Cactus Juice

Bunday: The Bunny Railroad

 
Not going anywhere very fast.

Bunday: Not-a-Bun

Look here Cactus, what ever happened to Caterday?

The Third Post Inspired by Natural Law: Hypocrisy and Meaning

"Only the acquired part of human nature ordinarily founders on a contradiction; what is inborn in it finds its way anywhere and not infrequently even overcomes its contrary with great success.  We must first be in harmony with ourselves, and then we are in a position, if not to eliminate, at least in some way to counterbalance the discords pressing in on us from outside." -Goethe (1)

I was mistaken to state that George Grant is as committed to natural law as Peter Kreeft.  Rather, he is driven to consider it in Philosophy in the Mass Age in response to the problem of hypocrisy.  I don't know that there is anything more fundamental to the project of philosophy than the eradication of hypocrisy.  Honest thinkers spend their entire lives retracing their steps, wearing the same grooves, trying to make gains on their own contradictions inch by inch.  Immanuel Kant spent 10 years in concentration between achieving notice with a major paper and publishing his first book, rejecting appeals by his closest friends for more time and companionship.  Few but great geniuses are capable of producing more than perhaps one book containing a few paltry accomplishments after such dedication.  Us mortals merely elevate ourselves from our entry as the basest of fools.

Hypocrisy is the deep and heavily excavated mine that thought puts itself to work in.  Popular culture insults the meaning of this work in daily discourse.  Not just the publication of mounds of absurd, meaningless and outrageous books, but the trivial use of the term.  The work on hypocrisy is the fundamental responsibility that can be brought onto any thinker.  Individuals do not have to share anything in terms of principles or abstractions; it is the one charge that can cross the boundaries of any belief system.  And yet, rather than use it as a charge toward dialog it is thrown away as a dismissal.  Hypocrisy is the one thing we all share; using it as an othering technique is perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of them all.

Grant's analysis of hypocrisy in Philosophy in the Mass Age drives him toward the idea of universal law because he finds it impossible to separate thoughts and actions in importance.  I don't find that a compelling impossibility- instinctively I find actions far more important than thoughts; this is why I identify myself as an existentialist.  However, the analysis of hypocrisy this drives him toward I do find compelling and unique.  I am here driven to a discussion of abortion.  Do forgive me- friends were just discussing at a dinner party how obnoxious it is that every ethical debate turns to Hitler or abortion, and yet these are the ethical issues written large upon or cultural and easiest to discuss with a supposed shared experience of past debate.

The use of hypocrisy as a dismissal places the anti-abortion thinker in the greatest moral peril.  This is the fundamentalist preacher who condemns abortion and yet upon the pregnancy of his teenage daughter is found driving her across state lines.(2)  This is the hypocrisy that touches us the deepest emotionally- someone who either condemned us personally or inspired us to live at a higher level has fallen short.  The betrayal is personal.  And yet what has this person done?  Does he condemn himself?  Frequently, yes.  This person has fallen short of a belief system which he holds.  He will spend the rest of his life reconciling his contradictions.  If he doesn't, if he somehow crates a system which permits his one exception, he had made himself not only a hypocrite but allowed himself to remain a fool in the service of hypocrisy.  The next thing you know, he'll be writing a book about it and making the talk show circuit.

Grant points out that hypocrisy as a serious ethical concept places the pro-abortion thinker in a possibly greater moral peril.  This is the access protester who would never commit the brutal act herself.(3)  Her hypocrisy will have no reconciliation; this is the ultimate moral peril.  It isn't what she has thought that has placed her in peril but what she has done.  Actions have circled back to strengthen thoughts which create a person who cannot have moral thought because the person can no longer recognize hypocrisy.  Our preacher is in the same danger, should he have the misfortune to have his justifications published so that they can become completely cemented into his existence as he recites the arguments day after day.  N.T. Wright suggests in his book that this is the condemnation to hell:

My suggestion ["I am well aware that I have now wandered into territory that no one can claim to have mapped." -p. 183] is that it is possible for human beings so to continue down this road, so to refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmering of the true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. -N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, p. 182

I am certainly not making the argument that either the pro or the anti abortion thinker is going to hell.  Certainly most such thinkers don't fall into the special cases of hypocrisy illustrated here and anyway I hold the favored popular American opinion generally stated as "There is a hell, but no one is going there [not even Hitler]."  I am making the argument that the trivializing and othering of hypocrisy is a great first step to get there, if anyone is going.  To have hypocrisy is human.  We think.  We are greater than what we are as instinctual animals.  Goethe speaks of something which has come in from the outside, and yet as social and spiritual creatures it is in our definition to be defined partly by what has touched us by influence.  To reject all of that is indeed to reject our humanity.

---

1. Goethe's conversation with J.D. Falk. Goethes Gespraeche, newly edited by F. Frhr. v. Biedermann, Leipzip, 1909-11, vol. 4, p. 468 as quoted in Kant's Life and Thought by Stephan Koerner, trans. James Haden, Yale University Press, 1981, p. 5

2. The wikipedia entry on hypocrisy is quite good and included a quote from Samuel Johnson which defines this act out of hypocrisy entirely.  While I agree with the sentiment, I can't quite go there.  The special destructiveness of this kind of inconsistency is rooted in a sin which must have some name- if not "hypocrisy," then what?

3. Christ famously speaks of hypocrisy in Matthew 23:14 & 15, the type of the preacher (sorry Dr. Johnson, he outranks you) in 14 and the type of the access activist in 15:
¹⁴Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

 ¹⁵Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

Fatday: It's Been A While

The weekly fat day posts have had a long slide while I've been busy getting fat.  And being busy: Out circulating, I've had to describe over and over again how much I care about my health.  About my miracle.  About how I have Celiac Disease and generally don't eat wheat, except every time I've seen you of course.  But in general, on days that don't end in a "y", I don't eat wheat.

Eventually that reminded me that I have a real good start on something that means a lot to me.  Something that sure better mean a lot to me since "do not die" is involved.  Currently I'm 12 pounds over my clean liver miracle weight- 262.5 is the score today.  Three months ago I had an A1C shocker; I'm 10 pounds up from that.  Some people would be surprised that didn't get me anywhere, but I successfully ignored liver disease for two years.  It doesn't take mad skills to ignore diabetes (Heh- it's nearly patriotic.).

This personal experience  plus a bit of input from the research world is why I'm always making the argument against negative goals.  "I don't want to die" has been well researched by the tobacco industry as a great way to increase smoking.  It has to be something positive.  And so much positive is going right in my life at the moment I can barely stand it.  But I'm tired all the time.  And uncomfortable.  And full of shit when I explain what I've done for myself as if it has anything to do with what I'm doing to myself.  There's too many wonderful things in my life to let my eating get in the way of them.

A Blog to Read

My more ponderous posts don't just happen by accident. It can take weeks to fully craft a philosophical statement in just the right way that even my best friends won't read it.  Or as one said the other day, "I would have read it, but I was at work and had to do something else."  Meanwhile, Plain Jane, who has a readership of like one gazillion, mentions in passing that she composed this bit on her lunch break.  I'd be all yay, yay, yay too.

Bunday: Making Husbun Presentable

You gotta keep those ears clean baby!
 

A Hope Too Far: Paranoia About Evil

Recently finished reading Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright.  Upon completing the book I am left to a trite phrase: The book strengthened my faith.  It truly did.  Unfortunately, Christianity has been has been leveraged by uneducated charismatic leaders as much as if not more than Islam (another religion which suffers the same indignities).  One cannot escape the creeping stain of popularized notions into one's deepest thoughts.  Surprised by Hope is a cure for this.  I have nothing more to say about it's primary topics than this.

Instead to devolve to minutia: there is a point in the book where Wright includes a discussion about the cause of evil that I find truly bizarre.  He has written an entire book about how to deal with evil, Evil and the Justice of God, which at the very least sounds as rational as the book I read.  Perhaps with more space to explain his ideas it all works out, but this shorthand found on page 95 of Surprised by Hope is just too much:

...when you do commit that idolatry, evil is unleashed into the world, setting off chain reactions with incalculable consequences.

Rationally this is problematic- Christianity sees the universe of being as existing in the space between God and Jesus and love placing us on the continuum between the two (so argues Wright and also Mcintosh, and I don't have a problem with this idea).  The above argument therefore suggests that you can turn away from God and pluck evil out of a space that God did not create.  This is of course always the problem with evil-- did God create it or not-- and upon first review this seems like a sly move toward "not".  I would have to read Wright's other book to know what he actually thinks on this matter.

Meanwhile, this argument reminds me of the varieties of personal paranoia about evil and misfortune that I have seen.  I have a close friend who is convinced that an airplane can only crash if there are more evil people on the plane than good people.  How often do we hear that some disease will be cured if only you live right or pray enough?  This is the spirituality of paranoia: it's all about me.  In the developed world we have a special scientific form of the paranoia.  If you do it right, nothing bad will happen.

I think the paranoia has been allowed to run unchecked for the same reasons that theologically ignorant preachers have been allowed to run unchecked- our American suspicion of the inegalitarian nature of knowledge and intelligence.  I don't think it is a happenstance that a writer like Wright is from England or that McIntosh has wrapped himself around knowledge and concepts outside of American time and space.  How unusual a topic McIntosh selects to write about in Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge.  This is not the kind of religion we talk about in 21st century American Christianity.  He quotes Cardinal Newman:

Apart from that concern for the whole, the religious mind as easily degenerates into superstition, prejudice, and bigotry as into rationalism or indifference. (footnote from University Sermons, quoted on p. 174)

In degenerate religion, a whole set of uglinesses attach themselves to the paranoia- prosperity preachers and citizens who think they are entitled never to rub shoulders with inconvenience, much less true evil.  There seems to be a trend toward "venting" about everything while your friends agree that normal life is simply intolerable to the average person, and you are correct to wish your co-workers dead.  And then someone actually shoots them.

I frequently find that people are shocked that only about 1 in 8 alcoholics is even capable of developing liver damage.  We prefer our paranoia that one behavior means that the next thing is automatic.  It isn't.  As David Hume so rightly pointed out, reason does not turn us into oracles.  Neither does spiritual sensitivity turn us into prophets.  There are things that we simply do not know and simply cannot control, and an intelligent Anglican bishop trying too hard leaves me scratching my head.

Bunday

Bunday: What about MY treat?

Natural Law Post #2: The Crisis of Influence

We are currently living in a culture that is in a crisis of influence, most starkly on the side of religious moderns who see themselves as faced with that responsibility on the two counts of existential reality and repentance before their God.  In an individualist democracy which has become urban, this was inevitable.  I have not read Democracy in America with an eye toward this question, but I would expect that Tocqueville noticed the problem in an embryonic form.  If it was there, he would not have missed it.

At the same time we are faced with an increased sense of our own responsibility, we are aware that the science of influence is used against us.  It creates as sense of suspicion and frustration, a kind of influence paralysis.  George Grant bases his comments in Philosophy in the Mass Age on the moral issues of living in a scientific age, and addresses the science of psychology directly:

People educate themselves to get dominance over nature and over other men.  Thus, scientific reason what we mean by reason.  This is why in the human field, reason comes ever more to be thought of as a social science, particularly psychology in its practical sense.  We study practical psychology in order to learn how other people's minds work so that we can control them, and this study of psychology comes less and less to serve its proper end, which is individual therapy. (pp. 10-11)

Thus previous Presidential addresses went out to the nation over the heads of congress, with the intention that congress would finish debating the matter the next day, but Joe Wilson had to shout "You lie!" in a 24-hour news cycle where the meaning of his silent presence would be set in stone before he had had his breakfast.  Just watching the process of influence play out is a dangerous moral act in a way that it was not in the past.

Parents are afraid to have the President address their children directly in school, and not without reason: it is inevitable that the address, should it make a positive impact on any child, will impact subsequent elections as those children reach voting age.  The President, for his part, is not unaware of this fact.

The Bible makes subtle comment on the question of influence when it claims that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children.  Early statisticians were morally perplexed when they realized that crime rates are somewhat constant and predictable (as explained in Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, Archer and Gartner, 1987).  How can a person be morally responsible for a crime when it was inevitable that the society would produce a set number of crimes?

We quickly realize that just because the crisis exists does not mean that it cannot be used in bad faith.  We don't accept criminal excuses that society made me do it.  In Making Choices (p. 104), Peter Kreeft charges his students with staring at him in mute incomprehension and charges it to their moral and ethical ignorance rather than to their stupification in the light of his errors addressing their thoughts. 

Using influence as a boogy-man allows a person to claim a believe in free will while rejecting that belief at the same time.  Parents who do not think that they can address the influence of the President are mocked for good reason.  Though psychology is indeed a weapon, everything else that has always been true of influence remains true today.  These parents, if they have the strength of influence behind them (and it does not take a PhD in psychology to have parental influence) can override a Presidential speech of less than 15 minutes.  If they have trained their children well, their children can do it on their own.  If they have failed to have that influence, that failure would be as real in the year 1500 as it is now in the year 2009.

The more hysterical people become over the possibility of being influenced or watching influence play out in a negative --or at least underhanded and uncontrollable-- manner, the more cynical they are about the possibility of influence playing out in a positive manner.  The natural law argument has started to be used as a shortcut around the suspicion that God is no longer available as an influence for good.  And that suspicion is built up in reality by a culture that rejects influence of any kind, indeed including influence toward the good.

I don't think this has any final sway on the goodness of our society.  The morality of a culture, I am convinced, is mainly rooted in it's stability and this will be addressed in the next post on hypocrisy.  It is the nature of popular society to be so far removed from God and from ethics that the particular shifts of particular generations or cultures are of no particular meaning.  For certain individuals upon whom the painful burden of evil was most profoundly settled, the Holocaust is no different from Katrina.  We fool ourselves if we think our manners make  it any different.

What the crisis does influence is the ability of ordinary people to find and create nobility in their lives.  The paradox of the crisis is that it takes away choices.  I have just finished Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge by Mark A. McIntosh, truly one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life.  He discusses the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who I don't know much about except that she was an admirer of Simone Weil, as am I.  He writes:

Murdoch comments in more than one instance that sometimes the possibility of a higher spiritual reality and position is really more than some of can even remotely sense; the call into a deeper place in life may seem to us only damaging or threatening. (p. 201)

I would say that in no other time or place than 21st century America has the sense of danger and threat loomed so large.  That overwhelming preoccupation with the danger of being led cuts individuals off from ethical refinement more than ever.  McIntosh writes:

The problem of creaturely [created] existence is that very often its apparent autonomy beguiles the creatures into settling down and refusing the signs of transcendence, gradually becoming blind to the invitation to a larger life of communion.  As this happens, the distance and freedom within which creation exists (the distance between the divine Persons [of the Trinity]) hardens for creatures into an isolation and alienation, a distance across which they no longer know how to love. (p. 211)

The nature of human existence is to have that distance.  Philosophers such as Sartre recognized the distance as unfathomable, but at the same time developed the ethical imperative of commitment to living the reality of your life (Best described in the opening chapter of Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century by Levi or in the brief and readable The Ethics of Ambiguity by de Beauvoir.).  Our modern society is not only trapped in that distance, but suspicious of commitment.

My problem with natural law is that it cannot teach anyone to love; it cannot create the morality that has been destroyed.  My hopeful note is that I do believe that it is possible to know how to love, and consequently or concurrently it is possible to have an adequate ethic independent of natural law.  Something about how this ethic is structured will be discussed next.