UPDATE: Somewhere from a third to half of this post disappeared. I’ll rewrite that soon. But not today, as I’m (dramatic flourish) feeling ill!

It’s been a busy lazy week. Since there’s nothing new in Gordland, I thought I’d just dump some links. I don’t do this often, but since I’ve just been catching up and surfing around (aside from a rewrite I’m working on) I have lots of stuff to share. I’ll subdivide it all by headings.

One more thing: for the LJ readers out there, there are some Youtube videos in this post. They probably won’t display on the LJ crosspost, so it’s probably easiest if you just hop down to the bottom of the post and follow the link to this post on my site. Thanks!

Now…

Sexy Teaching:

I’ve written before about my theory that attractive individuals make better teachers, and that in one-on-one teaching, the more attractive a teacher of the student’s preferred sex is, the harder the student is likelier to work. I’ve found at least one example online that bears this out. Imagine a videoblogger who posts a few times a week about philology and etymology. How many people do you think would regularly check that out? How much attention would you expect it to get? Well, if it was me, probably nobody would subscribe. But Hot For Words has tons of subscribers, and Marina has been interviewed on TV and appeared in Wired.

Why? Well, I think a video is worth a thousand words:

(I’m not sure that explanation is actually correct, but it certainly explains the interest so many Youtube/iTunes subscribers have in the series.)This is actually the kind of thing I wish I could recommend to my students, if they were all guys, just because I know they’d keep coming back to it. But since my students are mostly women, it’s not so useful. Still, I find it amusing.If you’d like to, um, investigate more, the Hot For Words homepage is here.

Good Reads:

I’ve been reading a lot. I’ll talk about the books I’ve gone through when I get around to a Recently Read post, but I realized I’ve said very little about the fiction I’ve been reading online. This is extra-silly since a lot of good stuff is going up exclusively online. So here are a few words about what I’ve read lately, either fiction, or about genre fiction:

• The Science Fiction Event Horizon is an interesting essay, seemingly, to me, a bit of a Mundane SF argument. The basic formula? There’s SF that’s really scientific, and there’s SF that’s really just fantasy. And lots and lots of people seem to identigy the fantasy-SF as the real, and not even be aware of the non-fantasy SF at all. (Which the author does indeed see as a somewhat bad thing.) Can’t say I disagree, really.
• “Time to Say Goodnight” by Caroline Yoachim, over at Fantasy magazine. A rich, dark-bright story about the one thing none of us can escape, and about its endlessly-repeated first discovery. (Disclaimer: she’s a classmate and a friend. But it’s a good story, really.)
• Again at Fantasy — good online mag, this one — an interview with Jeremy Tolbert. If you’re up for it, his Clockpunk.com site is a strange and neat place to poke around. I myself am in love with about four of his prints over at imagekind, including this one. This led me to check out a couple of his stories: the heartfelt and mournful “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You” (reminded me of how much I miss my own father, that story did) and the weird and lovely “The Yeti Behind You”.
• I haven’t read it yet, but Jason Stoddard’s (novel-length) expansion of his piece “Winning Mars” from InterZone 196 is available free in PDF format on his site. (Or, if you’re like me and prefer the mobipocket format because PDF is just evil on an ebook reader, go here.)
• Two Cranes Press. Tell me they’re not hip. I so want a copy opf their Field Guide to Surreal Botany (when it comes out, that is).

Book Trailers”

This is a neat trend. I don’t know if Jeff Vandermeer was the first genre writer to do this, with his trailer for Shriek — maybe Scott Sigler did it first? — but It’s an interesting form of free self-promotion. Well, free if you’re buddies with someone who can do you up a soundtrack, and if you can do up a decent-looking video.

I’m partial to Tobias Buckell’s trailer for Sly Mongoose:

And having also quite enjoyed the podcasts of his Getting Past Being Joe Blow Neopro series, available here. I have got to check this guy’s stuff out sometime soon…

Red:

Like, when people talk about how there’s medicine for AIDS, and millions of people can’t get it, because they’re too poor? This is what they’re talking about:

And I don’t buy the argument that these people cannot learn or have the chance to take a pill twice a day — an argument I first encountered watching The West Wing and which turned my stomach when I heard it. That’s insulting to their intelligence, and to mine if you think I’ll buy it. Yeah, when I see things like that, I suddenly start to think that drug companies’ patents should be honored… to a limit. And beyond the limit, I think companies should be reminded — worldwide — that they were enfranchised not just for the benefit of stockholders, but of humanity.Making a profit isn’t bad, but companies that don’t serve mankind while they’re at it should be drawn and quartered. If people can make money of the damned internet, they sure as hell ought to be able to find a way to make money off saving millions of lives.

Well, apparently, that’s what this Red business is all about. I’m not one to think that Bono and Madonna are going to save the world (and I feel badly for people who’ve been doing good work for ages, only to have some diva rockers show up and get all the credit), but all the same, I am curious about this. Has anyone heard much about it? Is this an example of the kind of humanist capitalism Mohammed Yunus discusses in his new book?

Godless & Thoughtful

Having just finished reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion — I’ll have more to say about it elsewhere — I thought I’d poke around and see what else I could find of Dawkins and other proactive atheists online. I’ve already mentioned the very entertaining Pat Condell here in another post, but there’s loads more on Youtube for you to enjoy. One Youtube user, PiroNiro, has collected a lot of great resources into one place (his or her channel, here). Recommended goodies:

• Richard Dawkins: I’m an Atheist, But…
• Sam Harris: Religion, Politics and the End of the World, which is actually a debate between Harris and Chris Hedges. Both make good points, but I have to give it to Harris with his discussion, at the end, of what it’s like being an atheist now, being analogous to listening to people talk about good and bad witchcraft.
• Christopher Hitchens: The Moral Necessity of Atheism, which is an interesting notion, really…
• Christopher Hitchens on Books and Ideas, which is loose and rambling but interesting.

(I should note that this is not an endorsement of Hitchens in all he’s written. I don’t really get how he could support the invasion of Iraq, for example. But these videos were interesting.)

And there’s this simple but inspiring videoblog from Mickipedia:

Dumb Superstition 9999999, Critical Thinking 9999999… +1

What happens when a local news report of a “ghost” at a gas station in Ohio makes it onto the Net?

Why, some smart, critical-minded young people decide to take it to pieces, and show that, yeah, one of the main reasons people manage to be superstitious is really just intellectual laziness. Check out the debunking:

Seriously, look at the color of her suit outside, compared to inside. Ding! Should be a hint, right there. (Though now I think I know a great way to get cheap special effects if I ever make a low-budget movie.)

The thing that kills me is that this is the same kind of newsmedia irresponsibility that has people in Korea believing in Fan Death — the idea you can die (somehow) from running an electric fan in your home at night.

Anonymous vs. CoS

Speaking of young people doing things online, this is bizarre. The online “group” (is that the right word?) Anonymous has decided to take on the Church of Scientology. Actually, to take down the Church of Scientology, a project they call Project Chanology. They issued this video recently:

There’s an interesting article here about this whole set of events, which mentions also Anonymous’ role in the arrest of pedophile Chris Forchand. The article links to this video, which, I warn you, is quite stomach-turning:

By the way, February 10th (my mother’s birthday!) was the deay they protested. Here’s a report on the protest that took place in Los Angeles. What can I say? I hope these kids are careful, because all I’ve read suggests the CoS can be quite harsh when fighting off criticism. But the Church will look pretty silly trying to sue hundreds of teenagers. (And I suspect that the majority of people involve in Anonymous are teenagers, not adults.) That said, good on them for being peaceful, using the resources they have, and for taking a stand.

How Things Change

That expression, the more things change, the more they stay the same… it isn’t true in all respects: for example, this hilarious video points out how much computer tech has changed since the early 90s. And that’s been, what, less than twenty years. I’ve often thought the same of bank machines, and how much more organized people would have to have been in the days before them.

HP Lovecraft Swag, Baby!

If you’re looking for amusing HPL swag, you can get some at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Indeed, besides T-shirts and mugs, they have resources for gamers, MP3 radio plays, and more! And before you complain about the cost, don’t worry: you can afford it (except maybe the Cthulhu Icon — somewhat beyond the range of my art budget)… after all, you can read piles of HPL’s fiction here, for free.

Already read all that stuff? Okay, try Dickens (in Mobipocket format, open, ready to go). Or Chekhov. That should do ya.

Art I’d Buy If I Could Afford It

Speaking of art I like but cannot afford, Edouard Martinet’s sculptures really rock. This froggie is only one example, of many cool pieces. I swear, I’d have this frog on my desk if I had the money to throw at art.

So.

Toward the end of a discussion about whether atheists are angry and unhappy people — by the way, my basic sentiment is that if they are that way, it’s because of all the zealot nutters we have to deal with in life, and that, actually, most atheists I know aren’t all that angry or sad — someone challenged my assertion that Aquinas’ Five Ways is transparently fallacious and relies on all kinds of assumptions that simply need not be accepted by a listener. This was in the course of a discussion that had such amazing comments as,

Your points about post-Enlightement Philosophy were enlightening. All hell broke loose after she gave up being the Handmaiden of Theology, Queen of the Sciences. [Puzzled emphasis mine.]

and…

Of course, to those of us who adhere to a philosophy of sanity and reject the tomfoolery that the moderns have foisted upon us, it’s the materialists who are completely irrational. In his aforementioned work, MacIntyre argues convincingly for the deficiency of modern concepts of rationality and a return to the premodern paradigm. It’s a must read if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Reading these Aquinas’ arguments that supposedly prove the existence of God, however, I certainly don’t feel moved to adopt premodern philosophy. I’m going to go through them piece by piece, to show why. Essentially, they all fit well with my dismissal of Peter Kreeft’s arguments in the discussion linked above — most of his writing that I’ve encountered has been downright pathetically fallacious and illogical.

Another reason I’m posting about this here, and now, is that it takes time to dissect something like this. Words need defining, explanation, contextualization. The simultaneous complaints over on that discussion of my not having attempted a refutation of Aquinas, combined with complaints that I’m long-winded — a ridiculous set of complaints to advance together, really! What these people expect of someone is incredible — and the realization that I might want this content long after it may be deleted elsewhere all led me to posting this examination of Aquinas’ Five Ways.

The First Way: Argument from Motion

1. Our senses prove that some things are in motion.
2. Things move when potential motion becomes actual motion.
3. Only an actual motion can convert a potential motion into an actual motion.
4. Nothing can be at once in both actuality and potentiality in the same respect (i.e., if both actual and potential, it is actual in one respect and potential in another).
5. Therefore nothing can move itself.
6. Therefore each thing in motion is moved by something else.

This trip into the world of Aristotelian physics is somewhat supportable until point 7. Of course, we could bring up Brownian motion, but even there, the main issue Aristotle is driving at is, whence comes the “original” conversion of potential motion to actual motion. When we’re talking about the planets going round the sun, for example, the question can be answered by gravity. But the theist (and Augustine) will then directly ask, “Whence comes gravity?”

The answer that a good scientist would give is, “Our current understanding of gravity is not such that this question is sensical,” in that strictly speaking, our model of the universe does not actually have a whence. There may well be a whence, but physics has nothing to say about any such thing even existing, let alone it being a deity or some baby-universe engineers in our universe’s “parent” universe, or the folks running the ancestor emulation we may well be clomping about inside.

In other words, science simply does not speculate about the whence. Theists will often say, “Aha! You see, not everything is knowable through science!” And right they are: we cannot know whether there aren’t pink invisible unicorns in the world through science. We cannot know whether the universe was birthed by a cosmic transcendant kine or emerged from an egg or the dream of ancient, immortal being reclining on the back of a tortoise borne upon the backs of four elephants.

Nor is it science’s job to falsify every assertion made. Science does not answer such questions because science doesn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. The reason is because theists of all stripes are more than eager to chuck the ball into the scientist’s court — or the rationalist’s — and demand a proof that their chosen deity doesn’t exist. This is made without any incontrovertible evidence that such a being does exist, of course, and it’s a trip down the rabbit hole into endless arguments about semantics.

Which in itself is revelatory about the nature of the “proof” that is presented in Aquinas’ argument itself: if it were indeed “proof” as we conventionally use the word, it would be unarguable, and it would not hinge on “logical” assertions but on demonstrable, repeatable observation. Everyone who examined the argument and observed the phenomenon wouldhave to agree with it. But Aquinas’ argument rests on logical convolutions. This, in itself, is the fatally telling flaw with regard to both his proofs, and to most of the latter-day applications of it (such as in the bullshit “Intelligent Design” movement that has been embraced by surprising number of zealots in the last few decades).

The necessary answer to the question of “Whence?” is not that science has nothing to say to whence, though. The correct answer is that the question “whence?” simply begs the question of a “whence” which may or may not even exist or be necessary; after all, the only thing a theist needs to paste the word “God” into is a single currently unknown stage in the regress of causes.

Here comes the first begged question:

7. The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum.

Why is that? This is far from a statement of fact. It is an assumption, not a statement of evidence — because there is absolutelty no evidence that this cannot be the case.

The scientifically literate theist might ask, “But… but… you surely don’t dispute the Big Bang?” And this is correct — I don’t dispute that our best model of the universe involved what we call The Big Bang. Over the last century or so, plenty of observations — of cosmic microwave background radiation, and before that, observation of Doppler shift in faraway galaxies — have suggested that something like what we now call The Big Bang occurred. Time, in our universe, commences with a massive expansion of superheated, supercompressed matter which exploded outwards in all directions at once. In the time after that primal expansion, matter as we know it and the familiar physics of our universe came to be obeyed by that matter.

The theist’s game of “Whence?” here comes into play too quickly. After all, there are a number of models that suggest the Big Bang may not in fact be a “beginning” but rather “an event in a much larger and older universe, or multiverse, and not the literal beginning” (as mentioned here). In fact, anyone who’s looked into the notion of branes, as discussed by Dr. Lisa Randall (among others, though it’s her book Warped Passages that I’d very much like to read to improve my understanding of branes) knows that it’s quite possible our own universe isn’t made up only of the observable dimensions and that the distribution of forces within it might vary vastly along different branes. (There’s a great discussion with Dr. Randall on Charlie R9ose’s TV show here that’s worth checking out if you’re curious.) The notion that a universe could have multiple branes, with different concentrations of forces — gravity so much less here, gravity more towards another brane — means that the Big Bang could be a natural event involving the collision of branes, as discussed in ekpyrotic cosmological models.

That’s even leaving out one of the great flaws in Intelligent Design theory, which is that, as several SF writers have jokingly suggested, maybe our universe really did emerge as the result of design — by beings like ourselves, using technology purposefully to create a singularity that would spawn a baby universe with the specific traits and properties that ours has and which makes it likely to give rise to complex, intelligent life of some kind. Intelligent Design, endlessly going on and on about a “Creator,” studiously avoids the possibility that it could be mortal, human-like beings that “created” the universe we live in. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be, as least not until we’ve completely falsified the notion that the Big Bang involved a singularity of some kind.

It’s important for me to point out, however, that when we talk about branes or other speculative cosmological models, that we remember they are speculative. Scientists will discuss these models and their implications using declarative sentences, but there’s no assertion — no “faith” — in them of the kind that Aquinas has in his statement, above,

7. The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum.

I’m afraid that Aquinas has precisely no reason to declare this, much less in his own time than in ours, when certain poorly-understood elements of cosmology (such as the incomplete model of our universe’s [or brane's] early existence) has given people the potentially false impression that the Big Bang is a “creation-like” event.

But it’s useful to speculate. My speculation is that, were the ekpyrotic model to be validated at some point in the future, theists would once again move the goalposts and say, “Yes, but where did branes come from?” That is completely predictable following the trend of their argumentation in the past.

The response is, “Demonstrate that there must be a whence,” and Aquinas, here, fails to do so. Instead, he simply asserts that there must be a whence, so that he can Sctoch-tape the word God onto it, in step eight.

8. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

First off, there is not, not even now, any evidence that the existence of a “first mover” is necessary. Not even after several hundred years of quite radically rapid advancement in science have we come up with any demonstration that there must be a first mover. And were we to come up with such evidence, as I noted above, not everyone understands this “first mover” to be God. There are a whole panoply of other possibilities which Aquinas studiously excludes.

They include:

• any other number of imaginable (or unimaginable) divine creator beings with little or no resemblance to the gods worshipped by humans all over the world, or who happen to be the gods someone else worshipped
• a pantheon of such beings that all simultaneously have prime mover status
• an evil being such as the Demiurge repudiated by the gnostics
• experimental scientists in our universe’s “mother universe” who created a singularity with specific traits to birth our universe
• our ancestors in the multiverse who manipulated brane interactions to seed the multiverse with life-potential branes

And that’s assuming evidence of a some antecedent to the Big Bang were to exist. It’s quite possible that the Big Bang was not a “first” event in the bigger picture, and that time actually does extend, in the big picture, infinitely backwards (and forwards) on the multiverse scale, or the multi-multiverse scale, or so on.

In other words, Aquinas cheats in several ways here:

• he asserts that the sequence of motion cannot be infinite, without any evidence for the claim, with the expectation that the claim will go uncontested,
• he “deduces” from this that there must be a “first mover” — suddenly not only does he posit time and movement cannot extend back into the past infinitely, but he also posits that a consciousness, and not some natural process, must have initiated it, though he gives no reason for this assumption except the (implicit) conviction that a the first movement cannot be the result of a non-movement-involved natural process or spontaneous natural irruption of movement, or part of a much bigger physical system
• he Scotch-tapes the word “God” onto this mysterious “first mover” that he has dreamed up

Naming his First Mover thus brings all the baggage of the established Church to bear on this ostensible First Mover for which there is no logical or physical evidence, so that suddenly this mysterious, ill-described “first mover” is the God of the Jews and the Christians.

The First Way is therefore logically fallacious and may be rejected on the ground that it rests upon false, or at least unnecessary, assumptions. Furthermore, I have to argue, in good faith, that its approach drips with dishonesty — it willfully posits declarative statements about the universe, where scientists have the good grace simply to say, “We have models, but we don’t know.” The scientistic statement is the less arrogant, since it does not impose a desired claim on the universe. In fact, throughout Aquinas’ arguments, it is just such truth claims as these, jammed into place at the precise moment when rational empiricism steps back and says, “We simply don’t know right now,” that he relies upon to make the leap from describing the world we agree upon, to the world he wants us to believe in (and believes in himself),

The Second Way: Argument from Efficient Causes

1. We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.

Okay, here it’s important to understand that Artistole meant when he discussed the four forms of cause:

• Material Cause: what stuff is made of — ie. Wood is the material cause of this table
• Efficient Cause: the agent that made it — ie. The woodworker is the efficient cause of the table
• Formal Cause: the potential for something to be made, as proceeding from the conceptual existence of the thing as a “form” — ie. The design for the the table as imagined or used by the woodworker is the Formal Cause of the table.
• Final Cause: the purpose or telelogy of something — ie. The Final Cause of this table is its usefulness as a piece of household furnishing. At the moment, its usefulness is its final cause. (This is complexified by an exchange or moneyed economy, but let’s leave that alone for the moment.)

What’s crucial to note here is that Aquinas gravitates directly to an “efficient cause” — an agent in the creation of something. Right off the bat, he’s focusing on agents that create things, which is of course because he wants to set the stage for discussing a supernatural Creator.

Right from the beginning, this argument is wholly questionable. Aristotle’s set of four causes apply quite well to things we know are made by agents — people and animals — but applying them to, say, planets or worlds or mountains is a little more problematic. It’s problematic because the set of causes Aquinas borrows from Aristotle relies on the implicit assumption that things are created, in the way things we humans create things, and thus is also implicitly assumes a Creator. But as in the First Way, Aquinas has offered no proof of a Creator.

2. Nothing exists prior to itself.

At first blush, this statement looks as if it is wholly sensible. Yes, things do not exist before they exist. Before I carve the wood, there is no table, there is only wood, and the potential for a table, and perhaps the need for one. In other words, prior to the intersection of material, formal, and final cause with an efficient cause — the intersection of materials, design, and need with someone who can make the thing — things do not exist.

This asserts priority to the existence of things — that there is a “before” to the existence of all things. It is quite straightforwardly true of things like tables. However, this does not mean that there is a time before all things exist. In other words, perhaps nothing precedes the things that exist.

3. Therefore nothing is the efficient cause of itself.

I’m not sure whether this is true or not, but because it’s stated in the negative (in the English translation anyway), Aquinas manages to squeeze in a little trick. Let’s restate this as a positive assertion to see what he’s claiming:

3. Therefore everything isn’t the efficient cause of itself.

Which when we remember the meaning of efficient cause, means:

3. Therefore everything isn’t created by itself.

See the step he’s made here? He’s already asserting that everything has an efficient cause. Rocks, trees, stars, multiverses… the assertion spreads as far as one likes. Except, once again, there is no evidence that all things have an efficient cause — in other words, there is no evidence that everything has a creator, but Aquinas is implying that all things must have been created at some point. This sets us up for a quite transparently anthropomorphic application of human industry to the whole universe:

4. If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results.

Bang. Here’s the application of the previous tricks and false assumptions, again obfuscatingly phrased in the negative. Restated without the negations:

4. If a previous efficient cause exists, so does the thing that results.

The commonality between the two statements is a bit of trickery, whereby Aquinas is creating two categories of things: things that have previous efficient causes, and things that do not exist. He’s claiming here that each thing that exists must have previous efficient causes — in other words, that for every thing, there is an agent that acts as Creator. Once again, he invokes (without any evidence for its necessity) boundedness:

5. Therefore if the first thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.

And then he crams all things into the set of things that result from a bounded set of efficient causes — in other words, he says all things must be created by a creator, and repudiates infinity without any obvious reason to do so except his own desire to have something upon which to Scotch-tape the word God:

6. The series of efficient causes cannot extend ad infinitum into the past, for then there would be no things existing now.

and now his Scotch tape is ready!

7. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.

Sadly, this argument is no more effective than the first, and in fact, is quite ruined by the end of the first line simply from intellectual dishonesty.

If you think the third of Aquinas’ ways is any more convincing, I’m sorry but it’s disappointing as well:

The Third Way: Argument from Possibility and Necessity (Reductio argument)

The history of this Third Way is interesting, and the reason it exists speaks directly to the earlier arguments, especially my focus on the incompleteness of our models of the early existence of the universe, branes, and the Big Bang. The issue of whether Big Bang model is complete, or part of a much larger comsological or meta-cosmological model, was far beyond the concerns of medieval scholars. There was no Big Bang theory to latch onto and misunderstand or misrepresent as “complete” — they simply had no idea whether the universe was finite or infinite temporally.

Therefore, this argument was deemed necessary. It is essentially the same argument as the Second Way, but recast in terms of “contingent beings” and causes.

As mentioned on Wikipedia’s discussion of the argument:

Aquinas follows Aristotle in claiming that there must be something that explains why the universe exists. Since the universe could, under different circumstances, conceivably not exist — that is to say, since it is contingent — its existence must have a cause. And that cause cannot simply be another contingent thing, it must be something that exists by necessity, that is, it must be something that must exist in order for anything else to exist. In other words, even if the universe has always existed, it still owes that existence to Aristotle’s Uncaused Cause, though Aquinas used the words “… and this we understand to be God.”

1. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, that come into being and go out of being i.e., contingent beings.

Okay, so the fact that something could just as easily not have existed is evidence that things exist as the result of other things. This is true of me, isn’t it? If my parents had never met, a person with my specific traits and characteristics would not have existed. So yes, my existence is contingent, though not upon anyone but my parents.

2. Assume that every being is a contingent being.

Here is where we can halt Aquinas and say, “Why should I?” It’s because of what he smuggles in under the term “contingent” (and his use, soon to be abandoned, of “beings,” that we should object to his exhortation to assume this. After all, the fact that things could just as easily not have existed makes them contingent, but they needn’t be contingent upon any creator — merely upon circumstance. Furthermore, I protest ahead of time that in step 5, Aquinas begins applying contingency to things, not just beings.

3. For each contingent being, there is a time it does not exist.
4. Therefore it is impossible for these always to exist.

This is self-evident. If things are contingent, they came into being. However, watch closely and you can see already the ghost of a deity that Aquinas is smuggling in here. All he needs to do is convince us of two things: that all things are contingent, and that they are contingent upon someone.

5. Therefore there could have been a time when no things existed.

There we are. He’s finally talking about all things — as usual, in the negative. In other words, he’s arguing that all things are contingent upon something else. He’s wangled his way into “a time before all things existed” without ever demonstrating that such a time need have existed. Conservative Big Bang theory doesn’t agree with this, by the way. There is no time when no things existed. Time commences with things in existence. Everything is contingent upon that moment, and science has no claim that that moment is necessarily contingent on anything else (though it could be contingent on physical processes in a number of models that we cannot now test or falsify).

6. Therefore at that time there would have been nothing to bring the currently existing contingent beings into existence.

In other words, there must be a creator, ornothing would exist! Again, flat-out manufactured declarations of knowledge of the absolute truth of the universe. Without even a close look at things that are visible in it, like, say, other galaxies.

7. Therefore, nothing would be in existence now.
8. We have reached an absurd result from assuming that every being is a contingent being.

This is like “teaching someone that alcohol is not pleasurable” by forcing them to drink three bottles of vodka. The absurdity is not rooted in the assumption that things could have been otherwise; it is rooted in the assumption that because things could have been otherwise, things must by necessity have been brought into being by someone or something by some agent in the past that itself exists because it’s necessary to bring all other things into existence.

Aquinas is now ready to unveil Whom this mysterious non-contingent being is. Can you guess whom it might be? Yes, we saw it coming long ago:

9. Therefore not every being is a contingent being.
10. Therefore some being exists of its own necessity, and does not receive its existence from another being, but rather causes them. This all men speak of as God.

In other words, God must exist because we need Him to in order to complete this logical proof, based on the assumption that all things must exist as a result of something else.

Ahem. Let’s move on.

The Fourth Way: Argument from Gradation of Being

This is one of the weakest, so much so that Dawkin’s alleged, “This is an argument?” is quite understandable, even to some theists.

1. There is a gradation to be found in things: some are better or worse than others.

Uh, yeah, I suppose, though the evaluation of “better” and “worse” is largely an artifact of human aesthetics and subjectivity. Things are’t absolutely “better” or “worse,” except in human heads. So anyway, so what?

2. Predications of degree require reference to the “uttermost� case (e.g., a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest).

Why not the leastmost? What does this have to do with anything? Except, of course, we know who he’s trying to talk about already.

3. The maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus.

All I can say to this assertion is that it seems to come out of left field, and all that I can really say is that this sounds like it’s based on some kind of mixed-up pre-evolutionary model of the origin of things. (Tied up, perhaps, with Platonic forms.)

Before arguing that the maximum in any genus is the cuase of all in that genus, what Aquinas needs to do is show us that maximums in any genus do indeed exist. Of course, he can’t, so he just skips it.

4. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

But by this logic, wouldn’t God also embody and personify all the evils and weakness and stupidity of humans? The uttermost can, after all, include, “the stupidest” or “the most cruel.” The human capacity for wilful, wanton cruelty — not just unkindness but cruelty as a manifest capacity in itself — is ignored here, and I’m sure Aquinas would cast cruelty as the absence of compassion. He’d argue that God has the maximum capacity for compassion, but if we separate our aesthetics from a neutral observation of humans, our capacity for nastiness is just as pronounced as our capacity for compassion. (Sometimes at exactly the same time.)

In any case, this whole argument makes no defense of its most central claim, that any nexus exists which is the maximum of all genuses of traits in humanity actually must exist in a nexus in some other being. Why can they not just be traits of varying degree and important within human beings? Why could they not simply be ranges of predisposed traits that developed through evolutionary selection?

There is, actually, no reason why they cannot. And recognizing this doesn’t require any intellectual backflips or the acceptanc, on Mr. Aquinas’ word, of the existence of an invisible creator being that neither he nor anyone I know has ever seen face to face.
The Fifth Way: Argument from Design

1. We see that natural bodies work toward some goal, and do not do so by chance.

Wait, we do? Water runs downhill, but I wouldn’t say that the ocean is its goal. The ocean is just what’s there when water finished running downhill, and water is uphill because of rain or melting ice or whatever. Is water “working”? Aquinas is chucking teleology and intentionality into the equation right from the get-go, here, and once you do that, you’re already presupposing an intender and a goal — without any reason to. It’s entirely problematic.

2. Most natural things lack knowledge.

Um… yeah, Most things seem not to be sentient, anyway. But there’s a danger here because, while most things do not act, they do behave in certain ways. Unless Aquinas is careful, he’ll end up claiming that, since there are physics and chemistry in the universe, governing the behaviour of things, physics and chemistry exist because of intention and goals. There’s, once again, no evidence to suggest that things are government by physical and chemical properties that just happen to underpin our universe.

3. But as an arrow reaches its target because it is directed by an archer, what lacks intelligence achieves goals by being directed by something intelligence.

Ask yourself, does this make sense? To assert that our universe has physics, and to assert that some consicous beings in that universe manipulate physics to make some things “work”

4. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

No, we don’t, because, again, Aquinas has summoned a “being” into his explanation that is necessary to explain invented intentionality and invented goals, the existence of which he’s produced no evidence.

So Much for the Five Ways

I think anyone who’s been patient enough to bear with me to this point should be congratulated, as this is somewhat dry stuff, so I’m going to make a single caveat to all of this before I tell you what I’ve learned:

Caveat: I’m not saying that I have “refuted” Aquinas’ claim. The claim as to whether a God exists is not one that can be answered by the kind of evidence that everyone will agree counts, or at least, such evidence is not now on hand.

But what I have demonstrated is the fundamental falsity of these proofs, as well as the rather conniving way in which they are constructed. Reading them carefully, with proper knowledge of the terminology (as proper as I can get together, anyway), it’s quite clear that the proofs were constructed backwards, from the assumption that God exists, to the first step — and in several of them, the assertions of that “conclusion” are plainly stated from the get-go. What these five proofs of Aquinas show is actually a much more disturbing fact about Pre-Enlightenment “Philosophy” and “Reason.”

What is shows is that such arguments simply cannot be trusted to say what they claim they say. If Aquinas is as intellligent as he’s supposed to have been, and spent even as much time as I have on these points, it’s very difficult for me to imagine him being unaware of the leaps and unqualified assertions and begged questions in his argument.

I’m not saying that he “knew” these arguments were false. I am sure Aquinas believed that God existed, it’s just that he used a very simply and very clear set of rhetorical tricks to shoehorn anxieties about meaning and existence in the universe into an argument forcing the comforting and absolutely unprovable conclusion that God exists. In every proof, he’s sneaking in assumptions that one can quite easily question or doubt, and against which he offers no reason not to doubt or question — but all the while, he seems to be trying to appear as if he’s being wholly logical, and not asserting anything unusual.

If conscious chicanery was not involved, then there’s something more disturbing to consider: whether unwarranted belief is able so completely and conclusively to hijack reason and muddle minds. If it is, then it seems to me doubt — which is the atheist’s chosen terrain — is the only safe position from which to evaluate such claims. After all, I am not claiming, definitely, that God does not exist, as much as I doubt it, but rather that Aquinas’ cherished proofs are unfortunately not at all what they’re billed as. Were they proofs, I would expect them to be logically more coherent, an, of course, indisputable. I have, at the very least, shown that they are wholly disputable, many of them from the first line.

Certainly, it seems from discussions elsewhere — over many years — the untenable and questionable assumptions encapsulated in this argument hasn’t to stick out to many religionists I’ve known. That is a profoundly interesting, and somewhat disturbing, fact.

In the end, what I am curious to read more about is branes. And Edward O. Wilson, who’s also featured in the Charlie Rose clip above, calling upon evangelical Christians to become ecological activists and stewards to the Earth.

Linear writing has therefore indeed ["]constituted, during many millennia, independently of its role as conserver of the collective memory, by its unfolding in one dimension alone, the instrument of analysis out of which grew philosophic and scientific thought. The conservation of thought can now be conceived otherwise than in terms of books which will only for a short time keep the advantage of their rapid manageability. A vast ‘tape library’ with an electronic selection system will in the near future show preselected and instantaneously retrieved information. Reading will still retain its importance for some centuries to come in spite of its perceptible regression for most men, but writing [understood in the sense of linear inscription] seems likely to disappear rapidly, replaced by automatic dictaphones… As to the long term consequences in terms of the forms of reasoning, and a return to diffuse and multidimensional thought, they cannot be now foreseen. Scientific thought is rather hampered by the necessity of drawing itself out in typographical channels and it is certain that if some procedure would permit the presentation of books in such a way that the materials of the different chapters are presented simultaneously in all their aspects, authors and their users would find a considerable advantage. It is absolutely certain that if scientific reasoning has clearly nothing to lose with the disappearance of writing, philosophy and literature will definitely see their forms evolve. This is not particularly regrettable since printing will conserve the curiously archaic forms of thought that men will have used during the period of alphabetic graphism; as to the new forms, they will be to the old ones as steel to flint, not only a sharper but a more flexible instrument.

What’s amusing to me here, besides the silly prognostications about automatic dictaphones (which are like nothing else more than they are like what people were proclaiming a century ago when audio recording was first invented, and it hasn’t happened in all that time… because, I fear, text can be skimmed and audio recording cannot), and besides the fact that in this claim, Derrida seems to demonstrate a stunning ignorance — perhaps purposeful and selective ignorance, mind you — of the differences between writing and speaking.

However, there is something stunning about the idea of being able to present an idea as a whole, in one shot. When ideas are presented in discrete parts, we can parse them and question them. The narratives open themselves to critique: when models or narratives are presented as completed wholes, imposed upon the mind in a single shot, it seems to me it’d be much more difficult to tease apart the threads and critique them. Which sounds like an interesting problem for future educators, philosophers, and dissidents. Theres a story in here somewhere, and I think it’s the real story at the heart of my M.A. Thesis’ title story, “With My Mouth,” in which speech and identity reformulation are deeply linked. Maybe I shall be able to rework that story during next semester after all!

Musing on this, and googling about for anyone who had anything interesting to say about it, I found an interesting post by David Larsen at Alli Warren’s blog touching on the primal roots of voice and utterance:

The point here is that language is a system of symbolic behavior that arose from the need to escape whatever it is that threatens the speaking subject, usually conceived as a punishment of some kind. Language’s persistence and development beyond the individual organism’s lifespan are decisive proofs of its own resistance to oblivion.

Unlike Derrida, this makes a lot of sense, isn’t high on itself, and word-salad-like. It’s written to be comprehended, and it’s actually interesting!

The more I attempt to read Derrida, the more I get the sense he’s an adult waving his arms about and declaring things that we all thought of as kids. but it’s so dressed-up in fancy words and confusing phrases, and so decked-out in idiosyncracy, that nobody dares say, “I thought those questions up when I was twelve years old, and I long ago moved on.” After all, that was almost exactly my experience of Descartes’ deal with the “How do we know everything isn’t a dream?” My proof is I haven’t woken up, tentative though it is; that, and, well, to quote tons of random average Joes and Marys, “Whatcha gonna do, hey?”

By the way, for those curious, my back is doing somewhat better. I’ve been avoiding sitting, and finally they’ve discovered down at the physio place that they were treating me for the wrong condition. I have had much-diminshed sensation in the toes on my left foot for days now, which has weirded me out, but sensation is returning, and the pain in my leg is lessening. Looks like things are turning around. Whew!

I have some patience for Foucault, though my respect was a little tarnished by discussions suggesting he based his work on, well, more on his own sense of how things were than on source materials and so on. Actually, what REALLY tarnished my respect for Foucault’s work was simply the religiosity with which a certain clade of academics cling to it as the best and final framework for looking at the universe. I’ll admit, Discipline and Punish was good fun, and smart, but come on, it’s one lens. We can’t hope to explain all things by that lens.

When an academic is self-described as, or accepts without resistance a description of being, a Marxist, a Foucauldian, a Derridean, a Kantian, a Kierkegaardian, a Straussian, or whatever, I really start to get uncomfortable. The investment in a theory to the point where identity gets tied up in it, identity and thereafter the tendency in one’s work to tend towards this perspective — with, of course, obvious attendant costs that nobody seems willing to discuss — it seems to me like people simply hobble themselves. It’s like elective paraplegia — or is there a word “triplegia”? — where you choose one limb to use for the rest of your life, and have all nerves to the other three severed. For what purpose? To what benefit? It’s beyond me, that’s for sure.

Of all the academics whose writings I despise, Derrida has to be the one I despise most. I can never get past a few pages without thinking, “Are you yanking my chain, buddy?” Well, the co-worker with whom I’ve been having this discussion has promised to “set me straight” about Derrida, meaning a talk over beer, I imagine, at some point; he’s also promised to copy a chapter from a book for me so I can know more about why Derrida is in fact important.

When he promised this, I decided maybe I should refresh my memory of Derrida by trying to read some more of him, but I didn’t find much in the University library, so I picked up a copy of the old, apparently seminal text Deconstruction and Criticism, featuring essays by Bloom, de Man, Derrida, and two characters whose identities are a mystery to me, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller.

Well, here I am, 18 pages into the Derrida essay, and I’m annoyed at having wasted my money on the book. The Bloom essay is full of, “I’m not saying… but…” moves, some of them quite silly, and the Derrida is unreadable. (And I’m not so interested in the other three anyway.) Derrida’s essay, called “Living On”, is a bloody stream-of-consciousness thought-salad. It’s as if he got high and then wrote whatever random crap occurred to him, and then fancied it up with special words, half-page-long clarifications, and fancy interjections of words used in highly idiosyncratic ways when the high petered out. So far, after 18 pages, I’m willing to say that the essay isn’t even worth wiping your butt with, for fear that you might catch whatever brain disease the original writer had.

So I’m wondering, folks. There’s a lot of edumaficated folks out there, some of whom read this very site. Can someone recommend to me even one readable piece of writing by Derrida? Just one work I can read, and not throw across the room? Something that doesn’t feel like some patronizing twerp with a sinecure is out to waste my precious time? Is there anything written by Derrida that is not dog-crap? I’m honestly interested. Because I’m quite curious why so many people are so invested in the writings of a “scholar” (ha) whom I think is barely even as skilled or talented as your average Korean boy-band. If someone can show me even one piece of writing by Derrida that doesn’t seem total trash to me — doesn’t seem to be constructed to confuse but rather to communicate, to make a point instead of endlessly digress because there’s no real point to be made that wasn’t self-evident from the start, that doesn’t seem to insult the preciousness of my time — something that suggests the man could actually write and express himself coherently at all for an audience whom he wished to benefit with the elucidation of ideas — I’d be quite happy to read it.

Recommendations? Anyone? And if there’s a text online, so much the better for me. I usually cannot preview books in English before buying them, and am loathe to spend any more money on this guy.

The article raises some really interesting questions about American culture, about art, about contexts for art. It brings to mind a question that’s been bugging me: is the blog a good context for writing to be presented? I’m beginning to think it isn’t.

The post reminded me of another atheist criticism of Dawkins elsewhere, on the excellent site mssv.

My thoughts–and my feelings–on Dawkins are conflicted. I mean, say, 85% of his ideas are sensible enough to be beyond objection. This is no small feat for a mind — I have more objections to the thinking of most people I know than I have to what Dawkins expresses publicly. I also understand why he speaks as he does, why he seems to feel as he does. He’s a complicated figure, but I have to say, I’m surprised at how many atheists I’ve encountered who criticise him without also praising him.

When I watched his documentary on religion, titled–as everyone by now should know, against his wishes–Root of All Evil (to which Wikipedia is offering links to streaming and download versions), one conversation in particular stuck out in my mind, and that was his conversation with Ted Haggard. Haggard was a famous evangelical Christian leader who, stunningly, counseled Dawkins, “… don’t be arrogant.”

Of course, my impression of Haggard was a lot like the mashup/spoof presented elsewhere on YouTube, here. Haggard struck me as the more arrogant of the two, by far, and that he could feel it within his rights to counsel Dawkins to beware of arrogance struck me as, well… symptomatic.

I’m not going to complain that it’s still not okay to be an atheist. It’s not that it is socially acceptable yet–far from it, even today–but reality is still, basically, a parody of good sense. That a man who claims to have a direct line to transcendant beings and wisdom, to know the ultimate truth and what is expected of us by those invisible beings, to know in an absolute way the difference between good and evil, and to appoint himself as the figurehead of a religion, that is utterly laughable. That is why I disagree with my wonderful classmate Julie, when she writes:

Religion encompasses three things: moral philosophy, metaphysics, and tribal identity.

I would like, instead, to note that, as Dawkins himself points out, “In the New World, religion is free enterprise.” With the emphasis on enterprise. Religion is not just about moral philosophy, metaphysics, and tribal identity; it is also, very often, about power, profit, and claims to authority.

I’ve been blown away by the way so many Korean Christians I know don’t really know the history of Christianity in Europe. Wariness of Taoists, doubt in the powers of shamans, and disgust with the corruptions they’ve seen in a long familiarity with Buddhism abound, but decontextualized, Christianity appears to many to be pure, unsullied by all of the historical baggage that educated Westerners at least are familiar with and, at least, grapple with. (Even the Western Christians who seek to criticize what they see as the “unfair” criticisms of the Inquisition, have to grapple with it.) Religion, you see, invented the original marketing agency–as George Carlin points out in this clip, where he presents a pretty strong criticism of the Ten Commandments, including pointing out the reality of whether religions actually have a problem with killing, or whether all parents in fact deserve respect. Religion is the original authoritarian regime–it sought to define reality and to blot out all competitors. If you disagree, tell me: what happened to the Manicheans? to the Cathars? to the Lollards? to anyone trying to publish religiously “seditious” texts in the Middle Ages? Did you know that the fellow upon whose translation work the King James Bible was based, one Mr. Tyndale, got burned for his troubles? I don’t mean burned politically, or financially screwed over. I mean they held a bullshit trial, convicted him, tied him to a pole, and set him on fire, because he was trying to translate what everyone believed was the Word of God into the language of the people.

Nice folks, those clerics.

The reason why Dawkins looks arrogant to us isn’t because he’s very extreme. To me, he’s not any more extreme than any mainstream religious person who, say, mentions God in passing in conversation, or who assumes that someone who is mourning the death of a loved one will, or ought to, find consolation in their supernaturalist blather. It’s not more arrogant than the people who imply, as knowingly as they can, that someday you might discover you were wrong about God. It’s no more arrogant than someone like Haggard who, if you think about it, makes some pretty drastic claims about the extent of his knowledge of reality–about the metaphysics of the universe and how they intertwine with moral philosophy, and who takes full advantage of the human tribal instinct to promulgate messages that ensure repeat attendance, personal dedication, and maximum profits.

And if Mr. Haggard knows so much about sin, about evil, and is such a great moral leader, and if, as he claims, he knows how much God hates homosexuality–because “It’s written in the Bible!”–why in the hell did he lie outright when the gay male prostitute with whom he’d been having (paid-for) sexual relations for several years disclosed this fact to the media? And why in the name of all that’s holy was he having that relationship at all, given the kind of claims he was making about ethics, morality, and metaphysics?

Oh yes, brothers and sisters. The light shines hard, and it shines unflinchingly. The behaviour of this Mr. Haggard would suggest, to anyone who is not fully brainwashed to favour him, that he didn’t believe what he was saying at all. That he didn’t believe in good or evil, or that gay sex was wicked, or that it was sinful and constituted a turning away from God. Doesn’t that make sense, when you hear reports like this, or an interview like this one? (It seems pretty unbelievable that he’d admit to being gay all his life, and maintain that he only had massages from a male prostitute… or that he would claim to have bought, but not used, crystal meth. These don’t sound like believable claims, given how some others in the religion business, and the local gay community, claimed to have already been aware of his same-sex behaviours. I don’t believe that Haggard actually truly believes the rhetoric he spewed originally, the hate of gays. I’m not even sure it was fully closeted-homophobia, as much as that gay-hate is simply the kind of talk that pays very well in America–or, at least, in Colorado Springs.

Hate is big business, and atheists know it. They are a group of people who for most of recorded history have, in essence, spoken in code, in whispers, and only after the secret handshake ensured safety. When they came for the gays, the atheists were silent. When they came for the Muslims, the atheists were silent. Then they came for the atheists. This is pretty much how it feels to be an atheist. Theists feel they can blame war and mass murder on atheists; they feel fully within their rights to imply atheists are arrogant.

But isn’t preaching that an all-powerful deity hates homosexuality, and paying for gay sex on the side with the money earned teaching that very notion, the supreme summit of arrogance? (Albeit, a peak that many preachers never scale, but, anyone who claims to know the real, hidden truth of the world as revealed in this or that scripture is still somewhere on the slopes of Arrogance Mountain.)

Here’s the thing, and as I say, I’m not whining, I’m just speaking from experience, is this: in North American culture, which includes Canada, one of the most unacceptable things to be is an atheist. (It may not be the most unacceptable thing, but it is one of the most unacceptable. I’d put it on par with being a Muslim fundamentalist.) It causes rifts in families, it can get you fired or run out of town, it most certainly would prevent serious political office from being attainable, were it admitted publicly… there are politicians who are openly gay, but I haven’t heard of one who is openly, vocally atheist, even though there surely are some who do not have any religion.

Dawkins, therefore, is a rarity. Yes, he’s harsh, but then, he perceives himself as fighting for education, and for the separation of religion from government. He is fighting for the right things, and part of the reason he alienates people who are religious is simply because they, and all of us, are not used to criticism of religion that is as pointed and open as his. Most atheists I know, including myself, instinctively adopt a very neutral, polite position in many situations, out of what we think is social necessity. It’s not necessity, of course–it’s expedience. If atheists all walked around making the same kinds of accusations toward religion that religionists routinely make, and imply, towards atheism–claiming that religion makes people moral (and thus atheism encourages amorality or immorality), claiming that religion civilizes people (and thus atheism is uncivilized or an enemy of civilization), or that religion is about truth (and thus atheism is patently false)–then things would be much harder for atheists in general. Steven Darksyde describes eloquently what it’s like to be an atheist in a world full of theists. The fact that anyone could criticize this explanation as disrespectful or arrogant–and some people have, it’s an absolute certainty–reveals that Dawkins is right: there is a deep, long-ingrained expectation of us that, buy it or not, we pay undue respect to religion, the kind of respect we don’t pay to, say, economic theories, or scientific claims, or artistic movements, or political systems.

Dawkins is not a fundamentalist, but I think part of his struggle is that he is trying to tap into the tribalism-drive in atheists. C.S. Lewis once described Christians as being stranded in enemy-occupied territory, in what finally became the book Mere Christianity. One of the reasons that metaphor struck me so powerfully, and stayed with me so long, is because to me, it describes the experience of atheists in our world today… the way rationalists feel surrounded by religionists of all stripes on every side. They all disagree with one another fundamentally on most of their claims, both metaphysical and moral, and tribally they often exclude one another without remorse, but it is atheists, those who don’t even have an analogous system to fit themselves into, that they all can hate together with impunity. And atheists are scattered, individual, atomized by the pressures of this all-encompassing denigration of the heretics… and after all, most of us have people we care about who are less than open to these ideas of ours, but who matter to us all the same. (However, if we really cannot express ourselves openly to them, what does this say about how much we as people matter to them?) Anyway, it’s understandable how a little silence on the subject can lubricate the wheels of life a little. It’s not like atheists need to be on the offensive all the time, anymore than we appreciate religionists who are on the offensive all the time.

But while I sometimes wince at specific things Dawkins says, I think that one thing he might be doing that’s useful is saying the unsayable. He might go too far, and thus may not be helping “defuse” things between atheists and religionists, but, then, the alternative form of defusing things–putting up and shutting up–has long been tried by freethinkers, and done little to aid us in gaining social acceptance. It seems that respect can only be gained when it is, in no uncertain terms, demanded. Why the things Dawkins says are so very objectionable, even–or perhaps especially–among us atheists, deserves to be scrutinized. I’m certain that comparable criticisms of political, economic, and philosophical ideas would provoke responses, arguments, but nothing like the shame, shock, and embarrassment that seemingly surrounds Dawkins everywhere he goes, and seems to make so many other atheists want to disassociate themselves from him. He’s not perfect, but he is one of us, and maybe engaging with his ideas publicly is what he’s trying to get us to do? If he draws us out, maybe we’ll band together instead of just tiptoeing politely through this demon-haunted world?

It’s worth thinking about, anyway.

All interesting questions. Unfortunately, the answers to most of them, as offered in Syriana, were nothing too striking or new. But it was worth the W1500 ($1.50) rental fee and I didn’t regret the loss of two hours of my life.

Next film on my list is 낭만ìž?ê°? (Romantic Assassins), another Korean film Lime didn’t want to watch with me…

• Here’s a gallery of art by Koko and Michael, two apes.
• Mulatta records has put out an album of recordings of a Thai Elephant Orchestra, including samples.
• This essay-page is the only place online that I could find where any of the line-drawings of Siri the elephant were on display. There’s a book on her art out there, though.

In the Diamond book, this chapter on the roots of art in animal behaviour, or, maybe, rather, the continuity of artistic behaviour with other behaviours seen in other species, got me thinking about the chapter just preceding it, “Bridges to Human Languages”.

It seems that people form Creoles — grammatically complex blendings of languages — spontaneously in childhood if they grow up in an environment in which pidgins (strict-grammar-less mishamashes of various languages) are spoken regularly. One theory Diamond discusses is the possibility that the deep structural consistency that is found across various creoles suggests that certain kinds of structures may be our default grammar tendencies, which can be overridden by experience in languages that have different grammatical structures, but which kick in and become the creole’s grammatical rules if children, while acquiring language, encounter a pidgin — a vocabulary set with no standardized grammar.

This notion of childrens’ development got me thinking about early development and art. Not the art by kids that sells for money, necessarily, but the deep tendencies for children to draw or paint in a certain way. I don’t know if one exists, though.

One thing I found when I was doing a painting class with some kids was that they were really creative imitators. If I painted first, they would imitate me — pouring paint onto the cardboard if I did so, flicking it with a brush if I did so. If I didn’t commence things, they’d usually gravitate imitatively to a bellwether, one kid who was just more eager, or more experienced. If the bellwether started painting something imitatively, many would follow — but that didn’t often happen. Just as often, paintings from previous days had already caught their attention and they were imitating what had been done before — which is pretty interesting, if you think about it. It involves inferring what was done by someone else to get a given result.

But of course, the kids I was dealing with were too old for this to mean much. They’d all painted, and experienced “art”, before. Still, I do think the imitative impulse is something that, interestingly, Diamond hasn’t much dealt with, at least not by halfway through the book. Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, while a bit over the top in some of its assertions (though I sometimes wonder whether she’s not dead on correct even there) has a lot about the evolutionary function of imitative behaviour.

We miss, meaning we as a society long for it, we wish we still had it around. Or, at least, we think that we do. Or, at least, some os us think that we do.

Not that your ancestors and mine are all that likely to have been courtly, or refined. Most of our ancestors were not like that. Most of us Westerners’ ancestors — those of us of European extraction, I mean — were drinking liquor all day long because the water was poisonous. They were dying at age thirty of pneumonia, or at age 16 in childbirth. Plenty of our European ancestors didn’t think telling a dirty joke in front of a little child was different from telling a dirty joke in front of a drinking buddy. Little kids dressed like little adults. People didn’t bathe anywhere near as often as we deem sensible.

But you know what? The people who had decorum, they had it in spades. If you listen to Renaissance music, if you flip through a few pages of Shaxpere, if you look at a few Dutch Renaissance paintings, you see something at work that’s infinitely more refined and detailed than anything produced in our own century, this 21st century still young and wet in its ears. Very little since 1950 rivals it, in my opinion.

I am not sure exactly why it is we’ve lost this thing, this whatever-it-is that the finest of our ancestors had back in Europe. Sometimes I think there is a kind of delicacy that exists in some young people here in Korea that reflects it. Men speak to women — and men and women sometimes speak to members of the same sex — with such fine and flowery words sometimes that it surprises me. Young men stop and look upon mirrors to assure themselves of their presentability before tromping off to class. For some people here there exist things not said in the presence of women, and there is a sort of pretty naivete about music among young adults here that I don’t see in North America. Sure, sometimes when someone declares his or her favorite musical genre to be “ballad”, I cringe; but when I listen to Renaissance dances, they seem rather balladesque.

Of course, Korea is not any more of an oasis of refinement than Canada. Here, people hork up pleghm in public, and slurp their noodles in ways that make Westerners cringe, even after they grow used to it. And the refinement I sense among some young people is not something I imagine to widespread. For every young man I see pausing momentarily in the mirror, imagining someone else looking upon his face, I see five or six of them lined up in front of the mirror, smoking, spitting on the bathroom floor, lustily gazing at their own cigarette-smoking as if practicing their coolness or something. Koreans are not so much more decorous than Westerners after all… but I get the vague sense that it’s not something that was ever that widespread here, either.

In fact, it’s probably something that has never been widespread anywhere, at any time. Whenever people talk about reincarnation, they seem always to be very popular historical figures — always a Napoleon or a Harriet Tubman, never a nameless washer-woman by some river in rural Germany or a child who died of starvation in plague-ridden Qayrawan. We like to think ourselves the descendants of princes and kings, of queens and princesses, but the truth is that most of our ancestors were dirty, poor, hungry, and long-suffering.

Why therefore the fascination with decorousness? I sometimes think there are three kinds of people: those who are descended from royalty, and who feel it somehow relevant to themselves; those who are descended from peasants and who feel it irrelevant; and third, those who are descended from peasants but who feel anxious about it, comfortable neither among royals nor among peasants.

Of course, the notions of line of descent are ridiculous; but the categories seem to hold. There are those born to decorousness, and may idle in it; those who are born to indecorousness, and happily wallow in it; and those born to feel anxious about their own indecorousness. It seems to me it is from this last group that the poets, the artists, many philosophers and the finer composers come.

All of this leads back to the question of what decorousness is, to which I can only respond with an observation: some people seem to feel entitlement one way or another — either because of the stock they come from, meaning the class in which they were raised — while other people cannot help but relate to both the class in which they were raised, and likewise the class(es) in which they were not, with a certain degree of anxiety. It might be insulting to suggest this is because they have some special insight into the way the world works; that they have an idea about it that others do not bother to develop because of their relative comfort in their status and position, whatever it may be.

And I know that I am categorizing people. This is the cardinal sin in some conceptions of Western culture. People react sometimes when one does this as if one were attempting to erase the whole of a person’s uniqueness by the act of categorization; and doubtless certain kinds of categorization historically have led to oppression, to the negation of liberties and to evil of various kinds.

But it does not follow that all forms of human categorization are necessarily evil, any more than it follows that all plants are poisonous just because certain ones are. As soon as I begin applying the categories to specific people, my statements will be open to disagreement, to quashing, but until that point, it is not inherently objectionable to categorize people. It is especially far from objectionable to categorize people into demographics based on behaviour — or if it is, then I certainly am not alone and one would be mad to criticize me alone for it. Behaviour is an overt, visible, and concrete basis upon which to form categories, and it seems to me that human behaviour, varied as it is, often can be fit into a few basic categories: the behaviour of those who feel entitled to any action as members of the elite; the behaviour of those who feel justified in any action by virtue of their exclusion from elites; and those who feel anxious, who feel that certain actions are necessary, and that certain actions are deeply wrong.

And yes, I am suggesting that the moral impulse in modern human beings is something heavily mediated by class, heavily mediated by one’s own relationship with one’s own class and one’s sense of its relationships with other classes. Strange to say it, but it seems to me to be true: the majority of members of the upper classes seem to think they are above any moral codes, and in fact live lives so fantastically dislocated from the effects of their choices that, rather than it being bizarre, it is an understandable fallacy. Then there are those who are defiantly proud of being members of the lower and sometimes even the middle class seem to think themselves beyond the criticism of anyone, and seem to feel their class is an excuse for their behaviours (though they would not put it in so many words): they hold up their own ignorance as a banner, they cloak it scriptural quotes, but the message is unmistakable that they will neither heed nor tolerate criticism or judgment from anyone on Earth. What you are left with in between are the moral beings — millions, to be sure, but certainly not the whole of the world population, and perhaps even just a small margin. These are the people who can conceive of an act itself — not the category of act, not the act as defined by such-and-such screiptural term, but the specific act itself — as either right or wrong, apart from its benefits or demerits to oneself.

So it is that the rich by and large are not so very moral; nor are the starving and desperate. Who could expect them to be? In either case, they are distracted from thinking about the thing-in-itself, and in both, we are little surprised by the result. But it leaves very little for us in the middle to deal with.

What’s strange, it strikes me an hour after my original post, is the weird connexion between decorum and morals. It’s not as if people who are extra deocorous are necessarily any more moral, and often they aren’t. But, on the other hand, the person who is decorous in private, even only slightly so, does tend to be a slightly more careful person, one who is more sensitive to things and at least willing to think about them.

The paradox, I guess, is that some extremely decorous people seem to live as if without any moral restrictions whatsoever. Some of the most decorous people in the world are quite immoral as a matter of course. And some of the most indecorous are some of the most moral and forthright. So as for why decorum is linked to morality as it seems to be in the back of my own mind, and in the minds of others, all I can say for that is, well, it’s strange, and it gives me the urge to point and handwave at some kind of Foucauldian description of the world, but I haven’t thought enough yet to come up with any explanation of my own that does the whole complex mess justice.

“…the American religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian. It has kept the figure of Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus rather than the crucified Jesus or the Jesus who ascended again to the Father. I do not think the Christian God has been retained by us, though he is invoked endlessly by our leaders, and by our flag-waving President [Bush Sr.] in particular, with especial fervor in the context of war. But the invoked force appears to the American destiny, the God of our national faith. The most Gnostic element of the American Religion is an astonishing reversal of ancient Gnosticism; we worship the Demiurge as God, more often than not under the name of manifest Necessity. As for the alien God of the Gnostics, he has vanished, except for his fragments or sparks scattered among our few elitists of the spirit, or for his shadow in the solitary figure of the American Jesus.”

and

“Anti-intellectualism pervades American political, social, and moral life, and its answering chorus is the political correctness of the academic pseudo-Left. Fundamentalism is the parodistic curse of the American religion, and the political, social, moral, and even economic condequences of its anti-intellectualism are quite vicious.”

If it isn’t quite clear, his argument (as far as it seems to me, at the end of the introduction in any case) is that American Christianity isn’t really Christian in any traditional sense at all; that it wears the trappings of Christianity but is, in fact, a far different, and absolutely ubiquitous religion that is more Gnostic-Individualistic, Orphic, Nationalistic, and post-Christian than anyone within one of America’s various Christian religions would like to admit, and that underlying the apparent diversity of various religions is a deeper, more unified foundation that spreads even unto such religions as Californian New Age… and that it is at the level of that deep foundation that certain trends vie for dominance, and either help or harm America and her citizens.

This lines up well with someone I said recently to a friend, which was that if the vast majority of people truly believed in Jesus, in Heaven and Hell, in the basic Christian theology I was taught as a kid, then people would be living vastly different lives. When I look out my window across the parking lot to the Church, I see an example of people who claim to espouse a faith, who gather together to sing and conduct worship ceremonies but who cannot even be considerate enough to close their windows when gathered together, even when the neighborhood locals have (apparently) complained and submitted a petition. I see a church administered by people who seem to feel they can afford major expansions in their lot, but who don’t seem to feel that they can afford to pay the construction workers in time for Christmas. I see, basically, people who seem to be fooled into thinking that going to Church, singing songs, eating a bit of bread, temporarily (or even obsessively) thinking about a loving God and their own salvation, is actually Christianity.

I can’t understand how anyone could mistake it for that, but I do know that may people do. I’ve heard it said at times, “Oh, so-and-so wouldn’t lie. He’s a Christian, you see.” Well, I have been lied to by Christians, perhaps even more than by atheists. I have seen Christians break all kinds of laws. I have seen Christians engage in all kinds of awful things, habitually.

Or rather, I have seen people who self-identify as Christian do these things. Here’s the thing: people complained to me, when I first observed this, that I was taking upon myself too much authority to say that someone else is not following a Christian path. As if to say that there are no absolutes in Christianity. As if to say that basically, anyone who self-identifies as a Christian thereby somehow magically becomes one. To assert this about the word is to render it not only meaningless, but necessarily devoid of meaning. One could assert one is Christian while being a devout atheist, in fact, according to this reasoning.

The rise of such an idea is not something that spontaneously began in the Early Church. It is the result of some pretty specific historical processes. You’ve got your Church pretty much in total control of European theology, and everything in general, during the Middle Ages. You’ve got people translating the Bible into vernacular and being persecuted for it. Then you’ve got prints of the book floating around and people suggesting that it’s possible to read and interpret this stuff on one’s own. The Church, of course, was nervous about that. Rightly so: what you get when you allow that isn’t so much Lutheranism–the Church could have absorbed Lutheranism and other Protestant faiths if it had been more careful and intelligent about dealing with criticism in the past. It was nervous about total chaos, about nobody recognizing any kind of theological authority. It was aware that anything so unbounded was even more susceptible to human weaknesses and twisted, self-serving intepretations and perversions of the spirit of the word.

Which is what my polemical side would consider Harold Bloom to be describing. He is, for the record, far more sanguine than I am about many aspects of the American religion. He doesn’t particularly think it’s bad for all the reasons I do; when he observes that American Protestantism is not really fundamentally Christian, he doesn’t seem to mean it as a bad thing but as a simply fact or observed, undeniable truth. He doesn’t seem to find objectionable the way that the claim to Christianity is a self-contradictory one, and seems to have to issues with the idea of “authenticity”, perhaps because to him, the outer claim of Christianity need not actually fit the inner truth of the religion. I suppose that my denouncement of this divergence as a perversion doesn’t fit with Bloom’s attitude, any more than calling Vodoun believers hypocrites because they happen to have assimilated the outer trappings of Christianity onto their older West African beliefs.

Marvin and I are seriously discussing the shortcomings of postmodernism, using an essay by a historian as a springboard, and the discussion is quite involved, but also, I think, not just interesting but related to the core of what’s going on in the intellectual world today, perhaps the core dilemma or conundrum of the intellectual life of the 21st century, which is determining the shape of academic life, political policy, and of course, the way people like you and I think about reality.

A worthy topic, awaiting your thoughts and comments. Go check it out.