Reason or values...

Which is more important: Heeding the "demands of reason" or sticking to your values and ideals even when they demand irrational measures?

It's a false dilemma. For reason itself, that is, rationality as an existential tool, is itself a value. You have to value being rational in order to live consistently rationally. But then for what reason, aside from your basic desire for it, dictates your adherence to reason in the first place?

As Michael Heller notes in Creative Tension, for the Greeks, rationality, logic, etc., were forms of public faith, forms of public piety. Greece became what it became because it, more or less collectively, chose to put reason high in its pantheon of public well-being. The fact that not all societies did likewise, but still flourished, indicates that there is no intrinsic connection between public well-being and Greek rationality. The good man in Greek ethics should be rational. Yet, paradoxically, the good man must first value being good, which then entails being rational. Being good, however, is not a purely rational decision. It is its own category of value, and cannot be adduced from pure reason.

The steps you take are not the steps taking you...

[I still intend to work this into a rough draft of a full essay, so I'm redating it--yes, AGAIN--into the present, so as to remind myself--yes, AGAIN--to complete it.]

Imagine you are walking on a mildly populated sidewalk downtown one afternoon. You walk from your office, to the elevator, then out the doors, along Park Street, turn onto Haven Street, and finally reach Bends (on step #N), a local sub shop. It is a logical necessity, that at every point along your way, you traversed every step along your way. That is to say, each step is an integral part of the event series which brought you from your cubicle to Bends. If, ex hypothesi, "your taking a 99nd step as you walk to Bends" were magically erased from the universe of facts, then when you take step #98, you will stop, never reaching Bends. Even so, is it true to say that the steps you took along the way were what caused you to move along the way? Is it true to say that step 98# caused step 99#?

Imagine further that, in this semi-magical universe (or, for a more mundane reason that I'll stipulate in a moment), just as you are a few steps away from entering Bends, it is suddenly transported across the street. Whereupon, as an accustomed inhabitant of such a universe, you turn on your heel and cross the street to the relocated but happily still nearby Bends. (The more mundane version is that you were under the impression that Bends was at the corner of Haven and Plainview, but in fact it is across the street. Once you see your mistake, you change course.) In this case, can we really say there was something about the physical constitution of your (N-1)th step and its efficent-causal power which caused you to end up at Bends?

On the one hand we must admit that if any or all of the steps were "erased", you would not reach Bends. On the other hand, we cannot reasonably claim any one of the steps caused any of the others, and therefore neither that the steps themselves caused your arrival. As a larger truth, constituent events (such as the steps) which take place in a whole action are causally subsidiary to the whole event.

[I anticipate two classes of objections, but I will stop here in order to see what the cat drags in. Then, if the objections I have in mind do show up, or perhaps others I don't foresee, I'll continue this post.]

So you're saying I should just give up now, right?

"Both Jaki and Hodgson quoted with approval Duhem’s statement that 'in order to speak of questions where science and Catholic theology touch one another, one must have done ten or fifteen years of study in the pure sciences.'"

–– Stephen M. Barr, First Things, in memoriam of Fr. Jaki

I found this gut-check quotation via a somewhat astounding blog I discovered only this evening: The Duhem Society. As they explain: "Founded on April 7, 2009 [viz., the date of Fr. Jaki's passing in Madrid], our purpose is to study the writing of Pierre Duhem and Stanley L. Jaki, two great Catholic historians of science. All who are 'ready to take a serious look at philosophy and history' are welcome to join."

This society was established in response to Jaki's own recurring plea for just such a society to exist (especially so among Catholics with any intention of engaging science in an historically 'informed' manner). As I think some of you know, I founded a Catholic review, inFORM, with much the same intention, namely, to make Fr. Jaki's work more accessible outside of professional circles (where, even then, it is not given the attention it merits), and to engage contemporary concerns, such as science, bioethics, and religious pluralism, from a classically 'informed' Catholic, Thomistic, Jakian (and, in turn, Gilsonian) perspective.

Where have they been all my life! ;) I'm tickled to see one of the Society's bloggers, Angelo, is a "follower" of FCA. And all this time I never even knew! I guess this means I have officially joined The Duhem Society, since I've been waiting to join it for years! And I guess this means the Society had a periodical even before it existed!

Smokin', drankin', and gamblin' too!

[The following is the first draft of an essay I "blurted out" last night in one sitting. Having been copied from a document into Blogger, it has lost all italics, etc., but I would appreciate any constructive feedback. I'm hoping to submit this piece to a "real" periodical, maybe even First Things. With notes, it's about 2,850 words.]

On the Perverse Excellence of Smoking and Drinking

by Elliot Bougis

Is there any species besides Homo sapiens which purposely generates fire and fermented fruit? It seems not, and so might Homo sapiens equally well be called Homo ignis**. I know of one beetle which can expel a stream of scalding chemicals from its posterior to ward off predators. I also know of elephants getting drunk by eating fallen, rotting fruit from the ground. But I know of no other species that willfully, much less gleefully, produces fire or harnesses the obscure powers of decay to produce wine and strong spirits.

Thus it seems highly ironic that secularists and atheists take Prometheus as their patron.[#1] For it was Prometheus who asserted his humanity despite the gods by stealing fire, that is, making fire into a human possession. Only slightly less ironic is it for leading secularists to champion classical polytheism against regnant theism, insofar as Bacchus is among the classical gods of antiquity; and if Bacchus inspires one thing, it is the suppression of reason, supposedly a pagan and secularist value par excellence, under the sway of inebriation.

Nevertheless, Old Man Tobacco and the Spirit of Spirits persist as perverse human diversions. And their staying power, despite their prima facie perversity, stems from the connection they have with our sense of ourselves as “value-driven” beings. “Part of what it means to value some activities,” writes Gary Watson, “is this: we judge that to cease to have such appetites is to lose something of worth.” He goes on, “It would be impossible for a non-erotic being or a person who lacked the appetite for food and drink fully to understand the value most of us attach to sex and dining. … Or consider an appetite that is in fact 'unnatural' (i.e. acquired): the craving for tobacco.” Watson explains, “To a person who has never known the enticement of Lady Nicotine, what could be more incomprehensible than the filthy practice of consummating a fine meal by drawing into one's lungs the noxious fumes of a burning weed?”[#2] What does this tell us about ourselves? Poetically, a cigarette is nothing less than the hand-held mastery of fire, as, likewise, a goblet of wine or a fifth of whisky are nothing less than hand-held signs of power over the exigencies of decay in our entropic world.

These totems of human mastery are no less trinkets of humankind's hard-won and ever-evolving mastery of exact physical science, and thus signs––nay, “wonders” (semeion)**, akin to the sense of the word St. John's Gospel––of the reign of Homo sapiens qua Homo faber. Modern humans thus express their hominid “wisdom” principally in their hominid “fabrication.” From the cultivation and breeding of the finest tobacco and the cultivation of the finest vineyards, to the harvesting and manufacturing of that fine weed and the processing and distillation of that fine drink to the packing and bottling and shipping and selling of those small diversions––all along the way humankind demonstrates its scientific mastery over unruly nature. What greater sign of a man's transcendence over nature could there be than converting a weed, normally a scourge to agriculture, into a hallowed, domesticated habit called smoking? Likewise, what more clever way could there be for man to flout the wiles of corruption than to convert the imperfection of decay into the perfection of strong drink?

Certainly much of the lasting appeal of tobacco, despite the by now nearly global anti-smoking crusade, lies in the physiologically addictive character of nicotine, as much of the enduring attraction of liquor lies in the addictive power of alcohol. Yet there is more to both smoking and drinking than mere physiology. Otherwise we would have long ago switched to direct infusions of nicotine and alcohol by injection or something similar. Intrinsic to the enjoyment of smoking and drinking is the psychological pleasure of manually holding fire tamed and manually holding a glass of wine rescued from the claws of decay. This manual absorption in smoking and drinking is all of a piece with one other feature which might be said to separate man from other animals, namely, our fabulous hands with their even more fabulous opposable thumbs. It is those beautifully thumbed hands which make exact science possible––the construction and calibration of scientific instruments like telescopes and spectroscopes––and which, thus, make the very holding of cigars and shot glasses possible on a large scale.

And yet, we all know smoking is bad for us and that, in the long run, drinking in any more than a “cultured” way (“Red wine is good for your heart”) is detrimental to our longevity. Nevertheless we continue to smoke and drink, if not like there is no tomorrow, then at least like there is no yesterday, like there was never a time in which humans were subject to the vagaries of rampant weeds and rotting fruit. Tobacco (as well as marijuana) may both be “natural” in the sense of being found in nature, but cigarettes (and any joint) are natural products only by the defiantly unnatural intervention of human technology. Wine may be the fruit of the vine, but only because humans carefully, craftily make it so. Actual fruit of the vine is much less thrilling (hence, we give children grape juice as a substitute for wine) and certainly much less intoxicating and only lasts so long before decay sets in.

Thus, smoking and drinking persist as two of the most perverse “anti-sacramentals” of modern human life.[#3] It is not simply an assertion of one's “individuality” or “personal rights” to keep smoking no matter how stringently society poo-poos it and to keep drinking no matter how scrupulously Medicine and Fitness scold drinkers. A more basic impulse behind the perverse persistence of smoking and drinking is surely the desire to assert one's humanity as such. To make fire and wine are two exclusively human powers––akin to the long-sought quest of alchemists––and so to indulge in smoking and drinking is to indulge in one's exclusively human prerogatives, good sense or natural longevity be damned. What a properly human marvel it is to ignite fire in one's hand with the mere flick of one's precious opposable thumb, and then willfully to inhale the acrid, chemically saturated smoke of a tiny roll of paper––only then, even more audaciously, to flick one of nature's most elemental forces, fire, away like a god after a feast! What a marvel it is to walk into an ordinary convenient store and clutch with one's articulate hands a six-pack of perfected decay, and then guzzle its contents without being poisoned––adding, in some cases, an equally godlike flair by pouring a mouthful of the wondrous fluid onto the ground “for my homies”! To be Homo faber is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens––which is, paradoxically, an integral feature of being Homo sapiens. From that feature of our human nature arises what I call the perverse excellence conveyed by cigarettes and spirits: we demonstrate our excellence in the animal kingdom by harnessing nature's weak points for our own degradation and diversion.

Despite the tone of my exposition so far, I must admit that I am not in principle opposed to drinking and smoking, two diversions I myself have enjoyed on more than one occasion. Yet I think the word diversion is very telling in this context. To the apparently unique features of humans, such as firecraft and “moonshineology,” we might just as well add our perverse dread of boredom, that is, our incurable taste for diversions. Some drink to escape, others to strengthen social bonds; some smoke to blow off steam, others just to pass the time. In every case, though, drinking and smoking are things we do to divert ourselves from something more mundane. Why do we divert ourselves? What might we find if we strictly avoided diversions, of which smoking and drinking are only two of the most colorful examples? I once had a youth pastor who said that “only boring people get bored.” I have found him to be right ever since I internalized his dictum. If you are feeling bored, certainly you can “relieve your boredom” by drinking it off or taking a few drags, but at bottom it is because you can't find anything within yourself to make existence more enjoyable that you are bored in the first place. This is why prayer is considered by so many to be “boring”––for one thing, in prayer we aren't “doing” anything and, and for another, we are stuck with ourselves. Prayer forces us into reality, free of diversions, and more often than not illustrates to ourselves just how boring, how shallow and lifeless, we are on the inside. Far easier is it to divert our attention from this inner secret about ourselves with the must of tobacco and the warmth of wine.

Humans' pathetic flight from boredom may seem flippant, or trivial, but I believe it signals an important truth about ourselves. We exult in the diversions which Science, our greatest invention to date, and certainly our age's chief diversion, delivers us precisely because they deliver us from ourselves. Video games, notably also dependent on opposable thumbs, is probably the latest instance of our obsession with technological diversions. Indeed, the ultimate hope of most gamers would be to don a “virtual reality” helmet and immerse themselves in the gaming world––which is to say, out of this world. Is it any wonder that The Matrix trilogy seized the popular consciousness with a spiritual gravitas for transcendence?[#4] Such a helmet would, interestingly, allow us to transcend even the archaic limits of our hands, hand-held controllers being notoriously clunky instruments for “leet” gaming. In any case, the impulse remains the same––transcendence by diversions––and it attains almost mystical dimensions when combined with the other two diversions I have mentioned: gaming while drinking and smoking with buddies, in, say, a “LAN party,” ranks among the highest pleasures of the technologically minded.

It is hardly my goal in this essay to “cure” the invert human desire for diversions, merely to diagnose it, and, if possible, suggest a contrary “therapeutic” practice. Assuming the perverse excellence of our modern diversions is a form of transcendence, perhaps there is a way to channel, nay, hallow, our “urge to diverge” into something truly transcendental. As a Catholic, I would say “the way” is nothing less than sacramental spirituality as the great Christian Tradition has always presented it. Surely it is not insignificant that both fire and smoke, wine and spirits, are integral to Catholic devotion and properly human pleasure. To the Catholic eye, it should seem no less a technological marvel that fire is harnessed at every Mass and in every chapel by the lighting––and then godlike dousing––of candles around the altar, or for prayer intentions at the base of an icon. (The use of “sacral fire” is especially evidence in the “candle light” vigil Masses at Easter and Christmas.) In related fashion do we see fire harnessed for the glory of God at solemn Masses in the form of incense smoke wafting upwards as marvelously as that from any ordinary cigarette.[#5]

Similarly does the Church recall the technological marvels of winemaking and agriculture in its liturgy when, just before consecrating the Holy Gifts, the priests thanks God: “Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life. … Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink.”[#6] Here, then, we find the ordinary human diversions of smoke and alcohol elevated to a truly transcendent level. Unlike cigarettes and booze and video games in the consumerist world, fire and wine and bread are not treated as merely human trinkets, since, in the Catholic faith, humans are not merely human trinkets. Humans, each one and altogether, are signs of their divine origin, and as such, the highest act they can offer is the offering of their greatest signs of earthly supremacy to Him Who is truly supreme in all the earth. Notably, at no Mass (but at every Black Mass) is enough wine consumed by anyone to deliver them over to Bacchus or out of “the ordinary world.” Nor at any Mass (though at many a Black Mass, as in the burning of animals, feces, and infants) is fire generated for human consumption, or merely to pass the time, but rather for human inspiration, and radically to hallow the time.

As in the Kingdom of God swords shall be beaten into plowshares, so in the Liturgy of the Lamb the smoke of cigarettes, the savor of bread, and the glint of liquor are transformed into the scent of transcendence and the signs of divine love given for all humanity. This is a marvel––to wit, a transubstantiation––that outstrips any marvel of natural science insofar as it is a pure gift of divine wisdom. If more Homo sapiens could see this, perhaps they would put away their cigarettes and cigars, shelve their fifths and shot glasses, shut off their game consoles and PCs––and come to drink from the wine that never ages, to eat the bread that never spoils, and to enjoy the game of eternal life. Perhaps the best gift the Catholic Church can offer the world is the conversion of diversion.

NOTES

[#1] There is a meaningful distinction between the two, insofar as atheists positively deny the real existence of God, while secularists might refrain, agnostically, from the answer about His existence, and maintain that if He does exist, He should not be allowed to intrude on the autonomy of human concerns qua purely human.

[#2] “Free Agency,” as cited in Free Will (Oxford: University Press, [2nd ed.] 2003), ed. by Gary Watson, pp. 344–345.

[#3] As sacred as they may be many people, I insist smoking and drinking are but “anti-sacramentals,” and not “anti-sacraments,” since I believe the anti-sacraments of Homo faber are the Faustian harnessing of fire in warfare and the pouring of wine in the bloody slaughter of others, inside and outside the womb. It is hard to imagine a more flagrant perversion of the death of Christ, in which water and blood flowed forth from His pierced side, than the death of the innocents at the hands of “health care workers,” in which amniotic fluid and infant blood pour forth from pierced bodies that see no light in this world but surely shall in the next. In this sense, contraception and abortion are just two more related examples of humanity's scientific glee over against nature. We can thwart the fundamental process of sexual procreation with the mere ingestion of a pill, or the slightly less mere intrusion into the womb, thus enjoying the spoils of sex without actually having to tend its fruit.

[#4] The techno-spiritual transcendence portrayed by The Matrix must, of course, be qualified by the fact that future humanity's gnosis consisted in breaking free from the illusions spun by its robotic masters. I believer, however, that this anti-technological message was lost, paradoxically, by the breakthrough CGI technology which made films' fabled “slow-motion fighting” such a landmark diversion. Surely The Matrix phenomenon is a case of the medium muddling the message.

[#5] I realize that incense and candles are not exclusive to Catholic piety; indeed, they seem to be universal elements of religious practice, as in Buddhism and Hinduism and even paganism. This does not detract from my argument, however, since the every universality of fire in religiosity seems but a fitting correspondence to the equally human thirst for the universality of the divine. It suffices to show that “sacral fire” is a key part of Catholic

[#6] “Liturgy of the Eucharist,” as cited in Daily Roman Missal (Huntington, IN: Our Daily Visitor, 2003), pp. 689, 91. Let it also be noted that the link between the fruits of science and the worship of God is no mere coincidence in Christian theology. For, as the work of Pierre Duhem, Stanley Jaki, Thomas Torrance, Thomas Woods, Reijer Hookyaas**, Rodney Stark, and James Hannam, among others, has shown, it was precisely in the theological matrix of Catholic civilization that modern exact science was born. The rationality of Creation, as the work of the Divine Reason (Logos), is integral to the axiomatic scientific belief that nature is a proper object of human reason (or, conversely, that human reason is a proper instrument for exploring natural reality). As Fr. Jaki argued many times, only insofar as this belief––this cult––was maintained and generalized to become the Zeitgeist of medieval European civilization could science emerge as a mainstay of modern praxis––or culture.

1 November 2009

Dreams and nightmares...

As I have mentioned before, I rarely dream (i.e., I rarely "remember" the dreams my brain generates), but in the past few weeks I do recall two nightmares I have had.

The first was a teacher's nightmare. I had just started teaching at a kindergarten (itself a kind of nightmare, but I digress…) and was well liked. I felt comfortable and fortunate to have work. At the end of perhaps the third day, however, I went to shake the hand of a boy, Kevin, whom I found especially clever and cute in class. But as I gripped his tiny forearm, his radius and ulna simply snapped within my hand. (A scenario surely drawn from reading and then watching The Shining all those years ago. It must have also stemmed my uneasiness about touching students. I just don't think teachers should cross any fine lines too quickly, even just in the form of playful rough-housing. I pretty much never touch female students unless it's unavoidable.) Anyway, Kevin didn't cry out in pain, but he was nonplussed and rather confused why his forearm was bent as it was. Nor did any of the staff seem especially upset; it was more like my good first impression had suddenly turned sour in their mouths and they were just waiting for things to get worse. Such a good start for teacher Elliot... alas.

Anyway, I felt compelled to take Kevin to the hospital for care. When I arrived, I found his father, a physician, was waiting at the triage counter, smoking. I was crying and begging for his apology. Look at your son's arm, I said, I'm so sorry. He was not greatly upset. He sighed and grimaced, but grinned it off in a boys will be boys way. Kevin was checked into a room and was expected to be back at school the next day.

By the next day, however, he had gotten much worse. Somehow the bone marrow had leaked out of his fractures and led to a rare blood allergy. Kevin was intubated and on life support. His fate was still very unclear. When I arrived at school, reporters were swarming in the foyer and the staff were visibly angry to see me. The principal was having a press conference in the activity room, trying to deflect the burden onto me as a foreign teacher, yet, I noted, without being too acrimonious about it. Time passed and eventually Kevin pulled out of his coma. He returned to school a few days later. I don't recall if I kept my job or not.

+++

The second dream, which I had last night, was even more arcane. And perhaps therefore that much more frightening.

I try to read Chinese everyday and lately I have been reading Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit in translation. Yesterday afternoon I transcribed a few phrases and words I had read which I either wanted to review or simply didn't know. Then just before I slept I looked up a pair of words with much sentimental value for me: 佩 pèi and 繫 xì (cf. this dictionary, if you'd like to). In any case, by the time I was sleeping, I suppose my "Chinese module" was agitated, so much so that I had a Sinophilic nightmare.

My original name in Chinese is 白亞山 (Bái Yà Shān). As you'll notice, the second character, 亞, is written here as a fourth-tone character. And that was how it was described in my mega-dictionary when I happened to look it up last night. However, since I got my name in September (or October?) 2003, only a month (or two) after I arrived in Taiwan, I have known and spoken 亞 as a third-tone character. In my nightmare, I could find not a single reference to 亞 as ever being third-tone. This meant––by the whiskers of Confucius and by the ox of Laozi!––this meant that I had not only mispronounced a very common word––such as in 亞洲 Yàzhōu ("Asia")––but had also insisted on mispronouncing my own name countless times!

The nightmare was woven of many threads. First, there is the language-learner's horror of discovering that your pronunciation is so bad that native speakers can't even tell if you're getting a word right or wrong, and therefore assume, in this instance, you are saying a fourth-tone when you carefully mean to enunciate a third-tone.

Second, there is the horror that your dictionary usage has been so sloppy all this time that perhaps you have blithely misunderstood hundreds of other words all along.

Third, there is the horror that perhaps even native speakers don't know the subtleties of Chinese homophones well enough to correct you when you plea for help! This is a problem I've actually encountered more than a few times in Taiwan, either because I use a legitimate, but more obscure, alternate pronunciation, or because in some cases I insist on accurate pronunciation to such a degree as to correct the 'slurred' Taiwanese pronunciation of, especially, s/z/zh/c and e/o––whereupon I'm accused of being wrong!

I am happy to announce that 亞 can be either a third- or fourth-tone character, a fact, however, which I discovered at the expense of one final attack of Sinophilic fear. As I was typing this post, I asked a Taiwanese colleague about 亞. She said it was third-tone. I agreed and complained how odd it was that two dictionaries showed it as fourth-tone. And then an eerie silence set in. I could feel the room spinning ever so slightly. A few moments later, she affirmed that 亞 could be fourth-tone. (She had found it in the computerized input tab under both tones.) Good to know, finally––and yet!––yet, why did I not know that at all! I have been studying Chinese for six years and 亞 is an integral part of my own name here! Further, why do I have no recollection of ever hearing 亞 in the fourth tone!

As you can see, now that I am awake, the nightmare has dimmed, but not died, for it lingers, mocking me in a homophonic cackle.

[Based on one friend's confusion, I guess I need to explain that the "content" of the second dream was simply me scouring dictionaries, online and in print, without being able to find 亞 in the third tone. It was nothing less than the inescapable consciousness of being wrong about such a pivotal character in my life. In the end, the nightmare just serves to remind me why I love learning languages: constant lessons in childlike humility. (From what my friend tells me, the more obscure preference for a third-tone 亞 in Taiwan stems from a desire not to sound like "mainland" Chinese, in which 亞 is always fourth-tone.)]

Auf diesem engen Weg...

"7. This chalice is death to the natural self, a death attained through the detachment and annihilation of that self, in order that the soul may travel by this narrow path, with respect to all its connections with sense, as we have said, and according to the spirit, as we shall now say; that is, in its understanding and in its enjoyment and in its feeling. And, as a result, not only has the soul made its renunciation as regards both sense and spirit, but it is not hindered, even by that which is spiritual, in taking the narrow way, on which there is room only for self-denial (as the Saviour explains), and the Cross, which is the staff wherewith one may reach one's goal, and whereby the road is greatly lightened and made easy. Wherefore Our Lord said through Saint Matthew: 'My yoke is easy and My burden is light'; which burden is the cross. For if a man resolve to submit himself to carrying this cross -- that is to say, if he resolve to desire in truth to meet trials and to bear them in all things for God's sake, he will find in them all great relief and sweetness wherewith he may travel upon this road, detached from all things and desiring nothing. Yet, if he desire to possess anything -- whether it come from God or from any other source -- with any feeling of attachment, he has not stripped and denied himself in all things; and thus he will be unable to walk along this narrow path or to climb upward by it."

-- St. Juan de la Cruz, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, II, xvi, 7.