The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "The Circle Game"

The Circle Game (by Joni Mitchell)

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like when you're older must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won't be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

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© March 22, 1966; R. Joan Mitchell, then August 22, 1966; Gandalf Pub Co

Joni Mitchell - The Circle Game (Official Audio) (youtube.com)

PS22 Chorus "CIRCLE GAME" Joni Mitchell (youtube.com)

Saturday Lecture: The Trifecta

{Today, we offer three mini-lectures for the price of one full-length lecture. The common theme here is the disaster that is Modernity: how it happened, what awful changes it brought, and what we can do about it.}

Historian Andrzej Walicki, in The Slavophile Controversy, related how Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov bemoaned the changes that modernity had brought, and was bringing, to 18^th-century Russia, everything having been unquestionably fine until then:

The reverse side of progress was profound demoralization: children no longer revered or obeyed their parents, parents ignored their children’s upbringing, marital love had disappeared and had given way to widespread adultery, dissipation, and divorce. Families were no longer bound by ties of solidarity and every man was concerned for himself alone; there was no friendship, for it was all too easy to sacrifice one’s friends to one’s own advantage; love of one’s country had been replaced by the pursuit of status and rewards.

Traditionally, the upbringing of children was completely subordinated to religion. While this may have encouraged a number of irrational and superstitious beliefs, it also induced fearful obedience to God’s commandments. Increasingly, though, said Shcherbakov, “There was less superstition, but also less faith; the fear of hell disappeared, but so did love of God.”

Special attention must be given to the individualization of personal relations, and, as a consequence, the basic change in the attitude toward women. “Passionate love, formerly unknown, began to hold sway over sensitive hearts, and the female sex, which had been unaware of its beauty, began to recognize its power.” Love of luxuries and excess was encouraged to stimulate industries, handicrafts, and trade.

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{On top of all that, Modernity also spawned Leviathan, replacing local, grassroots autonomy with irresistible central authority and top-down control. Marc Barnes, writing at ‘New Polity,’ explains.}

Marc Barnes:

From France, to Germany, to Russia, every country that became what we now recognize as a modern State did so by weeding out local languages and dialects; by banning local militias and curtailing local police forces; by taking authority away from monasteries, fraternities, guilds, and extended families; by disciplining the population into conformity—unto a theoretical limit point at which only the individual and the sovereign State form the political whole. All instituted national policies of education over and against local learning. All disemboweled local customs of their traditional authoritative force. All enclosed common land and so reduced ownership to direct state ownership or private ownership (allowed and enforced by the State). All peddled, and still peddle, a notion of sovereignty that reduced any diversity in authority to a war in which only one could prove victor: and thereby become the State.

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Adrian Vermeule Against the World — NEWPOLITY

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{How, then, are we to live, given the corruption of our morals and the overweening power of the State? Marc Barnes, still at New Polity, has the answer (which, credit where credit is due, he took from Jesus): we must become like children!}

Marc Barnes:

Children are obviously free in and through belonging to their community. ¹ This entails obedience to that community’s authorities; obligation to the weaker and younger; being given over to those aiding them into virtue; and a whole host of positive, political relationships that ground and give substance to whatever negative freedom results from this belonging. 

Old-timers know it best, however nostalgic their lament: a child governed by an entire community is freer than a child whose parents enter into the liberal model and assert the radical freedom of their child with words like, “You can’t tell my child what to do.” ² The former freedom is the romance of the well-ordered neighborhood; roaming until dinner; hot water from a hose; mothers who trust each other’s common participation and stake in the good of every child on the street and so allow, quite peacefully, law and custom to be enforced at the Smith house as much as the Jones. The latter freedom is liberal freedom, the child awkwardly conceived of as an individual with a battery of rights that cannot be transgressed through communal governance; the freedom of the lawsuit; the freedom that takes down the trampoline and the playground equipment worth climbing; the endless suburban bickering.

We are all children. We are all sons and daughters. We are all free in and through being members of one body. The maturity of adulthood is real, and it is good, but it is not a stark, sudden entrance into an anti-familial police state. Adulthood is the perfection of our capacities in virtue and so of our capacity for serving the common good — not freedom from having to. “Eighteen” is not a magical number. “Eighteen” is a sign and symbol of the over-bloated power of the modern liberal state to extrinsically, juridically declare the logic of the family, and its order of peace, subservient to the logic of the state and its order of violence. In the coming postliberal society, its significance will be eclipsed by ceremonies celebrating an actual attainment of virtue and membership within one’s community, and the memory of that dismal birthday party, in which the child is invited out of the family and into the world of violence will dissolve like a nightmare in the morning sun.

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Children will destroy us — NEWPOLITY

¹ Melissa Harris-Perry: “We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘These are our children.’ We have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Ms. Harris-Perry was canceled (by MSNBC) for espousing such radical collectivism, but Marc Barnes, whose 'New Polity' promotes a 'Christian postliberal worldview,' endorses it.

² It takes a village! Why did no one explain this to us before?

This is the village our parents warned us about

The Last Dishevelment

{A final post on the consequences of nominalism: it was the best of philosophies, it was the worst of philosophies.}

“Nominalism,” we have seen, “was the great liberating force of modern civilization.” Alas, added Julius Friend, “There is another and darker side of modern civilization, and this no less than the bright side must be attributed to the nominalist doctrine. Our failures are but the reverse side of our triumphs; the virtues and vices of a civilization are equally involved in its pattern.”

Fair enough; let us allow Friend to enumerate the vices of our nominalist culture. “The evils of nominalism,” he begins, “were implicit in its first declaration that only the particular things of the physical world were real. Man was thus the creator of order, but only in a subjective, mental world.¹ The objective world, the "real" world, was shown by science to be a vast, mechanical, inhuman affair of colorless, soundless matter and energy.” In fact, once men removed the God-colored glasses they had been wearing, the heavens themselves revealed, at best, a deity “unconcerned with humanity.” More disenchantment was to come:

With Darwinian evolution the last blow to man's pride was struck; along with all life, he was a peculiar accident of mechanical selection and his mind but a still more peculiar accident, capable of understanding only a little of the inhuman comedy. The inference was inescapable: man was sadly isolated in a universe that cared nothing for his values and his concepts.

The idea that the universe cared nothing for the individual's spiritual life was a mortal blow to the established religions. It produced on the one hand a vast indifference to religious doctrines, and, on the other hand, fideism, the teaching that one must have faith without reason.

Fideism ironically led back to the medieval view that earthly existence must reflect divine intention: “If God created the kind of world He did, He must acquiesce in it through and through. ² The next deduction follows all too easily—God hallows whatever succeeds. ³ The philistinism of the nineteenth century, according to which God decreed that the rich should be rich, and the poor should be poor, is an example of what happens when faith alone is appealed to.”

God having been disposed of for (literally) all practical purposes, men were free to pile up treasure here on earth, while taking out insurance against moths and rust:

The lack of a discernible supreme purpose has driven men to concentrate on the material and the immediately practical, but since the practical cannot be defined except in terms of a larger program, modern living has become the aimless and restless thing that it is. Modern civilization lacks a larger program; its social ideals are no more than the simple sum of the ideals of individualism, and all are directed at non-interference with the individual. Liberty, equality, and the so-called pursuit of happiness aim at giving the individual a chance to develop. To develop into what? Apparently to develop into whatever he desires.

As C.S. Lewis (among others) noted, our culture inundates us with objects of desire but provides no way of distinguishing between them. All desires are created equal; pushpin is as good as poetry.⁴

Encouraged to spend his time getting and spending, “The modern man is blinded to the nuances of experience and reduced to a dull factual outlook. From this blindness to values one value is pre-eminently excepted—property value.” Marie Antoinette’s blithe “Let them eat cake” was replaced by capitalism’s equally blithe “Let the market decide.” Given the amoral nature of the modern economy, “It is no wonder,” wrote Julius Friend, “that modern ethical standards should be hazy. According to nominalism, ethical criteria, like all judgments, become subjective (“matters of opinion"). Social contracts are considered from the angle of self-interest, and one treats a fellow human well because honesty is the best policy. Such an ethical program, negative and without transcendent authority, becomes subject to innumerable interpretations and exceptions."

Sanctioned by nominalism, modern individualism “led to democracy, but it also served to sanction the unlimited ambition of those who could rise above the masses. If all men were free and equal, they could look out for themselves. The powerful man had only his own sturdy self-reliance to thank for his success. He owed no obligations to those beneath him; on the contrary, they owed him gratitude, for by asserting his ability, the best interest of all was being served. This is the moral import of laissez faire or economic individualism.”

The displacement of abstract reason by empirical observation has led to a proliferation of facts and a paucity of explanatory theory:

The nominalist view of the particulars of sense experience as the only reliable evidence is called positivism in philosophy; practical reason is licensed by positivism, but speculative reason is disallowed as mere mind-spinning. Here we have an absolute inversion of the scholastic opinion which relied on speculative reason and scorned experimentation. As a result, scientific knowledge has become voluminous, more analytic, and increasingly specialized; but a synthesis of all its diverse facts has hardly been attempted. ⁵

Lastly, Friend complains, “The irrational tendency of nominalism is shown by modern psychology in which the mind is regarded as a separate object, to be studied analytically as a biologist might study a bug under a microscope. This approach makes the mind a mechanism acted on by the physical world, and its purpose that of guiding the physical organism in its various biologic functions. Hand in hand with such psychology goes that pestilence of modern thought—'psychologism,’ the mouthing of psychological tags as an explanation of almost anything. In this scheme of mentality, reason becomes "rationalization," and the question of falsity and truth is thereby rendered meaningless. Here is irrationalism in its last dishevelment. The development of nominalism has brought about anti-rationalism and a concentration on the emotional and impulsive side of mentality.”

If we jettison nominalism, however, what will remain of the modern mindset? Julius Friend certainly did not expect us to return to a hierarchical cosmos filled with supernatural entities; nor will we return to a belief that social hierarchies reflect divine intention. If nominalism has left us out on a philosophical limb without a metaphysical safety net, what can we do but cling to that limb as tightly as we can and hope it will hold our weight?

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¹ Enter Rene Descartes and his “Cogito, ergo sum,” an uncredited paraphrase of Augustine; later, enter Kant and his insistence that we can never know “things as such” but only our mental representations of them.

² Cf. Hegel: “Whatever is, is right.”

³ Cf. pragmatism: “Truth is what works.”

⁴ The “pushpin…poetry” example is taken from Jeremy Bentham, one of the earliest exponents of utilitarianism (and of the Panopticon).

⁵ The more we know, the less we understand; or, as Steven Weinberg put it, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” What Stephen Hawkings called the “grand unified theory of everything,” the holy grail of modern science, remains distressingly out of reach.

 

Julius Friend quotations are from: NOMINALISM: THE DILEMMA OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION on JSTOR (Virginia Quarterly Review, July 1935)

 

Objectively Sublime?

{We continue to wax philosophical, despite our lack of qualifications to do so. Philosophizing without a license? A misdemeanor, a venial sin at worst.}

Nominalism has been accused by some of having encouraged the abandonment of objective reality, of having reduced the world to subjective impressions, and of having launched a veritable plague of relativism into the bloodstream of Western culture. In support of such accusations, allow me to revisit one of my favorite essays, C.S. Lewis’ “Men Without Chests,” in which Lewis took modern educators to task for not inculcating in their students objectively proper and appropriate sentiments.

Lewis began by directing attention to “the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. There were two tourists present: one called the sight 'sublime' and the other 'pretty,’ at which Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust.” Before getting to Lewis’ complaint, let us note he did not describe the incident accurately. Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet William, wrote in her memoirs: “We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of the views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country. A lady and gentleman came to the spot; Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majestic waterfall.” “Sublime and beautiful,” replied his new friend. Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.”

Contra Lewis, Coleridge was not recorded as experiencing “disgust” at the tourist’s choice of adjectives. Why was Coleridge amused? Perhaps because his conversational partner did not stop at “majestic” even after Coleridge endorsed it; perhaps because “sublime” is not the same as “beautiful,” or perhaps because “sublime and beautiful” is not the same as “majestic”. Regardless, it appears that Coleridge, unlike C.S. Lewis, saw no reason to make a big deal about it.

In any case, what most offended Lewis was the modern, nominalist perspective which says that language reveals only our subjective views (that is, our opinions) and that there is no “objective” reality to which those views necessarily correspond. Which is to say, the real existence of Coleridge’s waterfall was not in dispute; what was in dispute was whether, as Lewis had it, there is an objectively correct way to describe it or to feel about it.

Lewis quoted an anonymous educator using the incident to drive home the point: “When the man said, ‘This is sublime,’ he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. Actually, he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was, ‘[When I look at the waterfall], I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘sublime’.’ We often appear to be saying something very important about something, when we are only saying something about our own feelings.”

That descent into subjectivity and emotivism was too much for Lewis, who haughtily insisted that “sublime” was the objectively correct word to use, and that humility was the objectively correct emotion to feel, in the presence of, shall we say, nature’s grandeur. For Lewis, neither beauty nor the sublime were in the eye of the beholder; they were objective realities, the existence and nature of which had to be drummed into the heads of philistine children (and modern educators). Lewis claimed the backing of Plato for this view of education, despite Plato’s ideal republic having been replete with overtones of what we today call fascism:

In Plato’s Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart.

Lewis confidently asserted that “To call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.” Are all children delightful all the time? Are all old men venerable all the time? Are individuals not entitled to their own evaluations? Not according to Lewis, who insisted there are right and wrong responses: “I myself do not enjoy the society of small children,” he admitted, “but I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or color blind.”

In other words, pontificated Lewis, “Our approvals and disapprovals are recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order. Against this stands the modern world. In it the very possibility of a sentiment being reasonable—or even unreasonable—has been excluded from the outset. The world of facts,” Lewis concluded, “without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.”

Feelings are not facts and facts don’t care about our feelings: such is our modern wisdom. Whereas, for C.S. Lewis, wisdom rested on “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, as to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Such certainty is precisely what nominalism opposed and, for the most part, demolished; whether we are better off without it is, like the "proper" description of Coleridge’s waterfall, a matter of opinion.

Objectively Sublime

Wednesday with Pascal: The Virus of Nominalism

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat weighs in on the debate between philosophical realists and their bitter antagonists, the nominalists. Existentialist that he is, Pascal clearly privileges existence over essence; he also rejects any suggestion that earthly arrangements, political or otherwise, point toward some transcendent order.}   

According to the late Julius Friend:

The rise of nominalism was a cryptic attack on the supreme authority of the Church; it was the intellectual echo of the vague, almost inaudible murmur of the common man against his unchangeable earthly destiny; it was the manifesto of the growing attention to common earthly things and satisfactions as against the inhumanly remote; it expressed dissatisfaction with static and fixed conceptions.

If it was “a cryptic attack,” it came, as Friend acknowledged, from “within the citadel of authority—the Church. As a philosophical doctrine, it was formulated two hundred and fifty years before any concerted organization appeared against the Church, and four hundred years before the attack gained any headway; but Catholicism sensed the virus in nominalism from its inception and condemned it as heresy.” The earliest advocates of nominalism were monks and priests, which should come as no surprise—in the Middle Ages, who else had access to books or to education? Dun Scotus, Roscellinus, William Occam, Gabriel Biel: none of these nominalists were ever denounced outright as heretics, though certain of their teachings were condemned. ¹

In any case, nominalism began as a minority, even fringe, doctrine. Eventually, “it emerged triumphant with William of Occam in the first part of the fourteenth century, and the Church had to make terms with it as best it could.” In time, those terms would become more and more onerous:

Once it was believed and accepted that the individual mind originated universals and classifications, then it followed that God did not put order into the world, but that man read order into the world. Thus, it came to be believed that the individual, not God, conferred or vested power, and having conferred power could take it away or deny it. The representation of God on earth claimed by the Church became then a picturesque figure of speech, not a reality; and private communion with God, without intermediary, became a logical procedure. ²

The Church was not alone in being disrupted by nominalism. The elevation of the individual did not bode well for hierarchy:

Furthermore, an overlord now held his tenure purely by the consent of individuals; if the contract between him and his vassals should become one-sided, only force of arms and not the decree of the universe could keep it so. If all ideas, and consequently the power of order, issued from the individual and not from God or His eternal Ideas, any man was the master of his own fate and could carve out a career for himself; he no longer had to acquiesce in the misery of his earthly lot while looking forward to another world of heavenly bliss.

It was not that nominalism necessarily led to the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest; but ideas have consequences, right?

Speaking of ideas:

In the intellectual sphere, acceptance of nominalist beliefs brought freedom from the authority of old conceptions. Aristotle, the hitherto absolute word on the subject of natural science, was not necessarily right. The particulars of sense experience, "hard stubborn facts,” and not abstract speculation, were the touchstone of truth. Men of genius began to scoff at cloistered theories, and to favor experimentation. Observation, not reason, was hailed as the correct method in science. ³

Empiricism was one of the many products of nominalism, “the development of which required hundreds of years; not only was it stubbornly fought at every stage in its progress by the tradition of realism, but time was needed for its ideas to leave the cloister and seep down to the masses.” Thanks to nominalism, those "masses" now had access--widespread, if not universal--to education and to advancement; a person’s status at birth (including gender, race, social rank, or material wealth) no longer set limits on their possibilities.

No fan of nominalism, Julius Friend grudgingly acknowledged that “On the one hand, nominalism was the great liberating force of modem civilization. By removing the static order of Platonic realism, nominalism showed the individual man that he was the creator of conceptions and that his ability to make these conceptions actual had no limit. If this were all that needed to be said, a discussion of nominalism could be only a paean to Progress.”

So far, so good: several cheers for nominalism! But what else, in the estimate of Julius Friend, hath nominalism wrought? What happened when people ceased believing that language—including words like, say, “God,” “Satan,” “Heaven,” “Hell,” "Good," and "Evil"—was linked to some metaphysically transcendent realm? If words were only products of human invention, and if they expressed human ideas rather than eternal verities: what in the world (literally) was sacred?

Perhaps nothing?

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 ¹ Some of almost everyone’s teachings were condemned in the Middle Ages, including those of such academic stalwarts as Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard. In those days, prudent scholars kept their more controversial manuscripts hidden or wrote them in jargon sufficiently convoluted that authorities would either not notice or not understand.

² It is not a coincidence that Martin Luther was educated by teachers sympathetic to nominalism.

³ Let us not forget the impact of the “Age of Discovery” on the European mind. The revelations of hitherto unknown continents, hitherto unknown cultures, and hitherto unknown natural wonders went a long way toward discrediting received authorities.

Reality, What Even Is It?

{Some say that a nominalist is someone who cannot see the forest for the trees. In fact, the nominalist denies that such a thing as a ‘forest’ even exists—there’s nothing but trees out there for the nominalist. Why does this matter? What exactly is at stake? Oh, nothing much: just our understanding of reality.}

Julius W. Friend, writing in the 1930s and trying to make sense of the ongoing trainwreck that was the 20^th century, concluded that “Modern civilization can be most comprehensively understood as stemming from the root idea of Nominalism.” Friend was writing more than a decade before Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences) made the identical claim, and, to his credit, Friend provided a more substantial and more balanced explanation of the topic:  

Nominalism was a doctrine held by certain scholastic philosophers, which came to the fore in the last part of the eleventh century. The doctrine was bitterly contested for two centuries by the opposing scholastic doctrine of realism; at the beginning of the fourteenth century, under the able championship of William of Occam, nominalism came to be accepted.

What was the big deal, the philosophical bone of contention?

The point at issue between realism and nominalism was: are classifications and general types (universals) figments of the mind or are they real? The realists held that they were real, existing in the world independent of the mind. The nominalists held that particular objects alone were real and that universals were merely names given to classify and relate particulars. For example, in the opinion of a realist the generic word "horse" corresponded to a reality in the outer world affecting each particular horse, while in the opinion of a nominalist only particular horses were real and the word "horse" corresponded to nothing in the outer world, but was merely a mental concept, a convenient way to talk of particular horses collectively.

To put it differently: philosophical realists held that each particular horse was an instance of “horse-ness,” which in turn was an ontological essence existing in the realm of Platonic (or divine) perfection. That essence could be shared (partially) with imperfect creatures. No particular horse could be perfect; each was an inferior copy of the Platonic form “horse-ness” and each possessed various "accidents" (color, size, etc.) as well. Similarly, dogs shared the defining quality of “dog-ness,” and humans shared the attribute of “humanness”; but no particular dog and no particular human could realize the perfection of its ideal, Platonic prototype. ¹ Even though creaturely "accidents" were all that could be observed, philosophical realists insisted that unseen "essences" were the fundamental reality.  

The obvious implication of realism—aside from its claim that an undetectable realm of perfection existed—was that existence itself was a defect. Whether “horse-ness,” “dog-ness,” or “humanness” existed somewhere in the metaphysical cosmos or whether they were Ideas in the mind of God: they were real, and they were incomparably superior to any mortal instantiation. Gnosticism, which was a form of Platonism, believed the physical world to be an inferior, degraded imitation, almost a parody, of true, spiritual reality.

As Friend emphasized, “Platonic Ideas are not to be understood as ideas in the commonly accepted meaning; they are not ideas in any man's mind, but external real essences. Therefore, the ideas which a man might conceive would not be created by his mind but would be impressed on his mind by the transcendent real Ideas.” The notion that “real Ideas” could be impressed upon (or impress themselves upon) the human mind also led to the suspicion that demonic entities might exploit that mental vulnerability for their own evil purposes.    

Nonetheless, and for a variety of reasons, Christianity and Platonism got along well, for the most part. Although Christian apologists were always quick to deny being influenced by Platonic dualism, the resemblance was striking:

For Christianity, which stressed the Kingdom of Heaven and condemned the temporal satisfactions of the world, the Platonic doctrine of realism came made to order. Earthly things were merely divine reflections; but at least they derived their nature from the divine and so possessed a certain symbolic authority from on high.

Nor was the Church’s authority merely symbolic:

Therefore, the hierarchy of clergy held power by divine sanction, and to question that power would be questioning the authority of God. In secular affairs, power was likewise believed to be vested from Heaven; each vassal held his fief from a superior, until the most powerful held his fief from God. Consequently, the lowliest serf, no less than the greatest noble, had obligations, duties and, be it noted, privileges, by divine sanction. For him to blame his ills and discontents on the constitution of society would again be to blame them on Divinity. Each man's lot was bound up not only in the social scheme, but in the scheme of the universe. Thus, no class in medieval society could possibly have questioned the justice of the social order. The effect of Platonic realism on the Middle Ages was to fix a static pattern for Church and State. ² 

The belief that the visible, material world reflected the invisible, spiritual world was akin to (though not identical to) the ancient Hermetic expression “as above, so below,” which is not to impute Hermetic esoteric beliefs to mainstream Christianity. The point is that the existence and the superiority of the Platonic realm, as posited by philosophical realism, provided justification for earthly hierarchies which were, after all, merely imitations (slightly flawed) of that higher realm.  

What would happen, though, if people stopped believing in the Platonic realm? To make a long story short, Modernity would happen, and it did.

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Biographical information on Julius W. Friend is hard to come by. Characterized as an early 20th-century "culture critic," Friend co-founded and edited a literary journal called "The Double Dealer" which lasted from 1921--1926. His essay on nominalism appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1933. He co-authored a book, What Science Really Means, which was published in 1937.

¹ Platonic realism asserted that “essence” preceded (and outranked) “existence”; modern existentialism reverses that order.

² Less pejoratively, one could characterize Christendom as having represented “a stable order” rather than “a static pattern”.

Sunday Sermon: "We Can't Make It Here"

We Can’t Make It Here

There's a Vietnam vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
The flag on his wheelchair flapping in the breeze
One leg missing and both hands free

No one's paying much mind to him
The V.A. budget's just stretched so thin
And now there' s more coming back from the Mideast war
We can't make it here anymore

And that big ol' building was the textile mill
That fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
'Cause we can' t make it here anymore

You see those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They're just gonna sit there 'til they rot
'Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks

Empty storefronts around the square
There's a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don't come down here unless you're looking to score
We can't make it here anymore

The bar's still open but man it' s slow
The tip jar's light and the register' s low
The bartender don't have much to say
The regular crowd gets thinner each day

Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself, Mr. CEO
See how far $5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one your stores
I bet you can't make it here anymore

There's a high school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazine
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that

If she comes up pregnant what'll she do
Forget the career and forget about school
Can she live on faith? Live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it's way too late to just say no
You can't make it here anymore

Now I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
'Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can't make it here anymore

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in
Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today
No, I hate the men sent the jobs away

I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They've never known want, they'll never know need
Their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed
Their kids won't bleed in their damn little war
And we can't make it here anymore

Will work for food, will die for oil
Will kill for power, and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks

So let 'em eat jellybeans let 'em eat cake
Let 'em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force or join the Corps
If they can't make it here anymore

So that's how it is, that's what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper, read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind if you're listening at all
Get out of that limo, look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone, tell us all why

In Dayton, Ohio or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That's done closed down, along with the school
And the hospital, and the swimming pool

Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There's rats in the alley and trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can't make it here anymore

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Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: James McMurtry

We Can't Make It Here lyrics © Short Trip Music

We Can't Make It Here (youtube.com)

Saturday Lecture: Modernity's Assault

{To an enlightened few, modernity came as a breath of fresh air; to many, however, it was a devastating storm that left, in its wake, a disordered and suddenly unfamiliar landscape.}

William Placher (from The Domestication of Transcendence):

Seventeenth-century thinkers often seem to have grown more confident, more optimistic about the capacities of human reason. Indeed, one of the standard versions of the contrast between modernity and postmodernism cites the failure of confidence in human progress and reason (and in European culture as the supposed vanguard of those ideals) in the aftermath of the trenches of World War I, the Holocaust, and threats of nuclear and ecological catastrophe.

It is a psychological commonplace that superficially vigorous confidence often covers up underlying insecurities, and something of the sort may have been true at the beginning of modernity. In much of Europe, the seventeenth century was a dreadful time. Thirty years of warfare, motivated in large part by religious differences, led to the death of a third of the population of Germany and to substantial if lesser disasters elsewhere on the continent. Civil war brought worse conflict than England had known since the Norman conquest six hundred years earlier. A severe depression, starting about 1619, ended the economic expansion of the sixteenth century. The plague ran through France from 1630 to 1632, and again from 1647 to 1649, and the famous English plague of the 1660s was only the last and worst of a whole series. In a time when most people lived less protected from nature than we are, it was cold—a ‘little ice age,’ worse than anything since or for centuries before.

People’s minds as well as their bodies must have seemed under assault in the seventeenth century. For nearly a millennium, most Western Europeans had been able to take their religious beliefs for granted, fostered by the dominant social structures around them and shared by nearly all their neighbors. Now, their neighbors in the next territory might hold quite different religious views and be threatening invasion over the differences. Ordinary folk could naturally begin to wonder how sure they were of the truth of their own beliefs, not to mention how willing they were to die for them. At the same time, the scientific discoveries of what Whitehead called ‘the century of genius,’ which often strike historians today as having been cause for growing cultural confidence, must often have seemed to their contemporaries unnerving subversions of their most basic beliefs—imagine that the earth does not rest solidly beneath our feet but goes hurtling around the sun!

In such a context, the appeal to reason can appear less a matter of confident optimism than a matter of desperation. In a world full of so much uncertainty, one would want to be able to argue compellingly for one’s beliefs, including one’s beliefs about God, and to be clear about the relation of one’s own moral efforts to one’s salvation. Stephen Toulmin has recently made a counter-intuitive but often persuasive case for the seventeenth century as a time of diminishing intellectual tolerance on the part of everyone from counter-Reformation Catholics to Protestant scholastics to Cartesian philosophers, a sad decline from the more open-minded days of Renaissance humanism.

Such historical analysis has interesting affinities with recent postmodern analyses of the tyrannical hegemony of Enlightenment reason. Maybe the ‘Age of Reason’ was not such a time of intellectual independence as we have been taught to think.   

Friday Thoughts

What hath climate change wrought? With the help of Clayton Page Aldern (at Aeon), let us count the ways:

Global average surface temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C (2°F) since the pre-industrial era, with most of this warming occurring in the past 40 years. Ice is melting; seas are steadily rising; storms are – well, you know this story. The narrative of climate change is one of meteorological extremes, economic upheaval and biodiversity losses.

Such is the familiar story, but the damage goes considerably deeper. Consider the myriad ways in which temperature impacts human behavior:

Immigration judges are less likely to rule in favor of asylum seekers on hotter days. On such days, students behave as if they’ve lost a quarter-year of education, relative to temperate days. Warmer school years correspond to lower rates of learning. Temperature predicts the incidence of online hate speech. Domestic violence spikes with warmer weather. Suicide, too. Drivers honk their horns more frequently (and lean on them longer) at higher temperatures.

And if all this were not scandalous enough, even the great American pastime is affected:

In baseball, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with their pitches on hot days – and the outdoor temperature is an even stronger predictor of their tendency to retaliate in this manner if they’ve witnessed an opposing pitcher do the same thing.

According to Aldern, “Climatic influence extends far beyond behavior and deep into cortical fissures.” Our brains are not literally melting (yet), but they are increasingly stressed by the heat itself and by associated impacts of climate change. Aldern, however, is an optimist, and, citing all kinds of research underway, he believes we will meet the challenge:

We need to further understand how the Anthropocene’s fever dream is already warping our wetware. Social and behavioral science have begun cataloguing the psychological fallout of a planet in flux, but a neural taxonomy of climate change awaits. The field’s methodological and conceptual arsenal is primed for the challenge, but honing it will demand alliances with climate science, medicine, psychology, political science and beyond.

Interdisciplinary alliances along with coordinated public policies: how hard can that be?

How a warming Earth is changing our brains, bodies and minds | Aeon Essays

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Samantha Rose Hill (also at Aeon), discussing Hannah Arendt’s perspective on personal authenticity, asks: “What does it mean to discover one’s true, authentic self? To act from a place of authenticity? Is there a truer self within the self that can be uncovered? What are we really talking about when we talk about authenticity?”

Before getting to Arendt, Hill lays some philosophical groundwork on the topic. According to Martin Heidegger, she explains, “There is a truer version of the self, a more authentic version, that can be experienced only when one steps out of the flow of everyday life, what Heidegger called ‘everydayness’.” Most of us, it seems, are like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamp post, not because he dropped them there but because the light is better; we try to find our ‘selves’ in the midst of the mundane activities that conceal, distract, and disguise the Self.

Heidegger’s authentic Self, then, was the Self that emerged when everything else—and everyone else—was stripped away, including connections to other people; to paraphrase Sartre, inauthenticity is other people. However, the philosopher Karl Jaspers held the opposite view: “For Jaspers, we can only ever exist in the world with others, which meant that any conception of freedom has to be conditioned by the principle of being with others in the world. Since nobody exists alone, ever, our authentic self must be understood always and only in relationship to others and the world we live in.” Jaspers’ view has the singular advantage of making sense, as it suggests we seek the Self in the actual world in which we (and other people) live, not in the deep recesses of some solipsistic cavern.

Long story short, Hill says that Hannah Arendt, struggling with questions of Self and Authenticity, opted for the world. Like Sartre and other French existentialists, Arendt understood “authenticity” as a project and the Self as always, to some extent, plastic. Human beings, Arendt insisted, possess will; that is, we make choices. Such choices require that we recognize, at some level, the existence of alternative choices; our minds, consequently, can never escape tension and conflict (and regret for roads not taken). ¹ There is no safe harbor, no place for an “authentic,” untroubled, unchanging Self to take refuge:

There is no true self inside the self. There is only the conflict of the will and how we decide to resolve it. It is human to reach for security in a time of unknowing. It is human to hope for a sense of direction in a time of uncertainty. Maintaining this inner friction of the will is the means to freedom, no matter how uncomfortable and frustrating it might seem at times. No matter how much we would just like someone else to decide for us, even occasionally. Because beyond the question of the self, what Arendt saw in Heidegger’s lonely concept of authenticity was an understanding of [Existence] that was world-denying. For him, the freedom of authenticity could only be experienced alone, away from the world of being with others, whereas for Arendt we are never alone, even when we are alone by ourselves.

Throughout history, humans have pondered two options for escape and/or discovery: to flee from the world into the Self or to flee from the Self into the world. In fact, neither option is real; we are both in the world and, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, of the world. Authenticity is simply acceptance of this fact. The Self, such as it is, is hiding in plain sight.

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^{What Hannah Arendt proposed as an alternative to authenticity | Aeon Essays}

¹ While Hill traces the focus on the conflicted will to Augustine, it in fact goes back at least to Paul: famously, Romans 7: 19-25.  

Wednesday with Pascal: The Invention of Genocide

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat remains trapped in 13^th-century France, a place which was either the zenith of Christendom or, if you happened to live in the Languedoc region, a veritable circle of Hell. The subject would be of merely academic interest, but, as we are so frequently reminded, we are the heirs of Christendom, and it helps to be familiar with our patrimony.} 

In his book A Most Holy War, Mark Pegg endeavors to puncture what he views as long-standing myths, both popular and academic, about the 13^th-century crusade launched by Pope Innocent III against the Albigensian heretics of southern France. For readers unfamiliar with that episode or with its significance, Pegg summarizes:

The Albigensian Crusade is one of the great pivotal moments in world history, if for no other reason than the fact that a very distinct Christian culture in [the south of France] was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church, accused of being an apocalyptic plague threatening to destroy Christianity, and that these accusations led to an irrevocable moral obligation for mass murder. The crusade ushered genocide into the West, changing forever what it meant to be Christian, what it meant to be like Christ. This most holy war is a story of grand expeditions, heroic sieges, village insurgents, kings trampled to death, children set on fire, heaven and earth remade—it is the epic story of the battle for Christendom.

Later in the book, Pegg repeats the accusation: “The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. This ethos of redemptive homicide is what separates the crusade massacres from other great killings before the thirteenth century: a crusader not only cleansed his soul by cutting the throat of a pestilential baker from Toulouse, he cleansed the very soul of Christendom.” Moreover, writes Pegg, “The Crusade, far from being a Christian aberration, epitomized the sanguine beauty and bloody savagery of thirteenth-century Latin Christendom. The threat from heresy and the necessity of eliminating that threat were fundamental in creating the Christ-like world that Pope Innocent III struggled all his life to achieve.” ²

Lest we think that Mark Pegg has an axe to grind against the medieval Church, let us jump forward a few centuries and see how the Christ-like world of Christian Europe was getting on. Michael Allen Gillespie, in The Theological Origins of Modernity, describes the destruction of the German city of Magdeburg in 1631 by “Catholic League” troops led by a Count von Tilly, intent on exterminating Protestant heretics:

“The slaughter was unstoppable. Fires were set throughout the city, children were thrown into the flames, and women were raped before being butchered. Fifty-three women were beheaded in a church where they sought refuge. No one was spared—twenty-five thousand Protestants were massacred or incinerated, and of the five thousand survivors some few were noblemen held for ransom, but all the rest were women who had been carried off to the imperial camp to be raped and sold from soldier to soldier.”

Another “Christian aberration”? Hardly; “Beginning in the early sixteenth century and lasting until the middle of the seventeenth century, the Wars of Religion were conducted with a fervor and brutality that were not seen again until our own times. Indeed, the ferocity of the combatants may even have exceeded our own, for almost all the killing took place at close quarters, often in hand-to-hand combat, and thus without the emotionally insulating distance that modern technologies make possible. The slaughter at Magdeburg, for all its horror, was not the first nor the last such event.”

For those who like their history lessons bolstered by numbers, Gillespie adds:

“By conservative estimates, the religious wars claimed the lives of 10 percent of the population in England, 15 percent in France, 30 percent in Germany, and more than 50 percent in Bohemia. By comparison, European dead in World War II exceeded 10 percent of the population only in Germany and the USSR. Within our experience, only the Holocaust and the killing fields of Cambodia can begin to rival the levels of destruction that characterized the Wars of Religion.”

As one of the 13^th-century French crusaders quipped before the conquest of the city of Beziers, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” ³ Nor was this an idle threat. In a letter to Pope Innocent III, the French commander Amalric related that, “While discussions were still going on with the barons about the release of those in the city who were deemed to be Catholics, the servants and other persons of low rank and unarmed attacked the city without waiting for orders from their leaders. To our amazement, crying “to arms, to arms!”, within the space of two or three hours they crossed the ditches and the walls and Béziers was taken. Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt …” ⁴

“If there is no God, everything is permitted,” say today’s defenders of theism. Pray tell, what could be worse than the things that were done throughout history in the name of God, the gods, or of one god or another? If God did not permit the nightmares of history, neither did He prevent them; and, while Christians like to take credit for having introduced moral values into Western civilization, they should take a closer look at the blood-soaked ground on which they stand and in which their “moral values” took root.

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¹ I assume that Pegg intended to mention “cognitive hardwiring,” though I find the “hotwiring” option to be intriguing.

² Pope Innocent III, we may note, before he assumed the papal throne, wrote a book destined to become a classic of its genre, De Contemptus Mundi (On Contempt of the World), which detailed the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which humans were vulnerable, and the many reasons for despair.

³ Alternatively rendered as “Kill them all. God will know His own.”

⁴ The Catholic History Behind “Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them Out” | uCatholic The provider of this anecdote (at www.uCatholic.com) adds drolly, “What an incredible true story from history!”