rules for universal social participation in a common good. They are essentially social in nature. Since American culture tends to downplay such universal and intentional participation in any "common good" (even sometimes to the point of denying the existence of a common good), it generally sees rules as either

1. the merely absolutely basic safeguards of minimal human decency in this war of all against all that we call a free market society (in which case these rules must be obeyed inflexibly and there is minimal room for "interpretation") or else

2. as attempts by a ruling cadre to impose its own will – for its own good – on another group. (This is often how lapsed Catholics understand the church.)

Sports are an exception to the rule since they are one of the few examples in American culture where there is an obvious and universally recognized common good.

A Brief Foray into Epistemology

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:12:00 +0000

I've always avoided epistemology since it didn't excite me the way ethics and politics did. It is, however, becoming clear to me just how intertwined all these philosophical branches are. You start digging at the roots of one and you find those roots travel quite a ways underground and flower into a whole different plant that you thought was quite unconnected.

So yesterday, during a discussion of science, global warming, and whom to trust, one of my brighter students expressed quite succinctly the epistemological principles I've been trying to articulate in my discussions with him:

"So, Mr. Watson, is that why you say the principles of knowledge are community and time?"

Yup. Community because you're ignorant, and time because it takes a while to communicate and get things through your thick head. That's overly simplistic, but a start.

Now the other interesting thing is that this "community" that you need in order to truly know things has to be a functioning, just, full, working political community. Anything less than this disables you from truly learning the truth about something because you never know what a person means when he says something. You both must have a common conception of overarching, higher goods that you are all aiming at -- I think these are what Charles Taylor calls "hypergoods" -- in order to trust his utterances, since a person can say what is simplistically true but mean something entirely different by it.

For example: someone might say: "Check out this huge cookie. It's really good. I'll trade you the cookie for your Rice Crispie® bar." And you might be tempted to make the trade since you like chocolate chip cookies more than you like Rice Crispie® treats. But that's only a fair trade if you two share the same hypergoods. In this case the hypergood of fullness of life through deliciousness of dessert. If it turns out that the vendor of cookies is your enemy and he doesn't have your fullness of life through deliciousness of dessert at heart, then what he means by "good cookie" is one that will poison you with strychnine and accomplish his unshared hypergood, which is fullness of life through your horrible demise. (I assume you do not share his longing for your own horrible demise.)

Unless you and he share common concepts and ideals of life, you don't mean by primitive terms like "good" what he means by those terms. Thus you can't believe anything he says. Thus you can't learn from him anything you don't already know.

I hope there's more to this story, 'cause if not, Henry VIII is definitely in hell....

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:34:00 +0000

The room ... was turned into a chapel in about 1530 by Henry VIII when he appropriated this complex of buildings from a leper hospital and turned it into a royal palace.

- from the BBC's Sacred Music documentary

Seriously, Henry? You got away with that inside your own head? Your conscience said, "Sure, close down that nasty old Catholic hospital. It's probably just used by monks and priests to do naughty things with the poor little leper boys. They'll be much better out on the streets." Like I said, there had better be another side to this story, because how seriously do you have to be messed up to think it more important that the king have another palace than that people suffering from a debilitating, contagious disease have a place to live and die with what little dignity and comfort they have left?

Of course, there are probably horrible things about my lifestyle that I don't see at all, but about which future generations are going to write, "Seriously, Jon? You got away with that inside your own head? I sure hope there's another side to your story because if not, you're definitely in hell."

The Philosophy of the New Atheists is Determined by Their Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:02:00 +0000

The New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet, Harris, et al) are working out the metaphysic of a liberal democracy that is considered “absolute”. That is, if you consider liberal, individualistic, democratic society to be the best (or only) way to live, that belief needs a certain theory to back it up. The NA’s have done a certain amount of thinking on this score and have worked their way back to the presuppositions that are implied by modern, liberal, democratic society.

For Christians, ideas like “modern political freedom” are not and cannot be absolute. (Really, for any human being they can’t be absolute, but most people in Western society haven’t picked up on this fact yet.) We recognize that our current political and social freedom is contingent on the common acceptance of certain, basic, society-wide values and norms - specifically, Christian ones. Given society-wide acceptance of those values and norms, there can be quite a lot of freedom for individuals to choose ways of worship, certain moral values, etc, without threatening the structured peace of society. It’s perfectly fine, then, from a political point of view, to have atheists in your society and allow them to not go to church, but only as long as they’re Christian atheists.

If, however, you take modern political and social freedom as an absolute, then there cannot be a Higher Being who has created us and determines what is right and wrong for us to do, personally and socially. The NA’s recognize that if there is a God who has created, then what he says goes. But what he says can’t go (or else modern liberal democracy isn’t absolute). Therefore, there is no God. If A then B. Not B, therefore not A.

Richard Dawkins especially is fascinating because his main argument is almost entirely a moral one. The “science” is just a smoke screen. (Not that I think for a second he isn’t convinced that Science disproves God.) But Dawkins basically says, “Religion disables a community from considering modern democratic political and social freedom from being an absolute. But they are absolute. Therefore, religion is bad.”

I Am So D*** Sick of Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:02:00 +0000

Why is it that every time people discuss Thomas Aquinas's, or Aristotle's, or Augustine's, or Plato's ideas of government, it's to gabble on about whether he would or would not have agreed with "democracy." If we like a philosopher, we try to argue that he was a proto-democrat, who would have been up there, signing the Declaration of Independence with his ol' pals, Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson if he'd only been lucky enough to be born 500 years later. And if we don't like him, we discuss darkly his inability to understand the light we have been granted from on high.

Seriously, can we just agree to look at what principles of government might lie behind any particular form of government, and not keep fetishizing "democracy" as some sort of Platonic Ideal of Government? 'S driving me crazy.

A Fascinating Phenomenon

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:50:00 +0000

A fascinating phenomenon that needs to be acknowledged and dealt with in the conservative intellectual community is the tendency of support that starts out as charity to become a matter of justice.

When someone grows to rely on the help that is given them, and plans their life around the expectation that it will be there, and there's no good reason to think that it won't be there, then such help is no longer a charitable contribution. Such a contribution is now just, and its denial an injustice.

A Basic Premise of Moral Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:44:00 +0000

I'm kind of shocked that I've been arguing with people lately who deny this. This is moral philosophy 101:

If a fellow human being is in significant trouble, you have to help him out, even if his predicament is his own fault. If I'm walking on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in wintertime and I see a guy about to go out on thin ice, and I warn him, and he goes out anyway, and falls through the ice, I can't just sit back and say, "I warned you. This is your own fault," while I let him drown. I have to do everything reasonable I can to rescue him. If I don't, I'm not just a smartass, I'm a bad human being.

That's why it is right that we as a society pay taxes to have search and rescue teams risk their own lives to search for, and rescue, even the idiots who ignored foul weather warnings.

So if some idiot 23 year-old kid with an overweening sense of his own invincibility decides to "risk it" and not get insurance, then yes, we, as a society, have to help him out if he gets cancer or crashes his motorcycle. We can't just say, "Sorry, kid. It was your stupid choice, and now you're screwed."

My Beef With Libertarians (and Libertarian-Leaning Conservatives)

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:23:00 +0000

I wrote this in response to an interlocutor on Mark Shea's blog post about the conservatives at the Tea Party debate who cheered when Ron Paul implied that someone who was in a coma without medical insurance - insurance that he had neglected of his own fault to get - should "suffer the consequences of his actions", since that was what "freedom" meant, and among whom were a couple who shouted "Yeah!" when it was asked whether that meant "let him die".

Anyway, the guy I was arguing with - a polite and generous man - asked what my beef was with libertarians. This is the first of a series of posts in which I want to try and flesh out my political philosophy a little (and also to save some of my thought that's been captured in some of the replies I've made in blog discussions).

My Beef with American Conservative-Libertarianism

I come from the conservative/libertarian end of the political spectrum - I'm still a Republican - and I am extremely frustrated with conservatives in the United States, mostly because they took what is a secondary consideration, "Whether it is a wise thing to make one, large, bureaucratic institution with the power of the sword the sole nexus of justice in a society" (answer: no), and made it into the primary thing, as if it were a primary principle of natural law.

I never thought I would have to argue with Catholics that society has a duty to help people in need. I never thought anyone would take the position that if someone's in trouble, and it's their own fault, then it's okay (under Natural Law) to let 'em starve (or slave forever under a burden of medical debt they will never be able to pay back, or ... whatever). And yet there are people in that video and [in the comment section of Shea's blog] who think just that way. That doesn't rise to the level of natural virtue, much less supernatural, Christian virtue. Even a virtuous pagan knows he should care for his neighbor.

These people have made "freedom" an idol. Freedom doesn't mean - it cannot mean - that I no longer have a responsibility to my neighbor if he's a big enough idiot. Yet under the banner of "freedom" and "liberty", people feel free to argue that they have no such responsibility, and that it's ultimately up to individuals and their own personal "charity" to decide whether to help their neighbor or not, and natural justice under natural law could never blame them if they didn't help. This is sick and wrong.

People keep saying things like, "Well, taking care of people in need: that's charity, not justice."

That is false. Charity is the love of Christ flowing out of me to give more than is my duty to give. But taking care of one's neighbor is not a supernatural virtue. It is a requirement of natural justice. I have a duty to care for my neighbor. If I don't, it's not a lack of charity, it's an injustice. I'm not an unprofitable servant. I'm a wicked servant.

Americans have had the luxury of living in a pretty decent society, where we could count on the fact that the churches were, by-and-large, well attended, well funded, and looked upon as true representative institutions of the whole community. Furthermore, we lived in towns or small neighborhoods within cities where people knew their neighbors, shared their ideals and their way of life, knew what they deserved in justice, and, since they belonged to the same organizations (churches, fraternal organizations, etc), had the means and the wherewithall to help them, and deliver the justice that society owed them.

But this state of things has been destroyed. And it has been destroyed as much by people who desired economic freedom from their neighbors and the mobility of labor that allows large corporations to operate more efficiently and deliver consumer goods in greater abundance, as by the "liberals" who wanted to expand government. In short, we destroyed it, just as much as FDR. And we Red Staters refuse to acknowledge this. Instead, we go on carping about "freedom" as though with just a little more "free market capitalism" we could save America. It was "free market capitalism" that helped destroy the America that could operate without intrusive national governmental oversight. FDR and his ilk were trying to save America for capitalism, for economic individualism and "freedom", not from it.

But my people will not see. They are captive to a philosophy that sees the Modern Conservative Understanding of the Founding Fathers as some sort of Oracle of the Divine, when Thomas Aquinas could have reduced all their arguments to rubble.

An Observation After Today's Mass

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:16:00 +0000

Why, oh why do old people in the church insist on Gregorian Chant and ancient hymns when it's obvious that what young people today want and need is cheesy 1970's folk music badly played?

Stuff White People Like: Stuff White People Like

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:17:00 +0000

I suppose that would have been better as a Twitter post.

Requirements of a Subsidiary Community

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:54:00 +0000

In political discussions that occur both among friends and over the internet, I keep hearing conservative Catholics bring up the principle of subsidiarity. While I welcome the prominence the principle is getting in our country, I am frustrated by the one-sided use of its negative aspect ("no public agency should do what a private agency can do better, and that no higher-level public agency should attempt to do what a lower-level agency can do better – that to the degree the principle of subsidiarity is violated, first local government, the state government, and then federal government wax in inefficiency" - Reid Buckley), without due attention to its positive aspect: that there actually exists a level of community that really ought to accomplish these functions, and that community is not "whatever club I decide I want to belong to."

In order to be a real community that accomplishes real good and distributes real justice, a subsidiary community must have the following characteristics:

It must have moral authority. The members of the subsidiary community must understand that a refusal to fulfill their duty to such a community makes them "bad" people. All law is, in the end, a moral appeal. The anti-littering statutes work not primarily because people are afraid of being caught by the cops throwing McDonald's wrappers out their car windows, but rather because nearly everyone understands that littering is a bad thing, and the law is there to restrain the small percentage of people who, for one reason or another, have decided to ignore the moral reality. A law unsupported by a common moral judgment quickly becomes a dead letter.
It must be capable of fulfilling real human needs. If it lacks the ability to enable its members to live decent human lives and truly receive justice from fellow members, then it is not a community, and its members will quickly conclude that it has no reason for existence.
It must have the ability to appropriately enforce its distribution of justice. We would like to believe that either, (a) everyone would voluntarily do whatever is to the common good (devotees of Marx), or (b) that everything everyone did would just automatically turn out to be for the common good (devotees of Smith). But this is fantasy. People are occasionally wicked, and any community must have a way of dealing with its members who transgress against their neighbors.
The people that comprise it must have a common understanding of a good life, at least to the extent of the functions of the community. The members must by-and-large agree on what they need from the community.
It must have a good, working knowledge of the people that comprise it. Without knowledge, how can you distribute justice?
It must have an understanding of the limits of its authority. At what point must the next highest community take over the distribution of justice?
It must have a way of resisting the encroachments on its authority by larger, outside powers, whether governmental, private, or corporate.

The first five characteristics belong to any community at all, I think. The last two are characteristics of specifically "subsidiary" communities.

Aha! It's awesome when someone as hilarious and insightful as Scott Adams says the same thing I've been saying for years....

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:24:00 +0000

Dilbert continues to be awesome.

Link.

My Frustration with Subsidiarity and the Common Good

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:30:00 +0000

Human society, if it is going to work in harmony, needs to have means of guiding people to, or, occasionally, punishing those who work against, the common good. These means are not exclusively violent (i.e. of the sword, as in St Paul's teaching that government rightly possesses the power of the sword to punish evildoers). Many smaller and differently constituted communities have the ability to punish violators of the common good in other ways. These ways may be economic (a refusal to patronize the violator's business), social (shunning a neighborhood jerk), religious (I know a lady who was excommunicated from her church for unrepentant adultery and who ended up coming back and being reconciled), or local-governmental (the local planning board doesn't let you start a pig farm in the middle of a residential neighborhood).

The techniques that these smaller, more local, and more particular human societies have available to them for enforcing the common good are often more incisive and accurate than the sword at enforcing real justice. Nevertheless, they only work as long as they have real power over people. If I own all the shops in town, people can't refuse to patronize my business; if it doesn't matter to me where I live or whom I associate with, being shunned by my neighbors will mean nothing; if my identity isn't significantly tied to a particular church (if not a particular congregation), I'll just go down the street to a different church or start my own "New Testament" house-church in my living room; and if I'm rich enough to buy the planning board, I can tell the town to go to hell.

Nearly all the social phenomena of the last 100 years or so has been towards eviscerating the authority and power of any of these smaller, subsidiary, communities, and conservatives have been complicit in this destruction just as much as liberals. Our contribution to this phenomenon has usually been economic, but we've occasionally been enamored of things like "the marketplace of ideas", in which individuals choose those churches and institutions which fit their own taste, instead of submitting in any way to the wisdom and authority of some community greater than themselves.

Thus we've gradually disabled any subsidiary community from inculcating its values and enforcing justice, and what is left? The only organization left with any power and authority whatsoever: the nation-state. Its tools are large and clumsy: it wields a broadsword or an axe when what is needed is a scalpel, but people who are desperately crying out for justice will take what they can get.

I am very sympathetic to the argument that power granted the government could easily - almost inevitably - be used tyrannously. But I have little sympathy with people who with economic tools destroy subsidiary communities' ability to work for the common good, then complain when people try to work for any possible common good with the only tools left available.

Post 1 - Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:54:00 +0000

A few days ago, while looking over the book selection at my local Goodwill, I came across Noam Chomsky's book, The Common Good, a series of interviews of Chomsky done by David Barsamian. I hesitated slightly to touch it with my hands, since being caught reading Chomsky would seem to imply disloyalty among the people I grew up reading, but in the end I thought, "What the heck," and bought it.

Reading Chomsky in a work like this - one that a favorable reviewer on Amazon.com called "a mile wide and an inch deep" - has been interesting, since half the claims he makes are exactly the sort of things my Evangelical, Republican, very-conservative parents said every day to me as I was growing up, while the other half of his claims are subject to total anathemas.

"If any should deny that the free market is the best way to distribute resources, let him be anathema."

Growing up reading Tolkien and Lewis and Homer Price, harboring a traditionalist yen for New England farms and older, more tightly-knit communities of land-owning farmers and small-town businessmen, I hated in my soul the economic, cultural, spiritual, and legal forces that would drive a farmer off his land and turn his small dairy operation into a private development of twee little condominiums where the wealthy people of our city would turn his fields into perfect, manicured lawns with no disfiguring mud-pit on one end where home plate sat, no boards and sticks lying around for impromtu forts, no more deep forests or pastures for grazing - only a development with a guard house, a remodeled barn as offices, the farmer's empty old house (too close to the road), and a thousand people with their own perfect houses and private beach rights.

"But if any should deny that capitalism is what has made this country strong and wealthy and great, let him be anathema."

We were sold a fundamental loyalty to what we called the "capitalist free market" on the grounds that it would get us the best-quality goods. The shoddy workman would find himself out of a job, and the manufacturer of junk would go bankrupt. Freedom to compete within the marketplace would mean a lack of interference would allow the cream to rise to the top. And yet the can-openers my great-grandparents bought in the forties and fifties still work, and still work well, while my parents in my lifetime have bought piece after piece of fragile junk. They say you can still get good can-openers, but they aren't in any store where I live.

It turns out we were just naive. Of course the marketplace doesn't provide the best quality goods. It just provides whatever it provides because that, apparently, is most efficient. But I didn’t sign on to the efficiency project. The good of “efficiency” is not something I can judge until I know what it is we are efficient at. We are not supposed to ask. It is unanswerable.

We were told the unregulated marketplace gave the people only what they wanted. But what if they wanted to be able to browse the marketplace without being morally and sometimes physically assaulted? That the unregulated marketplace could not provide, especially after businessmen learned that moral assaults masked as daring transgressions of a repressive status quo were useful for wearing down potential customers’ sales-resistance.

But I’ve fallen into a manner of speaking that Chomsky falls into far too often, though here and there he admits it’s less than accurate. It sounded in the previous paragraph as though I were positing a grand conspiracy of malevolent businessmen: slimy schemers scheming in their secret schools of deceit, hoping to swipe people’s cash as they made men weak. Chomsky turns you off because he seems to assume the worst:

“It’s been well understood for a long time that the best defense against democracy is to distract people. That’s why 19th-century businessmen sponsored evangelical religion, people talking in tongues, etc” (53).

Mr. Chomsky doesn’t know what he’s talking about if he thinks that 19th-century businessmen sponsored evangelical religion for the sake of distracting people from their own governance. I do not deny that 19th-century businessmen sponsored evangelical religion. Neither do I deny (necessarily) that the people were distracted. I do not even deny (necessarily) that the businessmen benefited from the distraction. But I categorically deny that evangelical businessmen sponsored evangelical religion primarily because they thought it useful for distracting people from their own governance, and that is what Mr. Chomsky implies.

Speaking (and, perhaps, thinking) like this fools you into thinking you’ve found the problem, the root of this particular manifestation of evil – there it is: that evil man – when in fact the root lies deeper. Rarely do men join conspiracies. People don’t do eeeevil, they do evil, and they do evil because it presents itself as good. The 19th-century businessmen promoting evangelical religion believed in that evangelical religion. They believed it saved men and made them good, and they foolishly believed that the correlation between their advancement of evangelical religion (entirely for reasons of good faith) and their own (and hence, the nation’s) accumulation of wealth was the consequence of God’s blessings for obedience. They may have been naïve and overly pragmatic, but they were not conspirators. Rather, to understand how it was that evangelical businessmen could promote a form of religion that resulted in the end in the impoverishment and ruin of the very people they were trying to help, you must look at their sincerely held theology, study the historical and cultural setting of a religion over which these businessmen had no control, and analyze the confluence of phenomena whose consequences are only now so clearly seen (and, I suspect, not even now). I find that even when I agree with Mr. Chomsky, I have an urge to smack him (especially when he talks about my own people).

So this is what I am calling an Introduction and Post 1 of “Blogging Chomsky.” At the moment I intend it to be an honest, appreciative, and critical look at this man and what he says in this rather lightweight book, The Common Good, from the perspective of a Christian, Catholic, former-Evangelical, lifelong Republican and conservative. I want to find out and explain why I might disagree with Mr. Chomsky, but also why I might find myself agreeing with him more than I once thought I might: a year-long blogging project. Sort of like Julie and Julia, but more like Noam and Nobody.

This is a painting. For real.

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:42:00 +0000

Although this looks like some nightmare from algebra class, or the crazed need of a math teacher to deface all the cultured spaces of the world with his own obsessions, the following is, believe it or not, an objet d'art in the Musée des something or other:

Entitled Rythme du millimètre, which, in English, translates as Descarte's Dream or Ha Ha, Suckers

If someone knows French and is interested in going to the museum's web page, reading up on it, and explaining to me why this is actually a worthwhile piece, I welcome his or her attempt. In the meantime, I shall not discontinue mocking it.

UPDATE: Here's what Babelfish has to say about it:

The voice of the millimetre is thin. It is necessary to pay a very interior attention to perceive it. Four rigorously identical white squares are delimited by two black lines of 114 centimetres, l' a vertical, l' another horizontal. Their crossing, symbolic system, create a fifth square, black. Each element raises the question of l' space and that of the matter in metaphysics terms: of what cosmos (l' is made; order of the lines), how s' organize chaos (the confusion of each point of l' spaces), which is their direction? C' is with l' art of the abstract geometrical painters that d' is attached; Aurélie Nemours since 1953. But more than Mondrian, it pushes its artistic experiment towards l' asceticism. It is included/understood since this s' creation; organize in the series: Rate/rhythm of the millimetre indicates a whole of tables of which that of the museum is one of the elements. Its more total effect s' thus connect with that d' a repetitive music: it plunges us in contemplation, millimetre per millimetre.

It's gonna take more than that.

Why Parents Are So Likely to Fall for Torture

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:24:00 +0000

I've been trying to figure out why parents are so likely to toss out the "I would torture to save my own little boy or girl and you're a weak and worthless would-be parent if you would do less!" defense of torture. I think I've figured out why this is plausible to us.

In a culture in which our morality flows only from our own personal commitment to that particular ethic, there is nothing more beautifully self-immolating than giving up your own morality for the sake of the kid. Dying for your child means only giving up your life. Breaking your own moral code for the sake of the child means giving up something closer to the center of your being for the sake of your kid, which is so much cooler.

I knew there was a reason bishops weren't allowed to have kids.

Ironically, for People Who Make This Much Freaking Money, These Guys Have No Clue What They're Doing

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:05:00 +0000

Top hedge fund managers do well in a down year

These guys have well worked-out equations and algorithms that can reliably predict what the market will do (at the moment), but they don't know why they work. They just know they work. The problem with that is that it means that they don't know if they're facilitating just trades that increase wealth, or whether they're taking advantage of unintended consequences of the system as we have it.

It could be possible, I suppose, that they've very thoroughly analyzed each part of the market and have all the just-trade possibilities worked out in their heads and they're doing nothing but facilitating just trades. But if that's the case, fire Tim Geithner and put these guys to work. They apparently know what to do with the market.

But I will bet a silk pajama that they've got Darwinian algorithms and fancy equations that are busy exploring the possible solution spaces for market trades, but they have no freaking clue what any of those solutions actually means or whether it represents a just trade. And given the history of the last 6 months and what has come to light about our financial system, I think these guys are almost certainly taking advantage of unintended consequences of our system, unintended consequences that (since they were unintended) actually represent grave injustice. And by "grave injustice" I don't mean that they're going into the inner city and stealing money from welfare mothers. I mean mean their trades cause people to think there's money when there isn't, which ends up being the same thing.

Evangelicals and Catholics Together ... in Laconia

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:27:00 +0000

So I was talking to a friend of mine after mass, today, and I asked her whether the Catholic community in the Lakes Region was providing much support to the local pregnancy care center, and she told me that significant cooperation was still hampered to some extent by theological differences.

Booo! Theological differences, booo! Why can't we just get along while we build the kingdom of God? All this rarefied theological blather is just getting in the way of all the great work we could be doing, says the Pragmatic American Full of His Own Self-Righteousness in His All-Holy Pragmatism.

This is roughly equivalent to a general who says, "Who cares which direction the guns are pointing! Just pull the d*** trigger!" Stupid, stupid, stupid pragmatic American: that's what I say.

But just because theological differences do, indeed, make a difference doesn't mean we have to just give up on the whole project. Back in the late eighties or early nineties, Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus started working on Evangelicals and Catholics Together: some sort of togetherness statement that emphasized all that we have in common. Excellent.

The problem with such a document is that it's a great statement of position, but unless our faith produces some works, then it's dead (at least so says the Bible), and so a statement of common faith ought to produce some common works. Is it?

But I was thinking, it's kind of nice for Colson and Neuhaus to do all that for us, but the fact of the matter is that their statement is not binding, and it was a labor of love produced by two friends, so it ought to be used as a model. What we need are for local Evangelicals and Catholics to get together and outline their theological and doctrinal commonalities and use this process to help them in common works: common works that flow from common faith.

So I see in my dreams pastors and laity from the various churches getting together so that they know each other and coming up with some shared statements of faith that are oriented towards what common works they can do, common works that will be a flowering of their common faith. But these statements of faith will be used for real work and will therefore be real statements of faith, not just rehashings of old arguments and so on and so forth.

And I have officially used the phrase "common works ... common faith" way too much. Feel free to make fun of me.

yours,

Watson

Definition of Community

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:39:00 +0000

The word "community" keeps getting thrown around. It's so hip to think/worry/talk about that my friend has made it a drinking game. Every time someone says "community" we take a shot. (Except we only pretend to take a shot because communally minded people can't be going around completely smashed all the time.) Anyway, I finally figured out what a community is....

community - nexus of inescapable responsibility

Notice that within a society of no-fault divorce with rates that hover around 50%, a family is not a community. Duh. It also makes the government the only community we have. No wonder "community organizers" become president.

That's 8 shots, Liz. You're buying.

Why Do Religious People Dislike Evolution?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:18:00 +0000

If the only time you saw a car it was being used to drive over your mother, you might develop an irrational prejudice against automobiles, too.

What is your mother doing in the middle of the road?

She's a traffic cop.
Traffic cops suck. They deserve to be driven over.

Well, okay then....

The United States is an extremely pragmatic society and, as a result, tends to lend a great deal of moral authority to what "works". Science "works", and therefore possesses an enormous amount of moral authority in our society. Of course, the problem with with moral authority -- as people have pointed out ad nauseum (Eek! a bishop!) -- is that it frequently gets co-opted by the powers that be, and not always for moral purposes. Now, if the saying is true that the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes, then we would expect the political and moral philosophy of the ruling powers of the United States to not be particularly friendly towards Christianity.

Furthermore, human beings being what they are, we would expect the moral authority of science to be co-opted by the same powers (whatever they are) for the sake of defeating the opposition in the public square. And, fascinatingly enough, that is what we do find. Creation "Scientists" are not the only ones declaring with confidence that Christianity and Evolutionary Biology are incompatible. Many others on the "side of evolution" say so, too. But of course there are quite a few of the powers-that-be who have no problem with the idea of Christianity co-existing with evolution. What shall we say to them?

The real point of contention in any society will always turn out to be moral. If we find evolution being co-opted in a philosophically simplistic way to defeat Christian morality in the public square, then there is good evidence that the moral authority of science is being invoked for a particular agenda which it does not necessarily support.

[A lot, I admit, hinges on the phrase "philosophically simplistic". I get extremely weary of the impatience of a pragmatic people with philosophy. Philosophy is of first importance, and if we ignore thinking about what is really true and good it is because either we all agree completely on what is good and true or else we for some reason don't want to discuss it.]

Note to Evolution Enthusiasts

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:34:00 +0000

Do you understand why devout religious people see Darwinian evolution as a threat to their faith? It's not because it is. It's because people like this guy think and say that it is. When the only time you see a baseball bat is when you're getting smashed in the face with it, you're probably not going to want to play ball.

Money quote:

It's true that spiritual beliefs of one form or another are universal, almost as defining of humanity as language is. But the universality of language and the fact that bits of the human brain are clearly specialised to do language suggest that our genes give us language-learning brains. Is the same true of religion?

Most people in the public don't have the philosophical training to understand why what this guy is saying ranks with "let's have a character named Jar-Jar" as one of the stupidest ideas ever to make a gentle plopping sound as it fell onto a soft head. Of course we're hard-wired to have certain kinds of experiences. But that cannnot ipso facto invalidate the truth of those experiences. His comparison to language is particularly infelicitous, since language is the means by which we get each other to recognize what is good and true. That we're hard-wired for language just makes it better, not worse, for religion.

Darwinian biologists need to grab their philosophical Louisville Slugger and bat this guy around for a while.

Review spam? Who could be doing this if not their competitors?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:35:00 +0000

Look at this. I found it on the tigerdirect website when I was looking for a replacement keyboard since I dropped a large 2x4 on the last one and busted all the keys in the lower left corner:

Compare the texts. There are minor differences that have very obviously been found and replaced, and there are a couple of phrases missing. Other than that they're exactly the same. All I can think is that there's some sort of review spammer who posts nasty reviews of Compaq computers. Who's doing this? Is this some sort of dirty trick by ... competitors or someone?

Belief is Moral

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:29:00 +0000

The decision to believe someone or something is always, in the end, a moral decision. That is to say, it is not "belief" until you find you must make a decision, a decision that has consequences, based upon what you do or do not believe.

In Which Richard Dawkins Does the Church a Huge Favor

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Watson) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:45:00 +0000

Despite Darwin's closing concession, Origin of Species dealt a body blow to traditional Western religious thought. - Edward J. Larson, Evolution

What the ... ? Didn't anybody read my book? - Thomas Aquinas

As I go around shilling for Darwin I am very much aware of the large numbers of Christians whom I respect very much who disagree with me on this topic, and I'm sure that to some people this is a useless and purely divisive argument which serves only to separate Christians further and undermine the common front we ought to present against the current crop of smarter than thou atheists who gleefully, obnoxiously, and moronically write copious books and articles full of fatuous, fallacious, and philosophically laughable arguments against any acknowledgement by human beings of any power greater and more good than they themselves.

Nevertheless, I'm really, really glad that the church in the United States is having this argument, because whatever position you end up taking on the question of Darwinian evolution, the discussion gives us a chance to correct a major misunderstanding about the divine act of creation.

You see, as I talk to people, I've realized that most of us have a quasi-Greek, essentially deistic understanding of God's role as creator. That is, we think of God as having called the universe into existence some 4000 to 13 billion years ago, like a model builder constructing a vast machine, giving it its various mathematical laws. And now he sits next to it, watching over and occasionally reaching down to stick in a new animal-type or raise someone from the dead or something.

But, while this is almost inevitable given the fact that we have to have pictures to think with, and no pictures are adequate to God, it's really a serious misunderstanding of who God is and the way he works, and the beautiful thing about the evolutionists is that they're forcing us to correct that false understanding of God.

Because, contrary to what Larson asserts in my opening quote, evolution is actually not causing Western theology (or even Eastern theology) to rethink itself or drastically change its understanding of creation. But it is causing us moderns to dig deeper into the theological tradition, go back to the Church Fathers, and read the Bible with them instead of with our own cultural misconceptions.

Next post: Does God exist? (The answer's way more complicated than you think.)