The culture of separation...

According to traditional western metaphysics, death is the separation of a person's body and soul. According to Cartesian dualism, by contrast, a person's life consists in precisely the radical existential cleft between body and soul. In so far as our culture is still pervaded by Cartesian conditioning, our culture is rightly labelled a culture of death. The ideology of death, aka nihilism, is driven by the underlying principle that plurality means discord, that difference entails disunity. Hence, divorce is a tendril of separationist nihilism, because it severs the bond between free commitment and eternal transcendence. Abortion is likewise a tendril of dichotomous nihilism, as it severs the bond between a woman's good and her child's. Contraception similarly forces a wedge between the distinct yet inseparable goods of sex and procreation.

By the same token, any movement which promotes homosexual intimacy as an equally valid form of human family life, is implicitly trying to reduce the awkward plurality of the male-female unity into a more manageable system of genderized uniformity, and as such is just as much a tendril of separationist nihilism as the others I have mentioned. It is precisely the distinction between an axe and wood which gives them a unity that finds its purpose quite literally in the family hearth. With an axe man may chop lumber and build a home, in which he can, in turn, make a family. With an axe he likewise may chop wood to make a fire, over which, in turn, a meal may be made to feed his family. What will not suit the man is an axe only or wood only. He can only make his home by unifying the difference between an axe and wood in the service of a higher end.

What the same-sex movement strives for, alas, is effectively endorsing axes to chop axes and wood to split wood, out of which I believe can only be made a heap of scrap parts, or, ultimately, tinder for an everlasting fire fueled by the inquenchable flame of self-love, which is the apotheosis of same-love. If a man cannot find himself (which is to say, lose himself) in a woman, it won't do him much good to seek himself in a man, on the assumption that men can love each other as well as if not better than men can love women, since, you see, the former bond is free of the complexity and political phoniness of the "male-female" dichotomy. If a man funds utter easier to love someone who is more like him, he may as well go the whole way and admit he loves the person more like him than anyone else, namely, himself. That he is more attracted to men than women is one thing; that his attraction can legitimize a whole alternative way of the human family is something else completely. An axe may fit better on the shelf with another axe, but thus does not mean heaping axes together is a valid alternative to using axes to chop wood for the good of homemaking.

That, of course, is the fundamental difference which must be acknowledged, and the basis for every person's fundamental choice between worldviews. The world is either a place for making homes ur for making heaps. At the heart of the Christian worldview is an icon of unity in plurality, of harmony based on difference, of a family of unique persons. The regnant worldview of our mass culture, by contrast, enshrines the supremacy of unity based on uniformity (the collective heaping of axes) or, if uniformity cannot be satisfactorily commodified or imposed, sacrifices harmony for the unqualified blind good of plurality for its own sake (the nominalistic scrapping of all).

Down with physicalism...

‎"Intention is ascribed by language users; it is not inherent in physical systems. Language users are physical systems in which intention (i.e. linguistic reference and representation) is inherent."

Down with physicalism, up with analogy.

Working with your hands...

May 24, 2009

The Case for Working With Your Hands

By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

... Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. ... 

... High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. 

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. ... But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? ... Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy. 

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. ... The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India. 

... One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”  

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. ... Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.  

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. ... I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. ...  

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor..., I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.” ...  

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. ... I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods. 

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. ... As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun. ... 

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. ... The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational. ...
As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot ... [and] you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. ... My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer. ... 

[M]echanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. ...  

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. ... The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. 

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. ... Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. ... Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. ...  

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up ... a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But ... it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.  

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. ... Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.  

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions.... In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?  

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. ...  

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Matthew B. Crawford lives in Richmond, Va. His book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published this week by Penguin Press.

The halting halting halting halting halting halting…

…problem.

This an argument I think I devised while teaching this morning. I say I think I devised it, since it is still so tentative that I need to present what the strands to see if it is even an argument, or rather just an observation, sprung, like so much, from my endless ignorance.

So.

I was thinking about the halting problem (HP) (I'll save you the click):

In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever. This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

(Here is a delightful proof of the halting problem, for those of you seeking reading materials for your children.)

Now, here was my wondering:

Assuming that "the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer"––a thesis which I do not accept (cf. e.g. Schulman, Searle, Tallis, Dreyfus, Ross, Bougis, et al.)––, but for argument's sake, say that the thesis of the computational mind (TCM) is true.

If TCM is true, then there is nothing in the brain itself qua algorithmic engine, to halt its own computations. A stop would only come from outside influences, say, if all sensory input were blocked, or if so many portions of the brain were mangled that the brain simply shut down.

Which brings us to a second prong of the inquiry: the modularity of the mind (MoM).

I think that TCM nearly goes hand in hand with MoM these days, since it is a lemma of TCM that the "programmer" of the mind is blind natural selection, and therefore there is no "central programmer" for making a unified mind. This lemma is extended in research programs about the modality of the mind. What biological sub-systems still exist in the human nervous system and comprise the modular mind? Apart from the different lobes of the brain (visual, somatic, motor, etc.), there are also cognitive modules that are all vestiges of earlier cognizant organisms, and just happen to be confined in one space––the human cranium––by natural selection. The mind is a "kludge", as some would put it. The mind is actually just a quilt of neural-cognitive modules which have tended to increase reproductive success in humanoid populations over time.

Fine. We'll take TCM and MoM as true for the purpose of argument. What follows?

If the mind is the brain and the mind is a computer, then the mind:brain is subject to HP.

If the modules of the human brain:mind are themselves kids-of-minds by virtue of being algorithmic engines, differing from "the human brain" on in degree, then human neural-cognitive modules (hNCM) are subject to HP. This is modus ponens.

If, however, the brain, either as an agglomerate of hNCM or as any one hNCM, is subject to HP, it (or they) should never halt in any algorithmic state. hNCM do/does not, however, endlessly "fail to halt", therefore…. This modus tollens, but I must elaborate on some conditional conclusions.

Since human cognition does not endlessly fail-to-halt––otherwise, how do we perform any action?––, but our behavior is governed by hNCM, then something peculiar is happening in our mind:brain. Enter my hypothesis.

Even if we grant humans are governed wholly by hNCM, we can see why humans have free will. If each hNCM is its own little non-halting Turing machine (á la TCM), then none of them should ever halt in a concrete decision. Halting is a function of decidability, but purely algorithmic halting is undecidable. So, how does/do our hNCM ever halt? From MoM, we must treat each hNCM as an external environment to every other hNCM. It is because our hNCM mutually interact that they can halt in ways that produce our unified-modular behavior.

The upshot is that there is a radical indeterminacy in the total hNCM nexus known as our consciousness, yet one that does not generate simple randomness––and this is the basic meaning of free will: non-random indeterminacy. The competing pre-halting computations of our hNCM lead to a dynamic series of non-random but non-deterministic actions aka our selves. Interestingly, even research into the irrational biases of hNCM itself relies on a standard of rationality that surpasses those very biases: we are not determined by our modular biases, although our modular mind is wholly physically deterministic. Even the mind:brains of cognitive scientists defending TCM indicate the non-random, non-deterministic nature of human consciousness.

This is akin to Robert Kane's account of free will, in that at any moment of conscious decision (note that MoM-TCM accounts for unconscious decision processes), we are literally an indeterminate, yet wholly physical, complex of unhalted, unweighted decision variables. Once the mutual interference among hNCM generates a halting state which propagates non-centrally but uniformly through the mind:brain, we act freely. We act because hNCM halt; we act freely because there is nothing deterministic about hNCM qua computational algorithm engines. The understanding of chance qua the overlapping of otherwise disparate causal chains goes back to Aristotle, and it is that sense of indeterminate causality which I invoke here. We are free because––assuming TCM-MoM––there is an intrinsically indeterminate congeries of hNCM which could not function unless they mutually limited each other. A jumble of indeterminate rational engines produces a stream of rational action.

So, I propose that free will is intelligible even on a materialist account of the brain, and certainly intelligible on a non-materialist account of human existence. Regardless which ontology of persons is true, the doctrine of rational, human free will is true.

Could there be a materialist Christianity?

It is conceivable. No doubt a band of astute theologians and philosophers could modify the "core doctrines" of Christianity enough to generate a materialist Christianity. Indeed, we have Mormonism. It is not my goal in this post to generate, or even attempt to generate, a materialist Christianity. Rather, my point is to ponder what that conceivability means for Christian revelation itself.

Let us posit the following, then: Given enough time and dialectic, one could adhere to any version of Christianity one liked. Surely all the materials of the faith and reason could be conscripted to support any "theory" of Christianity. The problem, however, is that a faith so radically open to revision and "re-envisioning" is unsustainable. It is a chimera. It is like a chair that could swap or lose any and all of its properties at whim (given enough time and dialectic), even its materiality. After so much "de-essentialization", however, in what sense can we speak of 'it' as a chair, or even as 'any thing' at all?

It is not my task as a Christian to devise clever, new ways to "reconcile" the Faith with the complexity of the human psyche, of ongoing scientific research, pluralistic and interreligious dialogue, etc. Indeed, as far as I know, it may be within the bounds of the deposit of faith to believe in a materialist Christianity (though, of course, at that point neither Christianity nor materialism would resemble themselves any more). It is not my Christian duty to devise or revise struts for the Gospel, but rather to accept the Gospel as the divinely revealed will of God.

The trouble, though, is that if this "revelation" is so endlessly mutable as to accommodate everything, and to assert nothing, then there is no-thing for me to accept by faith. The ongoing understanding of the Gospel must have a character of the same nature as its foundation––namely, divine revelation––, or the revelation cannot be ongoing (or, abiding).

It dawned on me as I pondered this last night that this is the reason I am a Catholic. The teaching of magisterial infallibility is as scandalous as the Gospel which would root all redemption in the life and death and resurrection of a wee Jew some two thousand years ago in a backwater. Hans Küng once mused how absurd it is for the Catholic Church to claim magisterial authority ultimately hinges on the bishop of Rome. A man in Rome! A man! In Rome, of all places! What a grotesque historical accident papal infallibility is (according to Küng). Yet I immediately realized how absurd (and grotesque) it is for the Church also to claim redemption and the fulness of wisdom ultimately hinges on the birth and death of Jesus Christ. A man in ancient Palestine! A man! In Bethlehem, of all places!

Thus it seems to me that the Catholic Church alone has a suitably scandalous self-consciousness of Her mission as the pillar and foundation of the truth.

It is not my duty as a Christian to "figure out" the contents, defects, excesses, deficiencies, etc. of the Faith. It is, rather, my duty simply to heed to voice of the Church when She speaks. If God has not provided a way for me to detect that voice with scandalous sacramental precision, then God has not provided me with a way accept the primal scandal of His Incarnation. In order for Christianity to salvage its claim to be a consistent universal religion, there must be something in every age and for every person which makes the immediacy and "provincialism" of the Church's preaching as scandalous as the scandal of the son of a carpenter pinning all of Israel's hopes on Himself. The dogma of papal infallibility fulfills that role.

Yet this is not an argument for idealized integralism. There has always been ambiguity in the life of the Church. Otherwise, what need for faith, hope, and love? The original kerygmatic density of the Gospel (in the early Church) has been teased out over the centuries into an intricate system of doctrine and piety (dogma and worship). As the orthopraxic structure of the Church became more refined and complex, the magisterial order became more pronounced and self-conscious. This is no mere coincidence. In the earliest days, there was the challenge of feuding bishops, an unspecified canon, linguistic confusion, and so on. Yet there was also something so powerfully unique and coherent about the Gospel that those extrinsic cultural assaults only made the Church's self-consciousness that much more pronounced and articulate. As time passed, and more and more dogmas became "taken for granted" (in so far as they were seen to be de fide), there way a corresponding rise in the extrinsic difficulties posed to the Church: unevangelized nations, slavery, freedom of conscience, imperial collaboration, scientific discoveries, interreligious challenges, hermeneutic spirals, textual criticism, etc. One of the most vivid signs of Providence for me is precisely this concomitant rise in magisterial order and doctrinal clarity. The more universal the Church has become, the more organically centralized She has become––and vice versa.

Some sects would only accept a pre-Constantinian Christianity. Others would accept only a post-Lutheran Christianity. Others still would accept only a pre-Florentine Christianity. And others still would accept only a pre-Vatican II Christianity. In other words, sects, unlike the Church, accept only a golden age, or some golden facets, of the Church's heritage. Alas, there has never really been a "golden age" for the Church. Or to say it differently, the only golden age for the Church is now, in the unity of faith and order, which the Pope embodies as a kind of gigantic scandalous walking sacramental. The following thesis is incautiously worded but basically true: The only thing that matters in the Church is the epiclesis. The Church only exists, really, substantially, in the precincts of that moment. In every age the challenge is not ingenuity––indeed, heretics are usually the greatest boons for ecclesial creativity––but rather is obedience to the incarnate order that makes faith, hope, and love meaningful for all humans.

Given a new dignity…

At Mass today the priest said how Jesus giving a new name to Simon indicates how God wants to "give us a new dignity." He referred to the last chapter of St. John's Gospel where Jesus calls His disciples "friends". He also noted how Confucian society is comprised of five levels, the only one of which that was not "vertical" being friendship. (Cf. these data on "The Five Bonds".) In the midst of all this, he made the point that, while we belong in the animal realm (e.g. we can get medical transplants from animals, etc.), we are more than animals, and God intends to give each of us a greater dignity.

Then I got to codgitating.

It is increasingly common nowadays to deride any suggestion of human specialness or uniqueness as "speciesist" snobbery. We are all animals, and human morality is based on minimizing undue suffering, the argument runs, so we are morally obliged to minimize the undue suffering of our fellow animals, even if they are not "human" like us.

Here was my worry, however: If granting moral immunity to non-human animals is a moral imperative, why don't non-human animals themselves grant such moral immunity to each other? More to the point, if non-human animals are "effectively" like us (which is just the way moderns say "essentially" the same, without having to say dirty words), why don't they assert their moral demands for themselves?

If non-humans need us to prop up their equally intrinsic moral worth, then we are different from non-human animals in a crucial way, namely, in that we can recognize and institute moral worth. Precisely by arguing that we must protect animals' moral dignity, anti-speciesists undermine their own core thesis, since the intrinsic moral duty of protecting non-human dignity is a special prerogative of humans.

Further reflection leads me to see that not even humans can "give themselves" intrinsic moral worth, since giving implies taking, and nothing intrinsic can be given or taken at will. Therefore, the intrinsic moral dimension in being-a-human cannot be something humans make for themselves, and therefore must come from another source. Plainly, it does not come from non-human animals, since they are precisely the creatures whose need of moral amnesty started this whole codgitation. Will a naturalist say that Nature bestows "intrinsic moral dignity" on humans? I doubt it. For according to Naturalism, humanness is no more intrinsic to the natural order than barnacleness, and so the only intrinsic traits natural entities may have are those which are common to Nature as a whole (i.e. mass, size, charge, etc.).

So it seems arguments against speciesism are arguments for a kind of theism, but theism inevitably implies a special status for humans as those in contact with God.

In the precincts...

You know you're not dealing with someone of wisdom when he utters the words "just a story." Nothing is "just a story," not even a story.

Ease as mark of truth…

"I decided to be a determinist because it's just easier. I can stop analyzing "why" I did this or that and simply accept the fact that my willing at any moment is the confluence of countless prior influences, conscious and unconscious. In a clip of Christopher Hitchens discussing global warming, notice how the phrasing of the question––"missing the boat"––leads to him using the word "boat" in his reply (or should I say leads him to using the word?). If challenged about his lack of rhetorical ingenuity, Hitchens would probably just shrug and say, "Well, there's determinism for you." Determinism, therefore, is true because it allows us to mesh most naturally with our environment."

Class, discuss.

I will suggest the following, though: the above comments make what I think is the deepest ontological error in determinism, namely, the claim that there is some puny, passive subject, which is constantly influenced by its environment, yet which does not add anything to that environment. The "self" in determinism is like the beam of light reflected in a mirror: a reality which allegedly only exists at its entry and exit points in the visible spectrum.

Also, while there is some truth (!) in the pragmatic thesis that "the true is the workable", since goodness is an analogue of being and both are unified in truth (and vice versa in all three directions), the very difficulty of "working out" certain interrelated claims is a sign of their truth (quantum mechanics, trinitarian theology, the "place" of the will [as if it were a spatiotemporal entity to begin with!], etc.). Further, the harmony, the functional resonance, which we experience in grasping the true does not mean the true is the useful; for some things are known to be true by their beauty, a beauty which of itself preempts pragmatic lechery. What is "it" good for? Shut up, philistine, and accept that its pragmatic vacuity is precisely the sign of its alethic dignity. A remaining snag is how to meet the utilitarian claim that even the "purely beautiful" is 'useful' in the utilitarian sense. Then again, that seems to be so much a concession to the classical view of beauty qua truth qua goodness as to be more a surrender than a challenge to metaphysics.

P.S. A clue that pragmatic success does not amount to truth: doping in the 1980 Olmypics.

A Freudian proto-argument against abortion…

"A fetus lacks sufficient neural abilities to function, and therefore to 'count', as a human person. More to the point, a fetus is basically unconscious, so it doesn't suffer conscious pains if it is aborted. Therefore, fetal abortion is not immoral or cruel."

Reply:

According to Freudian theory, a human functions in three psychic dimensions: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the dominant, fundamental dimension, comprising the most basic somatic drives. The ego is just the "tip of the iceberg" in human behavior. The real engine is below consciousness. Human nature subsists in its unconscious functions. Delving into a person's subconscious is delving into the person's real character. Conscious behavior is by and large a lattice of pseudo-drives and confabulation constructed to protect one's id or even to protect one's own ego from one's own id.

In so far as a fetus is an unconscious humanoid, it is an archetypal Freudian agent. It displays all the somatic drives that an ego will eventually gild: homeostasis, nutrition, expansion, crude stimulus response, etc. Just because the fetus does not (presumably) consciously feel pain during an abortion does not mean the abortion is not being performed against a human subject. Indeed, just because a psychiatric patient is not consciously aware of his innermost drives does not mean those drives are not human drives.

Therefore, a fetus is a true human person and abortion is cruelty against an unwitting subject.

I have an opinion about this too…

A very good Catholic man, whom I've had the privilege of knowing all my life, recently told me he's disappointed Catholics these days are less militant, considering the only Catholics most of us will ever meet are members of the "Church Militant." Anyway, last week I was watching some of the following videos and thought they could find a place here, so as to fortify the moral fiber I hope I and my reader(s) have.

(Part 1)


(Part 2)




"Pornography is the commercial documentation of assault played out on real women bodies" - Gail Dines

One of those people…

Some life advice:

If you ever want to test an object (a fence, an appliance, a wire, etc.) for live electrical current, lightly tap it with the back of your hand. If it's live, your arm will contract and curl away from the source, whereas if you use the palm of your hand on a live object, your muscles will contract around it and you'll be much worse off, if not dead. I learned that when I was nine or ten on a science museum field trip.

I realized yesterday that I do something similar to a woman with whom I must deal on a regular basis. I use a conventional greeting––"Hello, how are you?"––like the back of my hand: politeness expended just to assess how hazardous or volatile her mood is for the day. Sigh.

Well, as long as it gets his books sold…

A controversial psychologist's VERY politically incorrect 'truths' about human nature
By NIALL FIRTH, Last updated at 10:45 AM on 1st December 2010

…this is not the first time that evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has stirred up controversy with his outspoken declarations.

Usually perfectly timed to coincide with his latest book, The London School of Economics researcher has come out with a raft of startling claims about what makes us human.

Already this year he has claimed that men who cheat on their girlfriends or wives are less intelligent.
And he claimed that most suicide bombers are Muslim because they do not have enough sex.

He even gave psychological reasons why liberals are more intelligent than those with more conservative viewpoints.

A few yellow flags.

First, this strikes me as our era's version of phrenology. In Victorian times, it was titillating to inspect a friend's head, perhaps surreptitiously, and conjecture what it meant about his character or destiny. Now we like to superimpose a skein of evolutionary impulses onto others and conjecture the same.

Second, to take one example, what does Kanazawa mean by "physically attractive" women? Conceptions of feminine beauty can shift in just a few generations and already varies widely across cultures/regions. Is there a single evolutionary mechanism here that produces such scattered results, or are there really numerous 'occult' mechanisms working diversely in us as subspecies? Either answer is a bit harebrained.

As another example, it's hard to say just how high Kanzawa's analysis of Arab terrorists should extend. What if Arab guys just did a lot of prostitutes, would they still be inclined to terrorism? If the claim is that the motor of Arab terrorism (!) is the fact that most Arab men are competing for a mate, what does it mean to "have a partner"? To have access to a vagina on a regular basis? To have a shoulder to cry on? Or to have someone with whom you can produce offspring so you can transmit your genes? If the latter––and I think that's the only respectable answer a "real Darwinist" would want––, then shouldn't more gay people be terrorists?

Third, these claims are only as good as their statistical corroboration. In other words, as statistical claims, they can't be said directly to cause the behavior b of a particular man m at time t, otherwise the mechanism could be discerned 'straight off' m's actions at t, and then what would be the point of evolutionary psychology versus good old fashioned psychiatry? Laws are generalizations about the dispositions of concrete existents; but those dispositions are not wholly reducible to the laws, since they are merely dispositions dependent for their expression on a convergence of different factors. If the dispositions just were mechanistic laws, then laws could be violated with simple counterfactual adjustments, and that's an insult to the term "law". As always, evolutionary psychology is reifying a collective subconsciousness and ascribing it to "us", as if each of us were a real specimen of the real species Homo sapiens sapiens. Essence pervades the theory or its general claims don't hold for particular speci(e)mens. Since, however, essence is de jure anathema to modern evolutionary reasoning, the theory's general claims don't hold in particular cases.

The Internets is self-affirmed…

According to this peculiar website, the Internet has a 65% positive attitude towards… "the Internet".

Then again, it apparently has an 89.2% positive attitude towards… "death"!

I'm sure he'll be glad to know that the Internet has a 74.9% positive attitude towards "Richard Dawkins" and 66.9% positivity about "the New Atheism", while it scours with a 52.4% negative attitude towards "the pope" and 59.8% negativity towards "the Catholic Church".

Good thing truth ain't a beauty contest.

On a similar front, "natural selection" gets 86.1% positivity while "intelligent design" only gets 63.1% love.

Results may vary from region to region and time to time.

Dialecticae splendor…

[I think that title means "the splendor of logic" but I'm shaky on making adjectives in Latin.]

I recently posted an article on my Facebook about a movement of mostly Catholic university students campaigning for traditional marriage in Maryland. I included the following quotation in my link:

Shortly after setting up at a busy intersection, reactions erupted from passing traffic. All sorts of reactions -- honks of approval, thumbs up, double thumbs up, and applause. Then there were some who let out ghastly strings of insults, all in the name of “tolerance.” Why did they insult us? Because our banner stated this truth: “God’s marriage = one man + one woman.”

I cannot be sure without asking, and I don't want to ask, but I believe this prompted a friend of mine––call her Ariadne––to update her status with a kind of rebuttal:

So, let me get this straight...Charlie Sheen can make a "porn family", Kelsey Gramer can end a 15 year marriage over the phone, Larry King can be on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with EVERYONE. Yet, the idea of same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really? Re-post if you are proud to support equal rights.

Amidst the welter of "Like" votes and supportive comments, one person was kind enough to point out the logic here is a bit… off… although she didn't elaborate. Allow me to elaborate.

Let's formalize Ariadne's argument:

Supporters St of traditional marriage t (i.e. heterosexual monogamy) believe homosexual marriage h undermines/destroys the institution of marriage m.

The behavior of many St actually undermines/destroys m.

Therefore the arguments of St against h are invalid.

This is a weepy ad hominem fallacy, with a splash of emotive tu quoque. Let's run the argument in a parallel scenario:

Supporters Sh of honesty h believe lying l undermines/destroys the goodness of human communication c.

The behavior of many Sh actually undermines/destroys c.

Therefore the arguments of Sh against l are invalid.

Or again:

Supporters Sr of reforming the (USDA) food pyramid r believe the conventional food pyramid p undermines/destroys optimal human health h.

The (gustatory) behavior of many Sr actually undermines/destroys h.

Therefore the arguments of Sr against p are invalid.

I'll run two more versions, just because it's fun:

Supporters Sl of a law enforcement agencies l in society believe legal anarchy a (?) undermines/destroys the goodness of social harmony s.

The behavior of many Sl actually undermines/destroys s.

Therefore the arguments of Sl against a are invalid.

Finally:

Suporters Sm of Western medicine m believe heavy drinking and smoking ds undermine/destroy optimal human health h.

The behavior of many Sm actually undermines/destroys h.

Therefore the arguments of Sm against ds are invalid.

I hope you see how poor this reasoning is.

"I've seen lots of NBA players miss shots from the three-point perimeter, so it's not an NBA rule that you have to make three-pointers from that line. You can make three-pointers from anywhere on the court, as long as you don't hurt anyone and you really, truly, sincerely intend to make a three-pointer. Re-post this if you are proud to support equal shooting rights in the NBA."

Yep.

That's the level of logic we're dealing with here.

If proponents of traditional marriage based the nature of marriage on the quality or performative excellence of its "practitioners", then Ariadne's argument would be valid and sound. (A stronger argument would be to say that, since supporters of traditional marriage cannot agree, even among themselves, on a single definition or policy for marriage, there's not even a coherent case for traditional marriage.) Instead, the defense of traditional marriage––nay, the defense of marriage itself––rests on the principles of social and biological fruitfulness and order. When heterosexuals sin against that order by "doing marriage" so poorly, they eo ipso underscore the intelligibility and dignity of marriage. Indeed, defenders of homosexual marriage like Ariadne invoke the examples of bad heterosexual marriages because they implicitly agree those couples failed to live up to what marriage is, namely, lifelong monogamy between heterosexual partners.

Interestingly, while writing this post, I learned of a fallacy I had not known before: the argument from fallacy! (I call it the fallacy fallacy.) This fallacy occurs when A rejects the conclusion c_b of B's argument b because b is dialectically fallacious. Showing that b is fallacious does not, however, suffice to show c_b is false, since only an argument that c_b is false would demonstrate ~c_b. Hence, I am not saying that, because Ariadne's argument is fallacious, therefore homosexual marriage is wrong; doing so would mean I commit the fallacy fallacy. Rather, all I have done in this post is show that her argument against traditional marriage is fallacious and does not suffice to show the rightness of homosexual marriage and certainly doesn't suffice to invalidate defending traditional marriage.

Freedom…

Freedom perfects nature.

This was an epiphany.

Perhaps the most vivid and obvious example: Saving sex for marriage, as a free sacrifice of one's natural and good urges, perfects the natural enjoyment of sex.

Ein voller Bauch studiert nicht gern –– also an epiphany, but of the more "cynical" flavor.

If human nature (h) is wholly and merely a combination (result) of one's environment (e) and one's genetic inheritance (g), then the determinacy of h is but a function of the determinacy of e and g.

Since e is radically indeterminate with respect to teleological embodiment (i.e. rational control), h is radically contingent. Further, since g is contingent upon e–-e.g. the manifestation of "lung cancer genes" based on the inhalation of urban pollution or many cigarettes––, h is as indeterminate as g.

Imagine e, h, and g as the corners of a triangle, the triangle of real human existence (r). There is an inverse proportion between the indeterminacy of any corner and the other two. (Does Newton's three-body problem further accentuate the indeterminacy of r? I have the impression that the three-body problem is more tractable in quantum mechanics… that that mechanics is itself rife with indeterminacy, by most accounts.)

□e ∧ □g ⊃ □h

(~□e ∧ □g) ∨ (□e ∧ ~□g)

∴ ~(□e ∧ □g)

∴ ~□h

e ∧ g ⊃ h

◊~g ∧ ◊~h ∴ ◊~h

∴ h is not determinate

+++ an HTML addendum +++
& #9633; is □
alt+shift+v is ◊
& #8226; is •

& #9744; is ☐

Philosophy by metabolism again…

From "Darwin's Rape Whistle" by Jesse Bering (Slate.com, 13 Jan. 2011):

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that "adaptive" does not mean "justifiable," but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, "No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape."

I want to rework this paragraph to see what might fall out:

Investigators studying honesty through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that "adaptive" does not mean "vicious," but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a naivete in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Burpelson psychologist Manfried Rawhide and his colleagues write in a 2079 piece for the Review of Major Pneumatology, "No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating honesty from an evolutionary perspective condemns or undermines honesty."

The second paragraph exemplifies a rebuttal of Bulverism. Bulverism is the tactic of assuming some persons are wrong based on physiological and psychological––or, in this case, evolutionary––factors which dictate their rational biases. We may "believe in" honesty as a fundamental "moral" principle, the Bulverist argues, but this is only because we have been shaped by our evolutionary past to be so biased. Therefore, the preference for honesty, under the aegis of "morality", is just atavistic naivete, which ought to be supplanted by a truly rational ethics that is cognizant of the autonomy we know have over our own natural selection. Beren casts his vote against the Bulverists thus:

The unfortunate demonization of this brand of inquiry is rooted in the fallacy of biological determinism (according to which men are programmed by their genes to rape and have no free will to do otherwise) and the naturalistic fallacy (that because rape is natural it must be acceptable). These are resoundingly false assumptions that reveal a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Yet the purpose of the remaining article is not to belabor that tired ideological dispute, but to look at things from the female genetic point of view. We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?

Beren's point is that, just because the rape instinct is strong in numerous males, does not mean rape is therefore morally acceptable. The implication of his article, however, points in an obverse direction, namely, that because rape is bad, though natural selection has kept it going, the equally naturally selected measures of the female body against rape are a kind of good. It is interesting to note how Darwinian ethics is essentially Kantian in so far as the former rejects behavior which, if applied on a species-wide level, would lead to the degradation and dissolution of prior reproductive success. I will call this Darwikantian ethics. Kant, under the rubric of the "categorical imperative", argued that we should do only that which we believe could be practiced by everyone at all times, and abstain from that which we realize could not be practiced by all people at all times. As he writes in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (tr. James W. Ellington. 3rd ed. Hackett. p. 30 ( [1785] (1993)): "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." Lying, for instance, is unacceptable because, if everyone did it––i.e. if it became literally universally acceptable––, our entire means of communication and cooperation would collapse. Likewise, Darwinian ethics rejects selfishness on the grounds that widespread selfishness––i.e. as a 'universal' feature of human behavior––would undermine ultimate reproductive stability. And "it would be bad," or at least as "bad" as a Darwinian is allowed to say something is in 'purely' adaptive terms.



Aye, there's the rub. If the basis for defending, say, altruism is that altruism has generally promoted reproductive success in the past, then we can take it as a general ethical principle that that which is morally defensible is morally defensible because it promotes reproductive success. On this principle, however, what basis do we have for condemning rape in every case? Presumably, again, the saving principle is the Darwikantian categorical imperative (DCI), but this is a feeble moral guide for at least two reasons. First, how would we define the rapist's principle for action? Does he believe it would be a universal law that every man should rape every woman under any circumstances? Certainly not, since he would certainly defend his mother and sister and other favored females against male aggressors. His principle may, therefore, be so nuanced that it could be a universal basis for action, say, "Rape a woman only when the coast is clear, you have already sired at least another child, she does not appear to be pregnant, etc." If the conditions for the action were so specific that, even if universally accepted, they would come together only rarely, and therefore would not undermine the collective reproductive success of the species, it's hard to see how the DCI could coherently reject it. Further, if the rapist used a prophylactic so that pregnancy and its burdens on the woman were not an issue, he'd seem to be that much less immoral. But surely such moral reasoning is amiss.

A second problem with the DCI is that it cuts both ways. For, if an action cannot be "morally" endorsed unless it could be applied universally for the species, then altruism seems to be morally unacceptable. No species could survive if all its members all the time acted altruistically, since, if they literally never acted for their own interests, they would become paralyzed by inaction, like Buridan's ass, and probably starve to death. More realistically, if it were only the case that nearly everyone always acted altruistically (as we are, in fact, expected to make the case!), the altruists would eventually be overtaken by the minority of "deviants" acting selfishly. The point is that if the DCI proscribes actions that would have universally negative results, then altruism is morally proscribed by the DCI. As soon as the proponent of the DCI admits there must be some 'intermediate' principle between sheer relativism and DCI-absolutism, however, she is back in the folds of traditional moral argumentation and Darwikantian ethics offers little, if any, light in the discussion.

The institution of marriage, for instance, is seen as a good in Darwikantianism because it enhances social stability and thereby promotes reproductive success. This does not, however, mean everyone can or must get married, which shows once more that there is some other domain of moral wisdom by which otherwise "natural" behaviors are deemed justifiable and not merely "mechanistically viable." If marriage is wrong in some cases, presumably because a DCI-style universalization of such cases would undermine reproductive success, then it's hard to see why rape would not be right in some cases (say, as a form of cathartic vengeance which restores the social order by taking one male down a peg by the symbolic attack of his daughter or wife). That kind of socially beneficial "ritual rape" could be applied universally, since it would only apply in certain circumstances. But again, surely such moral reasoning is flawed.

The notion of a universally applicable specific law is not incoherent; indeed, it is highly common in science. The Bode-Titius Law, for instance, is universally valid if taken in conjunction with limiting conditions (e.g. the absence of Neptune). Indeed, the whole of Newtonian physics is still scientifically, universally "true", even though it is theoretically false, when qualified thus and such. Likewise, quantum mechanics is technically deterministic according to the universal validity of the Schrödinger equations, though it is universally indeterminate in every specific case. Paradoxical, perhaps, but true. So, while rape––and altruism––would be universally unacceptable, specific cases of rape, and specific cases of altruism, would be acceptable in Darwikantianism as long as they are qualified in their particular applications.

Yet, we all know that rape is intrinsically wrong, not merely generally undesirable. How do we know this, though? Not by a vague nod to natural selection, but rather by an awareness of the intrinsic principles of right human conduct. There seems to be an important difference between universally and absolutely true (i.e. between always potentially and intrinsically valid). I will not explore that difference now, mainly because I still must ponder it, but I want to close with a syllogism that captures the point of this post.

1. Humans are intrinsically moral agents.

2. Moral action is not intrinsically derived from natural selection.

3. Therefore, the nature of humans is neither intrinsically nor exhaustively based on natural selection.

Because we can decided to be better than our instincts, we are better than the basis for our instincts.

Junto pero sin palabras...

"However gratifying it is in later life to express thoughts and feelings to a congenial person, there remains an unsatisfied longing for an understanding without words--ultimately for the earliest relation with the mother."

-- Melanie Klein, Our Adult World and Other Essays (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 100 (as cited in Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols [London: Routledge, [1970] 1996], p. 52)

Put your hand in this post and it will be on mine. Forward it to others to do the same, and our hands will be in the same place, in an almost sacramental way. And this, without words.

Homo ignis...

Does any species but the human race make fire? Even if we grant some species can make tools, does any other species make a tool comparable to fire? I know of a beetle which shoots super-heated acrid gas to repel enemies, but that is more like herculean farting than manufacturing fire for some purpose. The Greeks might be right: maybe an essential difference lies in man's Promethean abilities.

I find it interesting that "Prometheus" is taken as a secular patron saint, and secularism by and large goes out of its way to "dethrone" humanity as some "unique species" (a redundant term, btw) in the cosmos. And yet it may be our Promethean savvy which makes us unique!

Thoughts?

"Cool It"

Global Warming - The Ice Age Is Coming

A tomato to snuff a cigarette?

Why not? Who says a tomato is not an ashtray?

Instinctively, it seems wrong to waste a perfectly good cherry tomato by snuffing out a cigarette against it. Is that sense of waste, as an ethical fault, merely a result of natural selection pressures, or is it tied to a deeper truth about living well and truth as such?

I got on of this bizarre train of questions after reading a portion of Frank Sheed's "God? Of Course!" I found a Chinese translation last week and finished it today. One point Sheed makes (on pages 13–14) really struck me. Since I only have a Chinese translation, I will post the characters as they are and then offer a translation.

除非你知道某物的目標是什麼，它是為何而存有的，否則你不能理性地使用它。 ．．．[某人]根本不知道它的作用是什麼，但覺白白把它丟棄未免可惜。 ．．．要確知一物的正確用途，我們就必須向裝造者求問。 這一切適用於人。 我們不能善用自己，或幫助別何人善用他自己，但如果我們知道我們的被造的目的，我們就能善用自己。

Unless we you know the point of some object, why it exists, you can't make rational use of it. [Sheed then imagines a thermometer in the hands of someone completely ignorant of such an object.] … [He] simply has no idea how to use it, but he thinks it would be a pity to throw the thing away. … To be certain of an object's exact use, we need to consult its maker. The same holds for human life. We don't know how to perfect ourselves, nor how to help some other person perfect himself, but if we know what we were made for, then we can perfect ourselves.

How many people live with this confusion at the base of their lives? On the one hand they deny "purpose" and "meaning" in the world, since these concepts seem like outdated, weak-minded throwbacks to religious immaturity. On the other hand, though, they rise each day, pursue goals, amend their behavior, and adjust their goals in light of higher values like truth, beauty, and virtue. But ultimately, if the world they believe they inhabit has no proper end, does not, by extension, their own life have no proper end? How often do we really face the elemental question, "What am I living for?" It is easy, psychologically, but not philosophically, to claim "the cosmos" lacks any proper ends. It is easy to be indifferent about the apparent lack of purpose "in the world," since this shifts the emphasis from oneself to "reality as such."

Imagine a child raised being told every day that his life has no end better than any other. Imagine a child being told there is no better or worse way to spend his days, since there is simply no "proper" way for time to be spent in the first place. Be a druggie or be a Nobel laureate––whatever, it's all good. Without a clear aim, all his young vital energies would increasingly unravel and, most likely, spin into a maelstrom of sociopathic anomie. His parents would surely be culpable of abuse. Their surest defense would be to blame the world: How can they be blamed for depriving their child of a sense of purpose when the world itself is devoid of purpose? They are just calling it like they see it.

Now imagine an entire culture of children raised under that demonic incantation: a society of aimless zombies in pursuit of proof that their is no proof of higher aims. Surely it should give us pause that one of the harshest forms of insult is that which deforms one object or action into another, much cruder object or action. "Is that your voice or did I die and go to hell?" "Is that your face or did your neck throw up?" "Will you stop talking or are you going to waste more of my air?" "Girl, don't you think it would be easier on us all if you stopped all that talking and walking and just lay back to open port to the world?" Just as nothing ennobles a person more than aligning him with his proper end, so that his vital energies and experiential wisdom flow as one stream in one direction, so nothing degrades a person more than the destruction of his sense of purpose. Being told you were abandoned and then adopted pales in comparison as a rude surprise to being told you were a coital accident and only barely scraped past being aborted. You weren't "meant" to be here, kid––none of us was––but I guess I can't tell you get out now. Now go play.

It is, as I say, an easy psychological task to deny "cosmic purpose" compared to the difficulty inherent in making a philosophical defense of this anti-teleologism in one's own lived life. The very act of denying human action has proper ends is itself an action driven by an implicit goal, namely, truth. "Every being loves its own perfection," says Fulton J. Sheen in The Life of All Living (New York: Image Books, 1979). "The plant loves sunshine," Sheen continues, "for it is its perfection; the bird loves its food; for it is its perfection; the eye loves color, for color is its perfection; in the strict sense of the term the intellect loves truth, for truth is its perfection."

Sheen's eloquence stands, as always, as a powerful antidote (and scandal) to the willfully aimless aims of our decadent secular culture. "The mind," Sheen asserts, "by the very necessity of its operation is driven to seek unity" (p. 53). If this were not so, why are you trying at this very instant to make unified sense of Sheen claim as either jibing or clashing with the rest of what you know and believe at the moment of reading his assertion? Your mind is compelled to integrate each claim you encounter with the rest of the claims that inhabit your cognitive world. This is why we even have a category of "not-right-now" topics, which we can "shelve" until we can properly affirm or debunk them. Even in their uncertainty, such claims have a specific place in the "unitropic" operation of the human intellect. They can, for instance, be invoked at a later date as either "random" examples or counter-examples to some other claim.

This "unitropic" tendency of the human mind is not circumstantial to the world that forms it and which it seeks to know. "All life reveals itself as a process of unification," Sheen argues later (p. 123): "To make unity out of multiplicity; homogeneity out of heterogeneity; the same out of the different; the permanent our of the passing––that is the fundamental movement of life" (p. 123). And good thing, too, for, continues Sheen, "This world would be like a gigantic puzzle-picture if there were no unifying force to put the pieces together. A mosaic is unintelligible if it is seen only in its details, but it takes on a new beauty when seen in its unity. … Life is beautiful only when it is reduced to unity" (p. 123). I would also point out that the very act of calling a mosaic "a" mosaic assumes its existence is only meaningful as an intelligible whole towards which all the parts are ordered.

To those, of a more scientific mind, who find such rhapsodizing mere theological bluster, let us recall the current golden fleece of science is a Theory of Everything, a total picture of everything that reduces all phenomena to a simple, unified, and therefore beautiful, whole. Even the effort to pluralize the universe––to universalize its universality, in other words, to trivialize its specific importance––by positing a multiverse requires positing "a" multiverse for the claim to be an intelligible improvement over the passé universe. I would even go so far as to say that "the multiverse" is but a lame bluff to scare "the universe" out of modern discourse (just as "meme" has tried, lamely, for decades to make "idea" and "concept" appear antediluvian). Even the most austere scientific theory of matter and motion is, in the end, a human construction, and therefore even the most rigorously reductionist, formal-mathematical explanation of the world is insuperably anthropocentric. The universe only makes sense by virtue of the intelligible human articulation of that discovery. This does not, however, entail that the world's sense is a purely human construct. It simply means that the universe's intelligibility expresses itself most potently in the human articulation of that intelligibility.

Although intellectual fashions seem to change as fast as the universe expands from its fiery origin in nothing, certain truths persist, one of them being that man, as homo loquens, only speaks because he believes his words refer intelligibly to something beyond his mere speech organ. This belief can in no way be proved without first being avowed. In the very moment he denies that the world has meaning, the somber skeptic is asserting a truth about the whole world, that is, giving a complete meaning to his life's disparate observable elements. "Language itself," argues Walter Burkert in Creation of the Sacred,

"as a signifying system, seems to be in need of an 'ultimate signifier,' the absolute, god. This may also serve the function of the algebraic x to solve the conflicting equations of life. … To introduce the unseen is to interrupt the closed functional chain of events––which also means that religion is never fully integrated into any system of society but retains some character of 'otherness.'

"Basic categories of being, of causality, and of goodness are reflected in the traditional predicates of gods or god as immortal or timeless, creator of the world, and the ultimate end of human destination. Even these a priori categories have been linked to biological evolution by the evolutionary theory of knowledge. They have been developed in the measure that they proved successful in managing an increasingly comprehensive objective world" (chapter 1, p. 27).

The very act of speaking about the world is based on faith that there is a world, and that it really makes sense from some ultimate perspective. And, as our knowledge of the world grows, even if we deny it some "higher" meaning, our love for the world grows. Our basic instinct to survive grounds our desire to know as much of the world as we can before we die, a desire which, in turn, sharpens our love for the world we are privileged to know in our short span of life. In other words, to cite Sheen again, the "three fundamental inclinations or tendencies in the life of every human being … are for life, for truth, and for love" (p. 137).

Only a suitably rich worldview does justice to these awesome human instincts, and only the Christian Gospel provides a rich enough worldview by which man may remain truly human. "As all creation revolves about man,"––the mineral transposed and unified in the plant, the plant transposed and unified in the animal, and the animal transposed and unified in the human––"so too, man revolves about Jesus Christ. Man is the pivot about which the whole order of nature swings; Jesus Christ is the pivot about which supernature swings. … [W]ithout Christ this world of ours loses its intelligibility and meaning" (p. 132).

Which brings me back to my questions about tomatoes and cigarettes.

If the universe as a whole is not "made for" anything, then neither is any thing in the universe "made for" anything. At most, various things stands in tighter or looser spatiotemporal causal proximity with other things. It would be no violation of the "cosmic" or "natural order" if I and some mates were to waste baskets of tomatoes inside a pub by smashing cigarette after cigarette into them. It would the rankest sentimental anthropocentrism for someone to protest that those tomatoes would be put to "better use" by stamping out the hunger in the bellies of the poor begging outside the pub. A tomato, like anything else in the godless comsos, is not more "designed for" any action or object than for any others. Cigarette-snuffing is just as much an "intrinsic end" of tomatoes as is "hunger-ending", since, of course, neither is an intrinsic end. But, as William P. Young put it in The Shack, "If anything makes sense then everything makes sense." Once, however, you admit a tomato, by virtue of its created structure, really does have some more "proper" ends than others, you invite the vampire of teleologism into your philosophical abode, whereupon he will patiently but ruthlessly suck dry the hordes of disingenuous "whateverisms" that pessimistic secularism has let inside the gates.