Sam Harris is a terrible horrible very bad no(t) good thinker

Mostly, I wanted an excuse to use this picture....

I should have paid a little more attention to the e-mail exchange between Chomsky and Harris.
For example, I caught the "good intentions" defense of America by Harris; what I missed was the moral superiority based on, you know, exceptionalism:

For Sam Harris, “not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development.” Yes, he admits, the U.S. has committed atrocities at a larger scale than many of our enemies, but we have higher moral standing because these were mistakes. Harris likens the U.S. to a “well-intentioned giant,” whose aims are good even if it occasionally blunders.

Yikes!  "Same state of moral development"?  What you mean "we," Kemosabe?

I'll leave the "thought experiment" Harris constructs from that premise for Chomsky to rebut (you can read it easily at the link).  I'm still stuck on this "some cultures are morally superior to others."  I knew modern-day atheists were still pretty much on the cutting edge of the 19th century.  I had no idea they were stuck on the bleeding edge of 19th century empire.

This is not a passing fancy with Harris; it is his raison d'être, indeed, it is his reason, period.

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris accuses Chomsky and other leftists of “moral blindness” towards the important differences between “the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence [perpetuated by Muslim governments].” Harris argues that there is a qualitative moral difference between the U.S. and the Muslim world, which leftists like Chomsky cannot see.

Because, you know, we're at a different stage of moral development.  Can I just say, at the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, that this was the reasoning used by Nazi Germany to exterminate Jews, homosexuals, and any other classification of people they could come up with?

Because, really, it was.

I can understand why Harris' argument is appealing.  I can also understand why it sells books.  But even in America, popularity and profits should not equal moral authority.  Or good sense, for that matter.

"Who looks out for shit kickers like you?"

I have, in my vast and yeasty archives, pictures like this.  That's the President of the United States with those people.  Ever seen a picture of Barack Obama in similar circumstances?  Neither have I.

Here's Robert Kennedy:


And here's President Obama at least talking about poverty:

Granted, that last one is a bit unfair, but even that appearance alone was too much for the delicate sensibilities of FoxNews and Joe Scarbrough.

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Imagine if Obama had dared to show up in pictures with actual poor people, so we had to see what they looked like. Eh, we'd just hear about how they had refrigerators and cell phones, again.

Update:  one other thing to notice about that stage in Georgetown:  no women.  Which, honestly, is a glaring omission, and I'm ashamed I didn't notice it myself.

Being and Time and Comedy Central

The weakening of Being (Heidegger) has made "Christianity" once again a legible, credible story, one that we can take seriously, and secularization has transcribed that story from unreadable myth into legible history. In secular culture the old religious narratives are published in a new edition, translated into the secular vernacular in an affordable paperback. There they are no longer tales told about transcendent transactions in eternity but stories about the saeculum, the historical time in which real people live. There is thus a "family resemblance" between the weakening of Being and the rebirth of religion, an essential correlation. With the withering away of metaphysics, which was given ample opportunity to prove its worth and whose only result was an arid and reifying rationality that turned the world and human life into objects for instrumental reason, we are free to return for nourishment to the old religious narratives.

 I was going to pull apart this long passage by Caputo, in order to focus on certain passages.  Then I got sidetracked by this interview with Reza Aslan:

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For the record, what Aslan is talking about here is hermeneutics; i.e., everything is interpretation. Scriptures are right because I say so, and because of how I interpret them.  There's also something to be said about Christmas there, and in Caputo:

For example, for Vattimo, the commonplace complaint that the secular world has taken the Christ of to Christmas and transcribed it into "Happy Holidays" is to be viewed as still another success on Christianity's part. For now the Incarnation, a theological doctrine accepted in a strong or robust form only within confessional limits, has been translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails. During the "holidays" this attenuated if wispy "spirit" of love becomes general among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually "means," its application in the concrete reality of lived experience.

So I gotta postpone that discussion a little longer....

Gianni Vattimo relates a funny story

In one sense, it is exactly because of the loss of a unified religious authority that there is a sort of rebirth of religiosity.  Real religiosity relies on secularization because religion is no longer single or uniform and there is no longer a central religious authority.  On the other hand, secularization and the new religiosity are also related by a sort of therapeutic connection because if I am ready to accept literally the return of religion in Italy, I would say that this religiosity tends again to be a sort of resecularized religiosity--that is, a religiosity that lives only as a consequence of secularization.  For example, John Paul II made great use of the media, his message was communicated via television, and, as his death showed so well, he was a legitimate global media star.  There is a sort of false universalism promoted by the media, which is very contradictory.  People are more interested in the religious show than they are in religious engagement.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from the Roman Catholic Church's celebration of the Year of the Jubilee in 2000.  Many young people came to Rome to see and hear from the pope.  This was perceived by many as an example of the rise of religiosity among today's youth.  But, after they had left and when it came time to clean up the area where the youth had spent the night, they found three hundred thousand condoms.

After the Death of God, pp. 95-96.

Elsewhere in this dialogue Vattimo notes the Church of Rome would prefer a return to the Middle Ages when it was the absolute power in Europe.  But anyone who has read Chaucer knows that, if medieval Europe could have gathered 300,000 youth and provided them with condoms, there would have been just as many condoms left behind in any mass pilgrimage to Canterbury or to Rome.  And my church history professor told of people racing from church to church in medieval Europe to catch the epiclesis, the moment the priest raises the elements of the Mass and blesses them, and they become the body and blood of Christ, revealing the true presence of God.  It was commonly thought that to look upon this glory of God would leave one struck dead, but as churches ran without a central time system, and so had services at different times on a Sunday morning, there were people who raced from church to church to catch just this moment, hoping to see God.

I'm not sure how much religiosity either Chaucer's pilgrims and their stories, or that bit of historical lore, reveals.

Same as it ever was, in other words.  We return, as ever, to gone away.

Don't change the facts, change the outlook

Mornings with John Caputo:

Above all, I am inclined today to organize everything I think about postmodern thought and about postmodern theology in particular around the figure of weakness, a figure forever associated with [Gianno] Vattimo's brilliant articulation of what he calls weak thinking (pensiero debole).  On an analogy with Vattimo's weak thought, I speak of a weak theology.  Such an expression, which is also to be found in Jeffrey Robbins and the Dominican theologian Ulrich Engel, does not refer to intellectual spinelessness but, in the first place, to a weakening of the militant dogmatic tendencies of the confessional theologies, which in modernity fused in a lethal way with the Cartesian paradigm of certitude.  As Engel points out, were the great religions of the Book to look to their own teachings about humility and to their traditions of mystical theology, which stressed that the truly divine God is the Godhead that eludes our comprehension, it would give them pause to so militantly pursue their purposes.

....

The Christian church should accordingly reconsider its critique of an increasingly secular culture, and, instead of lamenting defeat at the hands of secularization, it should declare victory and march home in triumph.  For what else is Western culture than the translation of otherworldly Christianity into terrestrial structures, the conversion of its celestial currency into the coin of the more benign ethical, social, political, and even economic institutions of the Western world?  The weakening of Being (Heidegger) has made "Christianity" once again a legible, credible story, one that we can take seriously, and secularization has transcribed that story from unreadable myth into legible history.  In secular culture the old religious narratives are published in a new edition, translated into the secular vernacular in an affordable paperback.  There they are no longer tales told about transcendent transactions in eternity but stories about the saeculum, the historical time in which real people live.  There is thus a "family resemblance" between the weakening of Being and the rebirth of religion, an essential correlation.  With the withering away of metaphysics, which was given ample opportunity to prove its worth and whose only result was an arid and reifying rationality that turned the world and human life into objects for instrumental reason, we are free to return for nourishment to the old religious narratives.


For example, for Vattimo, the commonplace complaint that the secular world has taken the Christ of to Christmas and transcribed it into "Happy Holidays" is to be viewed as still another success on Christianity's part.  For now the Incarnation, a theological doctrine accepted in a strong or robust form only within confessional limits, has been translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails.  During the "holidays" this attenuated if wispy "spirit" of love becomes general among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually "means," its application in the concrete reality of lived experience.  The tolerant, non-authoritarian and pluralistic democratic societies in the West are the translation into real political structures of the Christian doctrine of neighbor love.  When the transcendent God is "weakened"--or emptied--into the world, it assumes the living form of Western cultural life.  Vattimo shows that this schema, which modernity first learned from Hegel and Schelling, and was deployed by Altizer and the 1960s [Death of God] movement, is found in its earliest form in Joachim of Fiora's millennialist doctrine of the "three ages," that of the Father (Judaism), the Son (the New Testament), and the Spirit, which is the unfolding of the Kingdom of God on earth from the year 1000 on.  Western history for Vattimo is the Wirkungsgeschicte of a "classic" in the Gadamerian sense, of the New Testament, its unfolding life and application, its developing revelation and realization, translation and transcription. But in Vattimo the age of the Spirit is not a version of metaphysics, not the biography of the Absolute in time, as it is in Joachim, Hegel, and Alter, which is strong thinking, but an interpretive schema, a way to put the realization that we have always to do with conflicting interpretations whose only measure is love without measure.


The task of intellectuals today is therefore twofold.  On the hand, they must move beyond the old reductionism and objectivism of the nineteenth century and take the hermeneutic turn.  In such a world the old religious narratives have once again to be taken seriously as irreducible language games or forms of life that uniquely instruct us about the meaning of our lives.  On the other, the task of the intellectual is firefighting, that is, to see that while the flame of such religious narratives is kept alive it does not burn out of control.  While the stories are to be taken seriously, they are not to be taken literally, which would issue in the worst sort of fundamentalism, the worst hardening of theology into authoritarianism and dogma, as opposed to its weakening into pluralism and hospitality.

After the Death of God, pp. 73-76,

"Where's all the people?"

Southern Beale insists Christianity is "dying" (because the only Christians in the world are in America!) and the headline writers at Salon are driven to hyperbolic hyperbole (if that is, indeed possible).  A "record number of Americans consider themselves religiously unaffiliated," declares one. "Fewer Americans than ever identify as Christian" says another.  And all because Pew has released another poll.

As Charlie Pierce might say, this is all my balls.

First, 41% of Americans considered themselves affiliated with religion at all in 1906, so the "record decline" Pew has announced is actually a return to the peak of the last century, in 1998.  That year  70% of Americans declared a religious affiliation, actually a slight decline from the peak for the century just a few years earlier, although an increase from the immediate past.

And then, as Sarah Posner points out:  no.  Just:  no.  She makes 5 points:

1. The  Pew data "does not include its analysis of respondents’ religious intensity or orthodoxy, nor of the respondents’ political and social attitudes." That will come later.

2. "A different Pew survey out last year found a 'growing appetite' for mixing religion and politics, particularly among conservative religious respondents.  Per Posner on that poll, it found “those affiliated with a religion, particularly evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, ‘have become significantly more supportive of churches and other houses of worship speaking out about political issues and political leaders talking more often about religion.'”

3. Evangelicals, especially white evangelicals, "have been highly politically organized for decades."  And they still think liberals "stole" America and that they must "take it back."

4. Which is important because "the unaffiliated lack such a cohesive political identity."

5.  Speaking of organization:  "While the percentage of white evangelicals who voted in the 2014 midterms outstripped their share of the population as a whole, as Pew noted in its post-election analysis, “despite the continued growth of religious ‘nones‘ within the population as a whole, the share of the electorate with no religious affiliation also is little changed compared with other recent midterms (12% in both 2010 and 2014).” Political organizing and turnout matter far more than numbers."

So everybody take a deep breath.  Christianity is not coming to an end.  Religion is not coming to an end.  And America is not on the verge of becoming an atheist utopia.  And the real issue of faith is not really how it affects American politics.

Believe it or not.*

*And what's interesting is how much faith we have in polls.  The latest British elections left pollsters with egg all over their faces.  This was excused, however, because people don't respond to polls truthfully, or don't answer their phones, or something.  The poll cannot fail, it can only be failed.  The same excuses were trotted out a few years ago when pollsters got a major U.S. election completely wrong. In polls we trust.  God?  Who's God?  How does God poll, that's the question.

Readings in "Spectral Hermeneutics"

My thesis is twofold.  1.  In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the "Kingdom of God" are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called that "world," resulting in what I call a "sacred anarchy."  Consider but a sampling of its more salient features.  In the Kingdom, the last are first and first are last, a strategically perverted system or privileging, so that the advantage is given not to beautiful Athenian bodies that house a love of wisdom, but to lepers, deaf mutes, the blind, epileptics, and the paralyzed.  The favor of the Kingdom falls not on men [sic] of practical wisdom, of arete, of experts in freeness, but on tax collectors and prostitutes, who enjoy preferential treatment over the upright and well behaved.  In addition, in the Kingdom the way to be arrayed with all the glory of God is to neither sow nor reap but to behave like the lilies of the field.  If you try to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose it you will be saved.  In the Kingdom one should hate one's father and mother but love one's enemies, and if a man strikes you you should offer him the other cheek.  There, if you are rich, you have a very fine needle indeed to thread to get into the Kingdom.  If you would want to become rich with the treasures offered by the Kingdom, you should sell all you have and give it to the poor.  Moreover, you should give to the poor not only what you can afford but even what you need for yourself.  If one of your sheep is lost, then you should not worry about endangering the other ninety-nine but go out and search for the lost one, which is an unaccountably odd way to count.  If you host a party--even a wedding for your children--you should go out into the streets and welcome in the passers by.  There bodies pass easily through solid walls, rise from the dead, traverse the surface of water without sinking, glow with a blinding whiteness, and pass instantly from one state, like water, into another, like wine.  Cripples are made straight, lepers are cured, and the dead rise from their grave.  All these bodily metamorphoses are in turn figures of a personal transformation best described as metanoia, which might be retranslated from "repentance" to "being of a new mind and heart," being turned and attuned to the new being that come of belonging to the Kingdom.

2.  The event that shocks the world is not a strong but a weak force.  Underlying, or arching over, all these famous paradoxes, there is, on my hypothesis, a thesis about God, or about the event that is harbored in the name of God, one that is contrary to the powers that be in theology and the church, a startling thesis found in what Paul calls "the weakness of God."  Saint Paul puts this thesis about weakness very powerfully, even paradigmatically, in a veritably Deleuzian discourse on the "logos of the cross (logos tou staurou)," the mark of which Paul identifies as "foolishness."  Here, in a virtuoso performance of the interweaving of sense and non-sense, of a logos that is the offspring of moria, Paul spells out the way this weakness jolts the world:  God chose the foolish ones in the world to shame the wise, and what is weak to shame the strong, and what is the low down in the world, the ones who "are not" (ta me onta), to shame the men of ousia, men of substance, the powers that be.  The "weakness of God," Paul says, is stronger than human strength.  (I Cor. 1:25).

John Caputo, "Spectral Hermeneutics," After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2007). pp. 61-62.

Fillin' out my bucket list

I also went here over the weekend.  It was not the spiritual experience of a 400 year old place of worship, but it was a great geek moment.

The view I had was more like this, though.

The best part was, while standing next to one (there's a walking tour, you actually get to stand by one of them.  In that picture above you can just make out some buildings on the right; that's there the tour takes you) as it readjusted its position.  All the others moved synchronously (the dishes, not the actual antenna base; those are moved manually).

We decided it was contacting the Mother Ship, and that it was time to go.  Besides, it was very much a "wind-swept" plain, and even in the mild New Mexico spring, the temperature was a bit brisk."

(And no, these are not my pictures.)

Thanks, Obama!

There is, here, a valuable reminder of just how stupid our Governor is (in that he stands in a long line of Texas Governors, let's be fair):

Fears about the upcoming, multiple-state “Jade Helm 15″ war simulation being a preamble to martial law have circulated on social media and conservative websites for months. After a packed town hall meeting last week about the training exercise in rural Bastrop County, Abbott wrote to the State Guard and said measures would be in place to make sure civil liberties are not infringed upon.


“Frankly, I gotta tell you, I think the cause of the underlying concerns is that we see instances, like a shooting in Fort Hood by a terrorist, that the president labels workplace violence. We see the president come to the border in Texas and say it’s safer than it’s ever been,” said [Texas Governor Greg]Abbott. “And so I think it was a misplaced perception by people in Texas who have problems with the Obama administration and connected that trust with the Obama administration to the military.”  (emphasis added)

That preamble to the quote is the key.  This "outcry" didn't come from the whole state of Texas; it came from a handful of cranks in Bastrop County, which used to be rural and is now the outskirts of Austin's city limits.  Between a Black President and the push of "too cool for the room" Austinites, it's small wonder some in Bastrop are feeling like an invasion is underway.  Of course, there were people at that now infamous meeting who thanked the military for explaining Jade Helm 15" to them.

“I’m thrilled. I was glad to hear the presentation today,” said Don Nichols, a Bastrop resident and Vietnam resident. “We’re training the military and specials operations people specifically to go out and defend our country so we can have that right.”

Nichols and his wife Barbara sat through the entire two-hour long meeting. They said they believe no matter what, people will believe what they want.

“For me, today was kind of painful to watch the disrespect I saw to the lieutenant colonel during the presentation and I personally went up to him and apologized to him for other people and their
rudeness,” said Nichols.

 But sane voices get lost in the hysteria, hysteria Gov. Abbott (who is already on his way to a special wing of the Texas Governor's Hall of Shame) poured kerosene on, again and again.  So now "all of Texas" is upset by "Jade Helm."

And that's Obama's fault.

After all this, what's the impact on Bastrop County?  Less than the traffic going down 290 into Austin:

Sixty. That’s the number of troops Lastoria said would take part in Jade Helm 15 in Bastrop. When it comes to the town and impacting people, Lastoria said there will be two Humvees and water buffalo, a tank used to carry water, that people may see around the city.

Thanks, Obama.  Or, rather, thanks Gov. Abbott, for making everyone in Texas look like fools.  I think you're going to find that's not a winning political strategy.  Just ask Rick Perry.

Out on the Weekend

So I went here over the weekend, among other places.  This is San Miguel de Socorro, in New Mexico.  The stained glass you see above the door there is St. Michael the archangel.  There is a legend connected with the church being protected (and protecting those inside) from an Apache raid by a vision of St. Michael defending the church.  Make of it what you will, but that's the reason for the name.

The Catholic church recognizes a mission/church has been on this site for 400 years (they have a lovely document issued by Pope Francis honoring their anniversary this year).  This building is about 200 years old, which shows more on the interior than the outside.  There is a balcony just above the entrance; the heavy beams of its floor show the marks of being hand-hewn, and are easily eight inches on a side (and if somebody looks up the details and tells me I'm wrong, this being the internet and all, I'll gladly accept the correction; I'm going from memory here).

We arrived after closing time, but a lovely person was there who opened the place for us (five minutes later and she'd have been gone).  It reminded me of my church in Hecker, Illinois, with ropes for the two bells (one in each steeple, in this case), and a sense of both age, and reverence, and purpose about it.  People had been coming to this place for centuries (and to this site before that) for worship and fellowship.

That leaves impressions on a place, and on those who go there.

A pleasant time was had by all.

Thinkin' Geekin' Out

Yeah, it's a gimmick.  But I have a 3-D chess set, a Staunton set I've had since pre-teenagehood, a set made out of nuts and bolts glued together according to directions I got (IIRC) from "Boy's Life" (and if you even remember that publication, you are old!), as well as some figurative sets from Europe and China.

So I think I need this,  Besides, I gotta know how the pieces move when they get to that circular center.....

Robert Browning: 7 May 1812

Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made: 

Our times are in His hand 

Who saith "A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'' 

Not that, amassing flowers, 

Youth sighed "Which rose make ours, 

Which lily leave and then as best recall?" 

Not that, admiring stars, 

It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars; 

Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" 

Not for such hopes and fears 

Annulling youth's brief years, 

Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! 

Rather I prize the doubt 

Low kinds exist without, 

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

Poor vaunt of life indeed, 

Were man but formed to feed 

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: 

Such feasting ended, then 

As sure an end to men; 

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? 

Rejoice we are allied 

To That which doth provide 

And not partake, effect and not receive! 

A spark disturbs our clod; 

Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 

For thence,—a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks,— 

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 

What I aspired to be, 

And was not, comforts me: 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

What is he but a brute 

Whose flesh has soul to suit, 

Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? 

To man, propose this test— 

Thy body at its best, 

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? 

Yet gifts should prove their use: 

I own the Past profuse 

Of power each side, perfection every turn: 

Eyes, ears took in their dole, 

Brain treasured up the whole; 

Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn?" 

Not once beat "Praise be Thine! 

I see the whole design, 

I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: 

Perfect I call Thy plan: 

Thanks that I was a man! 

   Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!" 

For pleasant is this flesh; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 

Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best! 

Let us not always say, 

"Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" 

As the bird wings and sings, 

Let us cry "All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage, 

Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 

From the developed brute; a god though in the germ. 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 

Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next, 

What weapons to select, what armour to indue. 

Youth ended, I shall try 

My gain or loss thereby; 

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: 

And I shall weigh the same, 

Give life its praise or blame: 

Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. 

For note, when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 

The deed off, calls the glory from the grey: 

A whisper from the west 

Shoots—"Add this to the rest, 

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." 

So, still within this life, 

Though lifted o'er its strife, 

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

This rage was right i' the main, 

That acquiescence vain: 

The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." 

For more is not reserved 

To man, with soul just nerved 

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: 

Here, work enough to watch 

The Master work, and catch 

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 

As it was better, youth 

Should strive, through acts uncouth, 

Toward making, than repose on aught found made: 

So, better, age, exempt 

From strife, should know, than tempt 

Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! 

Enough now, if the Right 

And Good and Infinite 

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own 

With knowledge absolute, 

Subject to no dispute 

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. 

Be there, for once and all, 

Severed great minds from small, 

Announced to each his station in the Past! 

Was I, the world arraigned, 

Were they, my soul disdained, 

Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! 

Now, who shall arbitrate? 

Ten men love what I hate, 

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 

Ten, who in ears and eyes 

Match me: we all surmise, 

They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called "work," must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 

So passed in making up the main account; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 

All I could never be, 

All, men ignored in me, 

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 

That metaphor! and feel 

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— 

Thou, to whom fools propound, 

When the wine makes its round, 

"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!" 

Fool! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 

That was, is, and shall be: 

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent, 

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 

What though the earlier grooves, 

Which ran the laughing loves 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim, 

Skull-things in order grim 

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 

Look not thou down but up! 

To uses of a cup, 

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, 

The new wine's foaming flow, 

The Master's lips a-glow! 

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? 

But I need, now as then, 

Thee, God, who mouldest men; 

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I,—to the wheel of life 

With shapes and colours rife, 

Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: 

So, take and use Thy work: 

Amend what flaws may lurk, 

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! 

My times be in Thy hand! 

Perfect the cup as planned! 

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 

Advancing age makes me appreciate these lines more and more.

Keep your religion outta mah gummint!

Oh, er:

"Everything that God made is good, even marijuana" said state Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview, who filed the bill. "The conservative thought is that government doesn't need to fix something that God made good."

The 24-page bill begins: "The following provisions are repealed," then lists dozens of Texas statutes related to marijuana. If the Legislature were to approve the bill, pot in Texas would be regulated like any common crop.

In a press release, Simpson said he supported regulating marijuana like the state regulates "tomatoes, jalapeños or coffee."

This probably doesn't have a chance in hell (!) of becoming law, but it passed out of committee yesterday.

Damned religious fanatics!

Without Feuerbach or Derrida

Daniel Dennett is loose; and boy, is he stupid:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

I don't even know what this means.  Does he imagine the Catholic Mass is still chanted in Latin, and believers can only read that which is "nihil obstat" and under the imprimatur?  Has he not heard of the printing press, the German Biblical scholars of the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard or Rudolf Bultmann, the death of God movement or the contemporary work of Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, or John Caputo?

No, probably not.  But he seems to imagine the internet will do what Gutenberg and Franklin and Carnegie (both responsible of the American library system) failed to do.  Oh, and the Enlightenment, and widespread college educations in America and Europe.

I mean, seriously, is this guy for real?  If the internet is going to enlighten us all, can it start to work on him first?

And if you think the internet is going to lead to unity and oneness as we all learn to think like Dennett, please to read the comments at RD.  I gave up.  The comments were pretty much as clueless as Dennett.  I know, I know, same song, second verse.  But Vattimo makes more sense than Dennett; for Vattimo "the postmodern is post metaphysical, wherein freedom 'does not lie in having a perfect knowledge of the necessary structure of reality and conforming to it,' but instead is conceived as disorientation by virtue of the dissolution of reality."

If, for example, Dennett can tell me he understands quantum mechanics and doesn't just take it on faith, i.e., reliance on the expertise of physicists, that the universe includes quarks and mesons and dark matter, I'll eat my hat.  Because while those things are predicted by the mathematics, few of them have been proven to actually exist.  Yet still physicists tell us they do, and we accept that claim; pretty much the way the people in the pews in Dennett's imagined past accepted the claims that God exists, though they could no more understand that existence than most people on the globe can understand the Higg's Boson (which we are told was discovered; we have to take someone's word for it that what the data shows is what they were looking for.  I can't analyze it; can you?)

You can, of course, hide all manner of information in plain sight.  A physicist could work for days to reassure me the Higgs Boson was found (if it was; I can't remember if that was declared confirmed, or not), or that quantum mechanics determines how my computer works (the theory is followed and the result seems to be engineered to function; but that doesn't mean the propositions of quantum mechanics have all been established empirically; if, indeed, they can be).  As I say, the hypothetical physicist could work for days to educate me, but in the end I wouldn't be able to follow the math, I'd just have to accept that it made sense and that what I was being told was at least being presented sincerely as truth.  The perfect knowledge of the world that Newton imagined he could obtain has been proven unobtainable.  That's the whole purpose of Schrodinger's unfortunate cat.

And yet here is Dennett, once again proclaiming the millennium and the year of Jubilee because with the internet we will finally once and for all dial "F" and get, not Frankenstein, but fundamental functionalism.  And all will be discovered, and all will be known, and no one will live in ignorance again.

Except all the commenters on the internet who already know what they know and just want to defend it as fiercely and blindly as ever any knight defended his master.

There is a great deal more I could add, including a lot of information from Armstrong about the rise  (and fall) of atheism and, especially, the ignorance of the New Atheists.   Dennett's definition of religion, of what "belief" and "faith" are, of what religious faith consists of, and what religious belief is:  all false and unfounded and already falling away.  It may be that religion eventually breaks into two camps: fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists; but then we're there already, aren't we?  And what Dennett imagines people will no longer be able to believe means they will either have to think like him (highly unlikely) or that their thinking will forever be a mystery to him, an inner working he'll think they are keeping stubbornly secret (ironic!).  There is much in Vattimo's idea of the return of religiosity to consider, or in Wittgenstein's respect for religious belief.  But I've talked too long already, and Dennett isn't worth the candle, and besides, he's as incapable of understanding. It is as if he were deaf and I was trying to explain Beethoven's music.

However, when I read about how the internet is going to bring the new Enlightenment and make it stick this time, and I think of the number of people who now think "research" is synonymous with "Key word search," and that reasoning matters far less than "facts" ("IS TOO!"  "IS NOT!!!!"), I don't even chuckle mordantly.

I just think how I'm ready to give up; that the dike's gonna burst, and I'm kidding myself that I've even got a thumb in the hole in it.

"Freedom is a worship word!"

It's more than a bit illegitimate to take a quote out of context and then engage a critique of it, but better explication will have to come.  The words are those of Gianno Vattimo, an Italian philosopher of religion of whom I will have more to say, including the bibliographic information for the source of these quotes.  I will provide better context, later.

I have my freedom, after all.

If, in the multicultural world, I set out my system of religious, aesthetic, political, and ethnic values, I shall be acutely conscious of the historicity, contingency and finiteness of these systems, starting with my own.

I'm going to connect that to the internet, but to do so, I need this quote, too:

What I am proposing is:  (a) that the mass media plays a decisive role in the birth of a postmodern society; (b) that they do not make this postmodern society more transparent, but more complex, even chaotic; and finally (c) that it is in precisely this relative "chaos" that our hopes for emancipation lie.

The complexity and the chaos emphasize the individual burden, where I must "be acutely conscious of the historicity, contingency and finiteness of these systems, starting with my own."

Find me a place on the internet where that happens.

Take, for example, the 1400+ comments on the e-mail exchange between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris.  Pretty much they divide along "partisan" lines:  one sides with Chomsky, or one sides with Harris, and then one throws metaphorical rocks at the other side.  What precisely does not happen is an acute consciousness of historicity, contingency, or finiteness of especially one's own, preferred system.  That system is the given; all others are enemies to be repelled.

Which is the internet making postmodern society not more transparent but more complex, even chaotic.  Not sure this is where the hopes for our emancipation lie, because we seem almost pre-programmed to seek a savior, in the old Roman sense of the word:  a figure we can rally round whose efforts, whatever they may be, will shield us from chaos and provide for us the "civilization" (nee Pax Romana) that makes us comfortable and feel safe.

The cost of that Pax Romana being, according to modern interpretations of scripture which understand the crucifixion as humanity's plan, not God's, one of the major critiques of Jesus of Nazareth.

Hmmmmm.......

Make one mistake....

Rick Perry could have run for Governor again.  As the GOP candidate, he would have been a shoo-in.

"Oops."

That one word ended it for him.  He made a fool of himself on the national stage.  He did it while being Governor of Texas.  That, coupled with the fact he "retired" while still in office, meaning he drew his retirement pay as well as his salary while still Governor, and while running around the country raising money so he could run for President, until:  "Oops."

I mention the latter because there is a bill in the Legislature, which will surely pass, which will prevent any other Texas government employee from "retiring" while still drawing a salary as a government employee.  That one stung more than a little bit.

But no worse than Perry making Texas look stupid.  We wear our state heart on our sleeve, down here.  We swagger and brag and laugh at the "Yankees" who don't realize "Don't Mess With Texas" is an anti-litter campaign, not a warning.  Sure, it makes us look arrogant to keep that motto around (it's older than my daughter, who is into the third year of her second decade), but we know what it means and we like having the joke on the rest of you, even if it seems to be at our expense.  In fact, it's one of the best characteristics of Texans:  to laugh at our own expense.

But we don't like our Governors to make us look stupid.

Which brings us to Gov. Greg Abbott.  Nobody in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is stoking fears of ISIS and terrorists after the shooting in Garland.  Public officials there are rightly putting the blame on the shooters and Pam Geller, and the Muslim community in the Metroplex (D-FW's name for itself; two big cities and lots of "suburbs" around it; probably the most populated area in Texas, but not the largest city because there are so many cities in the area) is supporting, and supported by, the community.  No one in Garland or environs is cheering the idiots who armed themselves and died hoping to kill others first.

But a handful of yahoos in Bastrop, a city just outside Austin (practically a suburb now, though it wasn't even a bedroom community when I moved away from Austin 20+ years ago), have so terrified the Governor that he's made us the laughing stock of the country.  Sen. Joe Manchin is openly inviting the U.S. military to come to West Virginia.  The Governor of Utah has, quite sensibly, poured ice water on the whole conspiracy notion.  And Gov. Abbott has put himself in the company of Alex Jones and Chuck Norris.  Yes, Norris campaigned for Abbott, but you're supposed to put people like that aside when you assume office.

Oops.

It may be too soon to say that for Abbott; this may not be his "oops" moment.  But he hasn't acknowledged that he screwed up, and every day brings more news reports about how paranoid Texas is.  Texas doesn't like to see itself as paranoid.  It doesn't like to see itself as stupid.  If this doesn't go away soon, Gov. Abbott may find himself a one-term governor, with diminishing influence in the Legislature.

The legislative session ends the first of June.  Barring special sessions (which the Governor has to be careful to call; legislators have jobs, Texas doesn't pay them to be full-time solons), they will meet only one more time in Abbot's first term.  If he is a lame duck by then, he won't likely be around for two more legislative sessions.

Oops.

Thanks, Gov. Abbott

You wanna tell the Pentagon they misunderstood your letter?

"Operation Jade Helm poses no threat to any American’s civil liberties," Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren told McClatchy. "Operation Jade Helm is being conducted by Americans – by, specifically, American special forces personnel."

As Jon Stewart said, you've practically achieved the impossible, Governor.  You've made Rick Perry look sensible.

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I Hung My Head

The discussion at Salon about Chomsky v. Harris turns, in part (as does Harris' argument with Chomsky) on the question of intent.

The Sting song, performed by Johnny Cash, describes the problem of intent quite nicely.  The narrator aims his rifle at a figure in the distance.  The gun "goes off," the rider is dead, the narrator ends his tale at the gallows.  He had no intent; but he's still culpable for what he did.

Surely, according to Sam Harris' argument, the young boy should be excused for his actions.  He had no intention of killing anyone.  He just aimed a gun.  Our news today is replete with stories of guns "going off," and no one is to blame; well, when the offender is of the "right" color.

Or maybe Harris would argue this is different, since there's a difference between pointing a gun at a lone figure, and aiming a missile at a point across the globe.

Legally, frankly, the narrator of this tune might not be guilty of a crime leading to his execution.  Morally?  He's as guilty as the song says he is.

The Consolations of Literature

My first reaction to Sam Harris' argument here is that, on the moral question, he makes a curiously legalistic defense of American (i.e., Western) actions.

In law there are degrees of criminal culpability.  If I run you down with my car, it matters whether I saw you in the crosswalk, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and accelerated at you; or if I looked down to change the radio station and looked up too late to avoid you.  Either way, you're dead; but my intent determines the nature of my crime, the severity of my punishment.

But it isn't a moral judgment made by society, much as we say it is.  It's really a determination of what I did; either way, I'm morally responsible for your death.  The state isn't really concerned with my morality; the state is only concerned with my actions, and what it can discern of my intent.

So Sam Harris argues to Noam Chomsky that as long as the West doesn't intend for there to be collateral damage (and just yesterday on BBC World Service I heard some apologist for some attack by Western forces arguing that everything was done to reduce civilian casualties that could be done, so, hey, we're still the "good guys!"), the West isn't as morally culpable as "Islamic terrorists" who, in Harris' example, execute criminals in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (before the US invasion) on a soccer field at half-time during a soccer game.  These executions were carried out by hand, not by firing squad or lethal injection or gas chamber or electric chair; and somehow this makes the executions both "barbaric" and "wrong."  I'm not a supporter of the death penalty, so it seems to me dead is dead, whether by needle or by machete, and chopping off a thief's hand is as brutal as solitary confinement or sending a child to prison for 20 years.

But Sam Harris says it's all about "intent" so what we do is much better than what they do.

Chomsky eviscerates that argument after his fashion; I have my own response to it.*  Intent is a smokescreen when its a matter of the actions of nations.  As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out almost a century ago, nations act in the name of self-preservation; it is the only way they can be expected to act.  They cannot be moral:  period.  Terrorists act in reaction to what is done to them; the "West" acts in reaction to what is done to it, by people it labels "terrorists."  Auden's lines from "September 1, 1939" never enter into Harris' calculus:  we are morally superior to them, and that's an end to the discussion.

Intent is not the deciding factor, especially since no court ever sits in judgment over the nations to decide what intent was actually involved.  If I can escape the consequences of my criminal actions by simply declaring "I didn't mean to do it!", what criminal justice would any nation ever effect for its citizens?  We have no court of nations to decide such matters, but neither can we self-justify by declaring our hearts pure, their hearts foul.  The fact that we think we can do it just makes our claims of superiority ring ever more hollow among the other nations of the world.  Just ask George Orwell.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  Sam Harris is a putz.

*Although this is worth pulling out of the to and fro (if you don't want to plow through the whole thing; it does border on being too long).  The topic is the al-Shafira bombing carried out by Clinton in retaliation for the embassy bombing carried out by Al Qaeda:

Apologists may appeal to undetectable humanitarian intentions, but the fact is that the bombing was taken in exactly the way I described in the earlier publication which dealt the question of intentions in this case, the question that you claimed falsely that I ignored: to repeat, it just didn’t matter if lots of people are killed in a poor African country, just as we don’t care if we kill ants when we walk down the street. On moral grounds, that is arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human. That is exactly the situation. 

emphasis added