Please Stand By

I did this once before and it wasn't wholly successful, but I've added "word verification" to cut down on the spam comments I have to keep cleaning out.


I'll reset when I post something worthy of comment.  Probably only do this occasionally, when comments are flagging and the undergrowth is particularly thick.

Gettin' tired of coming in here and just deleting the stuff.  So, sorry if you get cut off.  Full access will return shortly.

--The Management

ADDING:  okay, that didn't last long.  But the axe will fall again if I have to keep cleaning up the troll droppings.

In which ideas get their due regard

So now comes news the DOJ has subpenaed records of phone calls made by AP employees from ATT (or the phone company; whoever, these days, is the central repository of telephone records).  And it is quelle scandale and tout le monde is in despair over the death of democracy and the end of freedom.

Which, of course, is what the "gun nuts" say every time anybody says "guns" and "law" in the same sentence; but tout le monde knows those people are NOK, and that this is serious because AP is definitely OK ("Our Kind") and besides, what's the point of being tout le monde if you don't act like it?

But here's the problem:

DOJ did not "secretly" take the records of AP away from AP.  They got copies of records of phone calls made by AP employees on dates certain, and what they got was records of phone numbers called and the duration of the phone calls, as well as time of day of the phone calls.  What they didn't get was the content of those calls, since that content was ephemeral and has now vanished into the ether, or wherever phone conversations go, and can't be retrieved even by magic (why didn't Harry Potter have a "call back" spell?).

But DOJ got those records from the entity which generated them (ATT?  I dunno these days, but for convention's sake....).  The phone company generates a record of every phone call you make.  The government, if it wants to, can look at those records.  You have no expectation of privacy in such matters, except to the extent the government has to get a subpoena (ideally) to see those records.  The government also needs a court order to wiretap your phone, so I guess you could say you have a limited right of privacy over your phone conversations.  But is this a fishing expedition?

Well, it would be if the DOJ were acting like Ken Starr and trying to justify its existence by finding evidence of a crime, any crime, to keep it in business.  But the DOJ is investigating a crime, the unauthorized release of classified information.  Now maybe Washington classifies everything including the phone book, but that's a defense in court, not a reason to never investigate leaks.  But tout le monde has gone mad over the issue; or, as I like to put it:  Ox.  Gored.  Whose.

Rachel Maddow last night opened her show comparing the DOJ getting records openly from ATT (or whoever) to the "Plumbers" of Watergate break-in fame.  Yeah, that's a sane comparison.  The same issues are involved.  A legally issued subpoena is the same thing as a bunch of yahoos breaking into private offices to get information.  The basis for this comparison?  The "plumbers" were trying to plug leaks of classified information, too.

So, you see, it's just like Watergate!

Now, this kind of request for records goes on constantly.  You can do it in civil cases, you can do it in criminal cases.  But you need a criminal case (to get a judge involved) or at least a grand jury investigation, to get a subpoena issued.  Almost by definition, that is not a "fishing expedition" (oh, it still can be, but let's not say every criminal investigation is a fishing expedition, or we will bring the entire criminal justice enterprise to a screeching halt).  The request was not made of the AP; they don't generate these records.  It was made about AP.  But just because AP is a "press agency," its activities are no more protected by the 1st Amendment than the average person's; or corporation's.

Reporters cannot engage in criminal activity and claim a "freedom of the press" exemption.  They can be prosecuted for receiving classified material, but that's a bootless enterprise, and is the real reason the New York Times was not prosecuted by the Nixon Administration for publishing the Pentagon Papers (the public's "right to know" will generally win in the courtroom over the government's interest in national security, at least with a jury and/or public opinion).  And, by the way, Ms. Maddow, the issue in that case was prior restraint; not a subpoena of NYT reporters' phone records.  Reporters also cannot shield their sources from all investigation.

I remember a "Murphy Brown" episode, from the Poppy Bush era, where Candace Bergen's character went to jail for contempt of court because she wouldn't reveal a source, even under penalty of law ("sub poena;" it literally means "Under penalty").  It was "ripped from the headlines," as the saying goes, and reflected the state of the law then and now.  Reporters can refuse to give up their sources, but the 1st Amendment doesn't protect them from going to jail.  Other laws protect them from being tortured to give up that information (maybe 9/11 changed that, though....); but they don't get a "Get out of jail free" card, anymore than they get a "King's X" over any request for records held by a third party which might be relevant to a criminal investigation.

This is not, in other words, the end of civilization and the death of democracy.  Not unless you want to apply the same standards to drug lords and wife-beaters and child molesters and terrorists and all the other low-lifes we don't have much respect for.  Granted, the rights of low-lifes should be protected, too; but at some point criminal investigations have to proceed, and have to probe you in places you'd rather be left unprobed.  So when you find yourself on the receiving end of a criminal investigation, remember some people find themselves in that position on a regular basis.

Maybe because they are criminals; or maybe just because they are poor; or black; or black males who are poor.....

But they, of course, are not tout le monde.

If you will indulge me in an UPDATE:

On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney batted away the notion that the Obama administration is behaving like Richard Nixon's.

"People who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history," Carney said.

Try as he might, though, Carney has not been able to tamp down the idea that there is something "Nixonian" about the Justice Department's secret probe of the Associated Press.

And why can't Jay Carney tamp this comparison down? Perhaps because of those keeping it alive:  Brian Williams;  the lawyer for the New York Times in the Pentagon papers case; and the New York Times editorial board.

Tout le monde, in other words.

Wonkblog explains the critical issue here (apologies that this is presented so randomly):

The key here is a legal principle known as the “third party doctrine,” which says that users don’t have Fourth Amendment rights protecting information they voluntarily turn over to someone else. Courts have said that when you dial a phone number, you are voluntarily providing information to your phone company, which is then free to share it with the government.

This all dates back to a 1979 Supreme Court decision. Police had asked the phone company for information about the numbers dialed from a robbery suspect’s phone. The suspect objected, pointing to a famous 1967 ruling holding that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to record the audio of a phone call. He argued that the same principle ought to apply when the government records information about the numbers a suspect dials.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument. “We doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the court. He pointed out that telephone customers are used to seeing numbers they’ve dialed on their monthly telephone bill.

 And, to be tedious, the crux of the biscuit:

 Journalists get a bit of a special deal here. The government has established special policies to guard against inappropriate surveillance of reporters. Before an FBI agent can seek a journalist’s call records, they must get special approval from the attorney general. But that’s merely a Justice Department policy, not a constitutional requirement. The policy could be changed in the future, and the lack of independent oversight makes abuses more likely.

The rest of the country doesn’t get even the modest procedural protection the government affords to journalists. The FBI likely didn’t need a warrant to obtain e-mail records that led to the identification of Paula Broadwell as the mistress of Gen. David Petraeus last year. Police officers have become increasingly aggressive in seeking records about the locations of suspects’ cell phones.

 Journalists get "a bit of a special deal here" because they own the megaphone, and that makes them tout le monde.  Which makes this "1st Amendment" argument sound more and more like the NRA on the 2nd Amendment....

(According to Democratic Underground, the "secret subpoenas" were issued by a grand jury investigating leaks regarding the capture of the "underwear bomber."  Yeah, just like the "Plumbers" in Watergate....)

"The chance won't come again...."

Which comes first:  the idea, or the person?

How do I describe this without giving away personal information about people who haven't chosen to be part of this blog's comments?  I'll do my best:

An elderly person in their 80's finds out someone they knew as a child has died, and in learning of the death, learns the deceased had a lesbian lover of many years standing.  Rather than condemn homosexuality, as this person was raised to do, the elderly person decides that homosexuality is not a "choice," and why should people be condemned for whom they love?  Why, in other words, shouldn't he grieve this death, and mourn with the family, rather than stand apart muttering darkly about the wages of sin?

Ideas come from people.  Even the ideas of Christianity came from Jesus of Nazareth; or Moses; or Abraham; or Isaiah; or Jeremiah.  I'm not trying to be exclusive here; you get the idea.  People come first, ideas later.

The idea cannot yield at every whim of society, every fresh breeze that blows through culture.  But neither can the idea be a stone wall, an immovable object waiting implacably for the irresistible force to encounter it.

If this blog has a motto, this is it:

 Ideas don't matter. 

Things don't matter. 

People matter.

Thanks be to God, who is indeed, making all things new; scary though that sometimes is.

Mother's Day 2013

So I came across this about today (although it's 3 years old):

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

And my first thought was how uncomfortable I was folding "Mother's Day" into the worship service on that Sunday morning in May.  It wasn't as bad as "Scout Sunday," when the colors were trooped down the main aisle of the nave and everyone all but saluted (false idols!).  It was worse than Father's Day, which wasn't much fun either (and, full disclosure, I actively dissuade my daughter from observing Father's Day in my own home; I always have, I always will.  I am not worthy.)

Mostly I didn't like it because it had no place on the liturgical calendar, and no real place in liturgical worship.  I wasn't a purist about worship, but worship is for contemplating and praising and seeking the presence of, God.  And Mother's Day is for...well, Hallmark and See's.

And it's not for people who aren't mothers; or who lost children in childbirth; or whose own mothers were horrors out of a badly written Gothic novel.  And no, that's not an idle statement:  I had a church member in the church I served as a student pastor whose history of family abuse made her not want to call God "Father," as in "Our Father, who art in heaven."  And I couldn't exactly disagree with her.

I'm sure she hated Father's Day like poison.

Not that the rest of us have to "suffer" because of one such unfortunate individual history; but then, excluding Mother's or Father's Day from the worship service isn't exactly my idea of suffering.  We don't have to put it on the back of someone else; we can just say it really has no place in public worship, and give people who do feel excluded on the day (especially from restaurants.  We took the Lovely Wife to lunch on Mother's Day once, a long time ago; we've never made the same mistake again.) a place to feel comfortably included.

Which, after all, is the purpose of the church; at least, in my ecclesiology.  I know that means welcoming the unbaptized and the unrepentant, and maybe even the unbelieving, but...so be it.

Here's hoping you don't feel the need to hide from the day, and that you understand those who might wish to.  And above all: don't misbehave!

ADDING:

Let me sharpen the irony by using this pre-publication update to note the history of Mother's Day, per Diana Butler Bass:

In May 1907, Anna Jarvis, a member of a Methodist congregation in Grafton, West Virginia, passed out 500 white carnations in church to commemorate the life of her mother. One year later, the same Methodist church created a special service to honor mothers. Many progressive and liberal Christian organizations--like the YMCA and the World Sunday School Association--picked up the cause and lobbied Congress to make Mother's Day a national holiday. And, in 1914, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson made it official and signed Mother's Day into law. Thus began the modern celebration of Mother's Day in the United States.

For some years, radical Protestant women had been agitating for a national Mother's Day hoping that it would further a progressive political agenda that favored issues related to women's lives. In the late 19th century, Julia Ward Howe (better know for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic") expressed this hope in her 1870 prose-poem, "A Mother's Day Proclamation" calling women to pacifism and political resistance....

 Now, if we could use Mother's Day for that purpose, or to further the kind of social justice Ann Jarvis favored:

...Anna Reeves Jarvis organized poor women in West Virginia into "Mothers' Work Day Clubs" to raise the issue of clean water and sanitation in relation to the lives of women and children. She also worked for universal access to medicine for the poor. Reeves Jarvis was also a pacifist who served both sides in the Civil War by working for camp sanitation and medical care for soldiers of the North and the South. 

 That would be an observance worthy of a church service.  But I can do without the hearts and flowers and schmaltz, thank you very much.

Hammer time!

In which I take a lovely, simple melody (a/k/a a perfectly reasonable observation), and drive it right into the ground (musical accompaniment by Leo Kottke):

Indeed, Mr. Sagan's argument was, and the argument still is, that of a man with a hammer, to whom the whole world resembles a nail. The Bible is no more meant to be the answer to all things (i.e., truly cosmological) than science is; but once you make that mistake, as many do on either side of the question, then you tumble down the rabbit hole into arguments with Mr. Sagan.

 I know I tend to lean to far toward Gould and non-overlapping magisteria to your tastes, but obviously (given your making of this statement) you have to agree 100% with Gould to agree with the position stated above.

Not really.  Here is Gould on NOMA in a nutshell:

Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.

Religion, IOW, is okay for those as likes it, so long as they keep it to themselves and at least tacitly acknowledge the supremacy of empiricism (i.e., "Science") to provide the real understanding of all things (like, say, "mind" (psychology) or humanity (anthropology), and stick with things science stopped giving a wet snap about sometime around the Enligthtenment (the soul, for example). So, we can't get rid of religion; might as well treat it like the red-headed stepchild.

Which is not something I would agree with, at all.

I can declare a complete disinterest in the empirical world without declaring a complete disinterest in the world.  Which is more important to my life:  that I know my wife loves me, or that I know how my car operates?  My knowledge of my wife's love is not based on empirical evidence.  If it were, it would be, as David Hume pointed out, a mere fact among facts, no more important to me than the weight of a particular stone.  But it is far more important to me than how my car operates.  For one to fail would be an inconvenience; for the other to fail, for me to be completely wrong in that knowledge, would utterly change my life in ways no mechanic (or hospital, if my failure is my knowledge of how to drive safely) could repair.

Are these non-overlapping magisteria?

Notice that even as Gould dismisses the concept of the soul as "a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature," he provides a sop to the fear that science is not the superior source of knowledge, possession of which offers a privileged position to any human.  At least, a privileged position within human society, which is the only place privilege really matters.

Are these non-overlapping magisteria?  Or is this Rome letting the children of Abraham in Judea have their god and their Temple and their rituals, so long as that Passover event doesn't get out of hand (and the walls of the Governor's Palace provide a vantage point for watching the rabble in the Temple courtyard that once a year)?

I really don't see that the late Mr. Gould's idea is all that distant from the Scientism of the late Mr. Sagan. I can disregard them both with out dismissing modern science or my religious faith.*


*Funny and perhaps unimportant anecdote:  Science Friday today featured a Nobel-prize winning physicist (Saul Perlmutter) who tried to explain the Big Bang as being a point when there was no space between all the matter in the universe, but the universe was still infinite.  He pointed out the problem was not accepting this image, but accepting the idea of infinity, which he finally had to explain in terms that sounded very much like the usual explanation of the Christian Trinity:  it's a mystery you can't understand, but you have to start there to understand everything else about, well, Christianity or cosmology, apparently.  No one, in other words, can "understand" infinity; they just have to accept the concept to understand everything else science says about the cosmos.

NOMA, right?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers..."

Ladies and gentlemen, the anarchist Cody Wilson:

In a letter to the student, Cody Wilson, a [U.S. State D]epartment official wrote that... posting the files [for the "printable gun"] may have released “technical data” without authorization [in violation of arms exporting regulations].... Mr. Wilson...said that he would try to claim an exemption for the regulations because on the Internet the files would be in the public domain.

Anarchy just ain't as simple as it used to be.

Oh, and he pulled down the files for the gun; 'cause, you know, libertarianism.  Or something.

I had just come back from the court house for a docket call; a procedure in the county where lawyers announced their readiness to proceed with a hearing on a pending case.  I announced to the lawyers (I was still a student then) upon my return that one party in a case we were involved in had filed bankruptcy, and so the case had been "stayed."

It was such a new concept in Texas that the venerable lawyer (now a Federal judge himself) looked at me like a man a big tall tree had just fallen out of, and announced with great confidence that no Texas judge was gonna stop proceedings on a case just because somebody filed bankruptcy.  I told him it was the Federal law, and he brushed it aside like a pesky mosquito.  No Texas judge, he repeated firmly, was gonna stop a court case because of some obscure Federal statute.

But that was exactly what happened; and within a very short time that statue was no longer obscure.  Bankruptcies became so commonplace that lawyers worked it into their expectations of trial calendars.  Bankruptcy froze the case against the filing party, and effectively froze the entire case, because the trial court couldn't even sever the bankrupt party from the case without permission of the bankruptcy court.

This is the Supremacy Clause of the U.S Constitution in action.  And Texas survived that intrusion into its judicial system, just as it survived the imposition of Brown v. Board of Education in my childhood, when the "black" schools in my hometown were shut down just in time for me to enter an "integrated" school my first year of high school (17 years after Brown was handed down; justice is not always swift).

The race riot at the school was the next year.  More of a disturbance, actually; and an excuse to leave the campus early, with my girlfriend (now my wife) and my other friends.  Not even a reason to call out the National Guard.

Thus do federalism and state government work hand in hand; or sometimes, in spite of each other.

No Texas governor ever stood in the schoolhouse door, or, to my memory, denounced the Brown decision or the Civil Rights Act or even the Voting Rights Act.  That's all much more recent history.  But now the Texas House has decided to trump all efforts by any state entity to enforce federal law when it comes to our federally guaranteed (!) right to keep and bear arms.

Which ain't as guaranteed as all that, after all.  My one and only appearance in Federal Court was as an appointed lawyer for a defendant accused of possession of a firearm.  Problem was, he was a felon.  Interestingly, felons don't lost their 1st, 3rd, 4th, or 5th amendment rights; or their 14th amendment rights to due process and equal protection even of state laws.  But they do lose their 2nd Amendment rights, and this man had lost his. (and so a note to State Rep. Steven Toth; "shall not be infringed" doesn't mean what you think it means).  "Possession," by the way, is a looser term than you might imagine.  He didn't have the gun in his hands or even within reach; and he didn't even claim it was his (a point of great confusion for him).  It was in the package tray of the car he was driving, when he was stopped.  And yes, they made a federal case out of it, which even at the time struck me as using a sledge hammer to swat a flea.

But it was an enforcement of federal law on a 2nd amendment issue; or not.  No one saw a 2nd amendment problem there, nor an overreach and violation of state law by the federal government.  (The fact that the 2nd amendment applies to the states at all works only because of the 14th amendment; and that the states can in any way pass laws about firearms is possible only because of interpretations of the 2nd and 14th amendments that allow such things.  This is very much what I mean, elsewhere, about a "Big Idea."  There is nothing remotely rational or even legal/Constitutional in the bills the Texas House has passed.  They are rampant absurdities, legal inanities, based on no more understanding of Constitutional law than the idea that the Constitution guarantees a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Nor are these bills, if they become law, likely to be upheld by many state judges, who generally know better.  But gun "rights" are sacrosanct, so no reasoning is necessary; only the fervent defense of the irrational position.),

Which leaves me wondering:  does the Lege want to allow felons to own guns, in defiance of federal law?  How about drugs?  Can we have those, too?  And isn't immigration a federal issue?  Can't we just ignore that, and make life easier on the border?

Or is it only guns that have inviolable rights?

I'm terribly late!

Thanks to TC I get a look at this old review of one of Carl Sagan's books I ignored back when it came out; and I get to enjoy Sagan's loopy "reasoning" on the Bible:

The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on its divine inspiration.

But of course, I might be wrong.

Where to begin?  With the idea that only "the findings of modern science" provide truth about the world, and all other works, literary or religious, are bunk insofar as they don't "prefigure" those findings?  And I presume "prefigure" is just a way of saying "Think like Carl Sagan thinks," because if you don't, you're primitive and backwards and benighted and "demon-haunted."

It's a howler that only a supremely self-important person could make.

But no, that isn't enough.  What is the purpose of Scripture?  According to the late Mr. Sagan, apparently its purpose was to explain the world, the universe, and everything.  Except it wasn't; it never was.  That's a presumption of the Enlightenment, much as the Renaissance gave us the loopy notion that medieval thinkers were only worried about angels dancing on pin heads.  They weren't; that was the Renaissance idea of a joke, of a wild exaggeration meant to illuminate a deeper truth.  And it does illuminate a truth; it illuminates the arrogance and rank ignorance of the Renaissance, which for all its virtues never produced a thinker as profound as Aquinas, a human being as notable and admirable as Francis of Assisi, a vision of reality as compassionate as that of Julian of Norwich.  It was the Enlightenment that put us onto the path that all knowledge which was not utilitarian, was knowledge barely worth of the name.

In other words it is not just that, as Mr. Lewontin puts it:

Most of the chapters of The Demon-Haunted World are taken up with exhortations to the reader to cease whoring after false gods and to accept the scientific method as the unique pathway to a correct understanding of the natural world.

It is the presumption that this knowledge is the only kind of knowledge that matters, and therefore the Bible presents such knowledge, but gets it all wrong, therefore it is entirely discardable.  It may be the Bible is entirely discardable (I don't think so, but I"m open to the discussion), but it is not for the reasons Mr. Sagan presents.  Indeed, Mr. Sagan's argument was, and the argument still is, that of a man with a hammer, to whom the whole world resembles a nail.  The Bible is no more meant to be the answer to all things (i.e., truly cosmological) than science is; but once you make that mistake, as many do on either side of the question, then you tumble down the rabbit hole into arguments with Mr. Sagan, which oddly enough bear no more relation to reality than rabbits with pocket watches.

It might be entertaining, but it ain't science; and it's certainly not serious.

Lewontin tosses off a fascinating observation, one that prompted more than one letter in response to his "defense" or affection, at least, for Orthodox Judaism:

If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn.  

That isn't a defense of a certain way of understanding the cosmos; it is, rather, an assertion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Sagan's philosophy, and many of them have as legitimate a claim to our attention and appreciation as Sagan's old essays for Parade Magazine and Reader's Digest.  But what Lewontin is also saying, althoug he shies away from it somewhat, is that science is not the only source of truth, and that there are preconceptions and prior commitments in every field of discourse:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

But, of course, we do believe in anything.  As Lewontin says a bit earlier in the review:

 What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity "in deep trouble." Two's company, but three's a crowd.

What is truly absurd is not believing in anything; it's believing in everything.  As Descartes noted when he started modern European culture down this road, if we deny the truth of everything, we are left with nothing; so we have to start with something.  Descartes chose to start with self-awareness, with "I think, therefore I am."  It's not entirely a provable assertion, of course; but to seriously gainsay it is to get nowhere.  Still, to seriously assert it is an empirical truth, is to distort the meaning of "empirical truth" until it is meaningless.  So we all do believe, at least, in our own existence; and some of us believe in the claims of empiricism.  But none of us believe in everything; that is an absurdity too far.

Lewontin, ultimately, doesn't understand the import of his own argument.  He makes this point (it has to be read in full to be appreciated):

 The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.⁷ The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education.

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.

The result was a fundamentalist revolt, the invention of "Creation Science," and successful popular pressure on local school boards and state textbook purchasing agencies to revise subversive curricula and boycott blasphemous textbooks. In their parochial hubris, intellectuals call the struggle between cultural relativists and traditionalists in the universities and small circulation journals "The Culture Wars." The real war is between the traditional culture of those who think of themselves as powerless and the rationalizing materialism of the modern Leviathan. There are indeed Two Cultures at Cambridge. One is in the Senior Common Room, and the other is in the Porter's Lodge. 

 Which I think is a very astute reading of the situation.  However, he concludes here:

 Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power.

 He's not as far from Sagan as he thinks, because the dilemma is not that we must give possession of the power to discover the truth to the benighted.  Our dilemma is that we cannot take away from "them" the power to define the "truth."  Sagan has one definition; Lewontin has another.  And the denizens of the "embattled culture" Lewontin identifies, have their own, which they will not give up any more than Sagan would give up his.

As long as we don't recognize that irreconcilable and irreducible truth, we'll continue to go 'round and 'round this mulberry bush; or down nonsensical rabbit holes.

Meanwhile, back home....

A 7 year old Houston, Texas boy was shot by his 5 year old brother with a .22 rifle after Mom left the two of them alone in the bathtub for a few minutes.

The parents are being investigated for violations of criminal law.  Under Texas law, leaving a gun where a child can get it and use it is a Class A misdemeanor when somebody gets shot because of such negligence.  The parents could face a fine of up to $4000, and up to a year in jail.

Which I guess is what the NRA means by "enforcing the laws already on the books."

Of course, anyone stupid enough to leave a loaded gun in the house where children can easily access and use it, is stupid enough not to pay attention to this story and consider their own liability.  Or, more importantly, the safety of their children.

But, you know, freedom, 'n' stuff.

Anarchy in the Hew Hess Hay

To hear the politicians tell it, this is the greatest existential threat to our existence since 9/11.


"This" being the latest thing, a "printable" gun.

But this story reminds me of the hippies of my youth, more than anything else.

Cody Wilson told Forbes Magazine that his goal with his printable plastic gun

is the dissolution of the U.S. government and governments around the world. He's an anarchist and a radical libertarian. And I think he sees this exercise of making a gun printable as kind of a demonstration of ways that the technology can circumvent the law, can circumvent -- to make the government irrelevant, until it just kind of disappears, or at least kind of he wants to carve out a kind of space where technology prevents the states' hands from controlling what people do.

First, Cody Wilson is a law school student at the University of Texas in Austin.  Yet he wants to dissolve governments.  After first taking full advantage of what they have to offer.  Including the internet, which was established by a government; and is maintained by power supplies made possible by governments; using industrial materials like plastics which are delivered to him through the good auspices of governments, which regulate or provide the means of access to plastics from the drilling rig that brings up the petroleum products to the refinery that turns that crude oil into something useful, to the chemical plants that render it into the plastics that make his gun "print," not to mention the mining concerns that produce the raw materials for the gunpowder, bullet casings, etc., etc., etc.  Oh, and the distribution systems that provide all those materials to Mr. Wilson, or you, or me; including but not limited to roads, police (to prevent theft), fire departments (to protect against hazards), and even public schools (to teach you how to develop things like plastic guns, or about the laws governing firearms) and public hospitals (to patch you together if the gun blows up in your face).

Oh, and at a quick glance, Cody Wilson both loves publicity, and first told his story to the BBC.  Yes, the government owned British Broadcasting Corporation.

In other words, Cody Wilson wants to destroy the very world that makes his printable gun possible, by printing a gun.

What a brave new world, that has such creatures in it.

Why does it remind me of the hippies?  Because they pretty much wanted to live in the world created before they were born without doing much more than taking advantage of the privileges given to them by the accident of their birth.

There weren't too many hippies born into poverty and rejoicing that they had not choice but to continue to live that way.  Not to bash hippies, but monks or the Amish they weren't.  No more than Cody Wilson is an anarchist.

He's just kind of an idiot.

Somethin's happenin' here....

Remington 750 semiautomatic hunting rifle. Remington's marketing material promises "super-fast cycling.... Rapid follow-ups are its specialty, but famed Remington one-shot accuracy comes standard."

When the political becomes the personal, it suddenly becomes very hard to continue to be "political":

Senators who voted against a bipartisan amendment expanding background checks for firearm purchased at gun shows and online refused this week to meet with families impacted by gun violence, citing scheduling conflicts or ignoring requests altogether.

Read the entire post; I don't want to quote it all here.  Clearly politicians are finding it awkward and uncomfortable to vote on abstract issues like "gun rights" and then face real people who suffer the real consequences of a nation awash in guns 'n' ammo.  "Big Ideas" meet human life, and once again, human life loses, and the only way to maintain the sanctity of the Big Idea is to keep human life away from it.

If I rail against ideas and knowledge for its own sake, this is a small part of the reason why.  We have fed to satiety on abstraction.  We have learned, begrudgingly, to not look upon others as members of a "race", and to attribute behaviors and characteristics to that "race" that then tar individuals.  We have learned, at least, to realize we really shouldn't do that, or cover it up with degrees, from "racism" to "prejudice" to simply "I just wouldn't want my daughter to marry one."

But we have not yet learned to place people above ideas; to do the hard work of discerning what is good for society, or just for others, rather than the easy work of serving the Big Idea.  There is a tension there, too, because without an Idea, even a Big Idea, society ceases to function.  But we've turned too hard toward the Idea, and too easily away from the person:  the grieving spouse, the parents of a dead child, the victims of too much violence too easily explained away or simply ignored (how many families from Chicago are traveling to Washington to beard Senators in their offices?  How many of those families would be listened to if they could make that journey?  How many Senators and Representatives are instead seeking them out, as servants of the public?)

Something's happening here; what it is, ain't exactly clear.  But persons are reaching out to persons, telling them not "Beware," but "Listen."  That the persons being addressed don't want to listen, illustrates just how compelling the message is.

Maybe a Big Idea is about to give way to reality.  A consummation devoutly to be wished. And no, the concept of public officials reaching out to the least among us is not a wild abstraction or a fond wish:

"Please to be shutting the pie-hole now"

Well, you knew somebody had to say it:

“Why single out firearms? Why not talk about all the other things that endanger children, too?” [State Rep. Robert R. Damron] said. “The Second Amendment doesn’t give anybody carte blanche freedom to put children and juveniles at risk.”

Guns don't kill people; toddlers kill people.

There is a grain of truth in what  Rep. Damron says:  the 2nd amendment gives you a right to bear arms (according to the Supremes); it doesn't give you a right to use them, though.

But let's take him up on his idea, and consider all the other things that endanger children, too.  10 inch chef's knives, for example.  Or, since this is rural America we're talking about, "hunting and shooting and sport fishing," which all "starts at an early age" (though I don't remember being at risk of killing my little brother with a Zebco rod and reel), how about a deer skinning knife?  I have a Buck knife from high school, with a blade sharp enough to cut open a deer (it never has).  Is it okay to give one of those to a four year old?

How about a machete?  A long, two pronged fork, perfect for inserting into electrical outlets?  Should a kid have one of those of his very own, so he can learn to barbecue just like Poppa?

We don't give a knife to a five year old because the purpose of a knife is to cut things, and 5 year olds don't have the cognitive ability to recognize the dangers of a sharp blade.  Even used as it was designed to be used, a knife will inflict significant damage and we understand that to let small children have access to them is to endanger them.  To tell a child this knife, be it a Buck knife or a chef's knife, is for him, is a form of child abuse.  We would take children out of any such home without a second thought; and we should.

But this is a gun, so it's okay?  This gun did precisely what it was designed to do.  It fired a bullet when the trigger was pulled.  It didn't malfunction and it wasn't misused, except in the sense that the misuse was leaving it where the child could get to it.  The first rule of gun safety (I know this and have never owned a gun in my life) is that all guns are loaded, whether you just unloaded it or not.  This is why you never point a gun at something you don't mean to shoot; because of the risk that you will, when you didn't mean to.

Who in their right mind thinks a 5 year old understands that?  And in what moral universe do we allow such guns to be marketed to children, or defend the possession of such guns for and by children, because other things are dangerous, too?

Charlie Pierce thought this was the worst quote of the day:

"It's a normal way of life. I mean, folks - and it's not just rural Kentucky, it's rural America. I mean folks hunting and fishing, it's sports shooting - it's just a way of life. You know, you begin at an early age, learning to use and respect a gun," said Joe Phelps, Cumberland County Judge Executive, whose position has been described as similar to that of a local mayor.    

I think Rep. Damron tops it.  And I adopt the remainder of Mr. Pierce's post and incorporate his words herein as my own, as well:

Stop.

No.

Also, too: goddammit.

Up with this, I no longer have to put. If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, "learning to use and respect a gun" means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it's sitting in the corner of the parlor like it's a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way "normal" to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too. I do not have to understand these people any more, and it is way too early in the day to be drinking this much.

This gun fetishization has to stop.  "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" applies to the Second Amendment, too.

Update:  as Lawrence O'Donnell points out, neither does anyone market knives or long forks or other dangerous objects to 5 year olds.  But the makers of the Crickett gun do:

“You live in a country where Bill and Steve McNeal legally sell guns for five-year-olds,” O’Donnell concluded. “Tonight, you live in a country where they make and sell guns for little kids. Because they can.”

And there is something profoundly wrong with that.

"Life is Messy"

That phrase was a favorite of my Pastoral Care professor in seminary.  It was almost universally applicable to all problems raised in pastoral ministry, because pastoral ministry is about human beings.  It isn't about communities, or groups, or neighborhoods, or societies, or cities, states, or nations.  It isn't about ideas or theologies or even zeitgeists.  It's about people.  You are only and always and ever just dealing with individuals.

And individuals have lives all their own.  And life is messy.

I look out for any little indication that other people get this.  It shows up on blogs like this.  And sometimes people at blogs like that try to bring this salient fact to the attention of those in power, those who supposedly should be able to do something about some problems, but for whom the major problem in life is getting re-elected.

Or in the case of healthcare, making a profit.

This blog post by Ezra Klein is one about the latter subject.  It's about the fact that we still want a pill, or a program, or a system, to take care of things for us, so we can get on with living our lives just as we see fit.  We condemn the Puritans because we think they were always in everybody else's business; that all of Ne England as lived like a Hawthorne novel, or in the context of witch trials.  But the rough and rude democracy of the Puritans put God directly among them (and their response to that mysterium tremendums was not all that it could be), and meant God cared for every one of them.

It was God that led German immigrants to build hospitals and orphanages and mental care facilities in the St. Louis area without the wealth of industry behind them, without captains of capitalism to finance the buildings and the operations.  They understood, intimately, that life was messy, and that the mentally ill and the orphan and the sick were their brothers and sisters, their charge and their responsibility and their blessing to serve, even if those people only spoke the same language they did, and otherwise had nothing in common with them.

And today, after all our progress?  Hospitals are for profit and medicine works when it makes money:

In 1895, 14 women came together to form Doylestown’s “Village Improvement Association,” which was dedicated to “the health and beauty” of the community. The association actually owned Doylestown Hospital, and its mission was the hospital’s mission. “I did get some heat from my senior management team,” Reif says. “When you’re doing annual budgets you see reduction in revenue. But I could always come back and say, ‘Wasn’t that our responsibility?’ ”

But not all hospitals are run by the local Village Improvement Association. Many seek to turn a profit. That makes models like Health Quality Partners something of a threat. “If we scaled what Ken is doing,” Brenner says, “you would probably shut down a third of the hospitals in the country. It’s a disruptive innovation. It just guts the current business model.”

 Because the "current business model" serves Mammon, not God.  

When was the last time we dedicated anything to the "Health and Beauty" of the community, and it wasn't just a public park or an arena with a corporate logo attached to it, open to those with the money to afford entry?

Read Ezra's post.  It's long; it will take time.  Just the length alone might mess up your day.  Life is messy.  Caring for others is messy.  We can't reduce it to a pill, we can't make it convenient to our needs to shop and watch TV and play on the internet and update our Facebook status or keep our job by working from home even if we work at work.  Life is messy.

And in our quest for efficiency and the perfection of the machine, of the computer, of the path of least resistance to what end we really don't know because it would take too long to stop to consider, we are making it messier.

But we don't have to.

My Brother's Keeper

I really did not know this until I heard it on BBC World Service today:

On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. Between April 25 and May 4, workers attended scores of meetings and paraded through the streets at least 19 times. On Saturday, May 1, 35,000 workers walked off their jobs. Tens of thousands more, both skilled and unskilled, joined them on May 3 and 4. Crowds traveled from workplace to workplace urging fellow workers to strike. Many now adopted the radical demand of eight hours' work for ten hours' pay. Police clashed with strikers at least a dozen times, three with shootings.
....
 Inspired by the American movement for a shorter workday, socialists and unionists around the world began celebrating May 1, or “May Day,” as an international workers' holiday. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries officially adopted it. The Haymarket tragedy is remembered throughout the world in speeches, murals, and monuments. American observance was strongest in the decade before World War I. During the Cold War, many Americans saw May Day as a Communist holiday, and President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as “Loyalty Day” in 1955. 

Which explains my ignorance; born in the wrong year....

And the Pope said:

"Living on 38 euros ($59) a month - that was the pay of these people who died. That is called slave labour." Francis said in a private impromptu sermon at his personal morning Mass in his residence, Vatican Radio reported.

"Not paying a just wage, not giving work, only because one is looking at the bottom line, at the budget of the company, seeking only profit - that is against God".

"Today in the world there is this slavery that is perpetrated with the most beautiful thing that God has given man: the capacity to create, to work, to make his own dignity," he said.

"How many brothers and sisters in the world are in this situation because of these economic, social and political policies?"

"Dignity is not bestowed by power, by money, by culture - no! Dignity is bestowed by work. Social, political and economic systems have made a choice that signifies exploiting the individual."

"Work is fundamental to the dignity of a person. I think of how many, and not just young people, are unemployed, many times due to a purely economic conception of society, which seeks selfish profit, beyond the parameters of social justice."

When disaster strikes in America, whether man made or natural, we resent any implication that the victims are at fault.  But when the problem is a failure of the system that is supposed to provide us all with dignity, with "the capacity to create, to work," we blame the individual.

We are all responsible; which does not mean we are all at fault.  If we took the responsibility more seriously, the need for fault would all but disappear.

FSM, my a**

TC inadvertently directs me here, where I find some interesting assumptions being tossed about as "data":

A British journalist contacted me about this recently and we talked about M-theory and its problems. She wanted me to comment on whether physicists doing this sort of thing are relying upon “faith” in much the same way as religious believers. I stuck to my standard refusal to get into such discussions, but, thinking about it, have to admit that the kind of pseudo-science going on here and being promoted in this book isn’t obviously any better than the faith-based explanations of how the world works favored by conventional religions. (emphasis added)

I know it's a throw-away line, but I'm really unaware of any "faith-based explanations of how the world works" that are favored by "conventional religions."  There are creation stories, which can be read as metaphysical explanations of physical phenomena; or they can be read as stories explaining the connection between the created and the god(s) identified by those religions.  We don't have a problem reading Homer or Sophocles this way; not that the gods must interfere with the battle for Troy, or Apollo must have personally cursed Thebes in order to expose the crimes of Oedipus.  We can understand those terms to be explanations of human nature and society that transcend the particular personalities of individuals.  Do Homer and Sophocles really require us to adopt a "faith based explanation of how the world works"?  And what is a "faith based explanation" anyway, if not the line William James challenged:  "believing what you know ain't so"?

It was a Jesuit priest who formulated the Big Bang theory (I know, I know; I run that one into the ground).  But "conventional religions" no more offer alternative "faith based explanations" of how the world works than they offer alternatives to conventional Western medicine and mental health treatments.  Hell, some of the best hospitals in this country are affiliated with mainline Christian denominations.  If medical care isn't one of the most direct applications to daily life of "how the world works," I don't know that is.

So I nit-pick.  But then there's also this:

Toward the end of the meeting [in Sweden, 1990], everyone piled into a bus and drove to a nearby village to hear a concert in a Lutheran church. When the scientists entered the church, it was already packed. The orchestra, a motley assortment of blond-haired youths and wizened, bald elders clutching violins, clarinets and other instruments, was seated at the front of the church. Their neighbors jammed the balconies and seats at the rear of the building.

The scientists filed down the center aisle to pews reserved for them at the front of the church. Hawking, grinning ear to ear, led the way in his motorized wheelchair. The townspeople started to clap, tentatively at first, then passionately. These religious folk seemed to be encouraging the scientists, and especially Hawking, in their quest to solve the riddle of existence.

I get that part of this is a slap at Stephen Hawking's celebrity status (he's been in cartoons and even TV shows!).  He's certainly the most identifiable physicist since Einstein.  But here's part of the issue:  were the people there all "religious folk"?  Churches are grand places for musical concerts.  They don't all have to be performed in concert halls.  And concerts in churches don't all have to be religious occasions, nor occasions for worship.  Churches usually have a space built to accommodate large numbers of people, which make them make good gathering places, especially in villages which may not have conference centers and large buildings devoted to secular gatherings only.

But, again, more to the point, why are "religious folk" antithetical to scientific understanding?  Isn't that assumption a little, I don't know, parochial?  I never, in my entire life, was taught by my family or my Sunday school teachers, or anyone, that science was at odds with my Christianity or my religious beliefs in general.  I'm no physicist by any stretch, but to this day I maintain a decent lay understanding of science (M-theory is opaque to me, but still, I'm no ignoramus).

And yes, I know that's the popular opinion thanks to fundamentalists and "Inherit the Wind" and a lot of other jibber-jabber.  But seriously; if you're going to comment on subjects outside your narrow field of expertise, either admit your ignorance, or remain silent.

Putting your ignorance on display so openly only shows how much you know about how very little, and how very little you know about very, very much.

I think. I think I am. Therefore I am. I think.

We begin with Eddington:

I find a difficulty in understanding books on philosophy because they talk a great deal about "existence",  and I do not know what they mean.  Existence seems to be a rather important property, because I gather that one of the main sources of division between different schools of philosophy is the question of whether certain things exist or not.  But I cannot even begin to understand these issues, because I can find no explanation of the term "exist".

The word "existence" is, of course, familiar in everyday speech;  but it does not express a uniform idea - a universally agreed principle according to which things can be divided into existing and non-existing.   Difference of opinion as to whether a thing exists or not sometimes arises because the thing itself is imperfectly defined,  or because the exact implications of the definition have not been grasped;  thus the "real existence" of electrons, aether, space, colour, may be affirmed or denied because different persons use these terms with somewhat different implications.  But ambiguity of definition is not always responsible for the difference of view.  Let us take something familiar, say an overdraft at a bank.  No one can fail to understand precisely what that means.  Is an overdraft something which exists?  If the question were put to a vote,  I think some would say that its existence must be accepted as a grim reality,  and others would consider it illogical to concede existence to what is intrinsically a negation.  But what divides the two parties is no more than a question of words.  It would be absurd to divide mankind into two sects,  the one believing in the existence of overdrafts and the other denying their existence.  The division is a question of classification, not of belief.  If you tell me your own answer,  I shall not learn anything new about the nature or properties of an overdraft;  but I shall learn something about your usage of the term "exists"  -  what category of things you intend it to cover.

It is a primitive form of thought that things either exist or do not exist;  and the concept of a category of things possessing existence results from forcing our knowledge into a corresponding frame of thought.  Everyone does this instinctively;  but there are borderline cases in which all do not employ the same criteria,  as an example of the overdraft shows.  A philosopher is not bound by traditional or instinctive conventions to the same extent as a layman; and when he similarly expresses his knowledge in this primitive frame of thought, it is impossible to guess what classificatory system he will adopt.  It would be rather surprising if all philosophers adopted the same system.  In any case I do not see why such a mystery should be made of it,  nor how an arbitrary decision as to the classification to be adopted has come to be transformed into a fervid philosophical belief.

I do not want to make sweeping charges on the basis of a very limited reading of philosophy.  I am aware that in the recondite works the meaning of the term is sometimes discussed.  But, after all, philosophers do occasionally write for the layman;  and some of them seek to repel the scientific invader in language which he is supposed to understand.  What I complain of is that these writers do not seem to realise that the term "exist", if they do not explain the meaning they attach to it, must necessarily be as bewildering to the scientists  as, for example, the term "curvature of space", if left unexplained, would be to the philosopher.  and I think it is not an unfair inference from this omission that they themselves attach more importance to the word than to its meaning.

It is not every sentence containing the verb " to exist" that troubles me,.  The term is often used in an intelligible way.  for me ( and, it appears, also for my dictionary) "exists" is a rather emphatic form of "is".  "A thought eists in somebody's mind," i.e. a thought is in somebody's mind - I can understand that.  " A state of war exists in Ruritania,"  i.e. a state of war is in Ruritania -  not very good English, but intelligible.  but when a philosopher says "Familiar chairs and tables exist", i.e. familiar chairs and tales are....,  I wait for him to conclude.  Yes:  What were you going to say they are?  But he never finishes the sentences/  and I do not know what to make of it.

Speech is often elliptical,  and I do not mind unfinished sentences if I know how they are meant to be finished.  "A horrible noise exists"  presumably is intended to be completed in such form as " A horrible noise is- disturbing me".  But that is not how the philosopher intends me to complete his unfinished statement. "noises actually exist " - and I really have no idea what completion he does intend.  I myself, when I am not intimidated by the existence* of critics determined to make nonsense of my words if it is possible to do so, often say that atoms and electrons exist.  I mean, of course, that they exist - or are - in the physical world,  that being the theme of discussion in the context.  We need not examine the precise ellipsis by which a mathematician says that the root of an equation exists, when he means that the equation has a root;  it is sufficient to say that he has no idea of putting forward a claim to include the root of a mathematical equation in the category of things which philosophers speak of as "really existing".

In the preceding chapters I have discussed a number of things which exist in the physical universe;  that is to say, that are in, or are parts of the physical universe.  We have seen that "to exist in",  even in the equivalent expression " to be part of", is not free from ambiguity,  and is made definite only by the conventions discussed in connection with the concept of analysis.  The question whether the physical universe itself exists has not arisen.  I have, in fact, avoided saying that it exists - which would be an unfinished sentence.  Ordinarily it would be unnecessary to be so particular.  The existence or non-existence of things is a primitive form of thought; and, if I had used the term, it would mean no more than that I was forcing our observational knowledge into such a frame** as it is forced into several other frames that we have discussed.  Knowing, however that as philosophers we must seek to get behind these forms of thought,  I have thought it best in this book to avoid introducing it even temporarily.

* No;  you have not caught me this time.  The critics intimidate me just as much, whether philosophy concedes to them "real existence" or not.

** If we wish the assertion to mean more than the expression of a primitive form of thought, we say "really exists".

Eddington has a point.  Wading through Heidegger's Zein und Seit, one never does quite grasp what "Being" is.  Well, not as a concrete object. Then again, one can read Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic and still have no clear idea what "Beauty" is.  And frankly, the physicist who explains to me patiently and deliberately the tenets of quantum mechanics is just repeating so many words, to me.  Jargon, really.  The physicist insists the concept of quantum mechanics, or even Einsteinian physics, have reality.  I, ultimately, just have to accept that as true.

I've read a very detailed, very technical account of how an internal combustion engine actually manages to produce power.  The explanation went down to the molecular level of the combustion of the fuel, IIRC.  I'm sure it was soundly reasoned and based on the finest understanding of scientific principles and informed engineering.  It still just meant the car starts when the key turns and there's gas in the tank, and all the systems of the automobile function as they were designed to.  It doesn't really make it clearer to me that the engine exists, or that the power it generates has reality.

These are, in other words, enormously slippery concepts.  As I often tell my students, I can't bring abstract concepts like "Justice" or "Beauty" into the classroom so they can identify them the next time they see them.  What is "Justice"?  Where does it come from?  What does it look like?  How do you define it?

Lawyers and politicians have been working on that one for centuries, and so far the closest we've gotten is that we know it when we don't see it.  Could I ever meaningfully say that Justice exists?  And would I mean it in the same way as saying that a platypus exists?

What Eddington is encountering is what Wittgenstein called "language games."  We use words in different ways depending on so many different things:  culture, context, meaning.  And "meaning" is hardly what's confined to the dictionary (which is not the objective arbiter of language after all; dictionaries since Samuel Johnson's day have only recorded the way words are used.  "Awful" for example, once meant "full of awe."  But even if a dictionary insisted that was the only meaning of the word today, we'd consider it a pretty awful definition.).  Wittgenstein argued this confusion arising from such freewheeling use of language as if it were the stuff of reality is what leads to most philosophical conundrums, like:  "How far is up?" or "How long is a piece of string?"

Okay, okay, but seriously, folks.  Take my wife:  please!

I digress....

We can say, for example, that a stone exists.  That's a perfectly sensible English statement which does not seem immediately contradictory or strange, especially if the stone is large and you just stubbed your toe on it.  Clearly it exists apart from your perception of it, or you wouldn't have run your toe against it in the first place (you didn't perceive it until your toe struck it).  But would we also say a stone has existence?  Even if we aren't quite sure just how to define "existence," we'd hesitate to use this sentence, this concept.  Conversely, we can easily say a unicorn does not exist.  Yet it isn't the same thing as saying a unicorn doesn't have existence.

I mean, neither does a stone.

Now it's a bit clearer, to be fair to Heidegger, why Being and existence don't get squarely defined in his philosophy; especially since his philosophy is all about the nature of Being and existence.

What, then, is "existence"?  What do we mean when we say we have existence?  Eddington insists it is "primitive thought" (by which he means to be pejorative.  But "primitive" is almost as acceptable in discourse today as the "n-word" is.  It's a bit too harsh, in other words.  We stumble over it.  Well, I do, anyway.  "Primitive thought" is too simplistic a concept for me, too dismissive. It smacks of arrogance.), but is it really "primitive" (or just simplistic) to think in terms of existence or non-existence, of either/or?

A stone exists, or it doesn't.  And it has existence; or it doesn't.  Now, whether that gets us anywhere worthwhile, whether that tells us anything worth knowing, is worthy of debate.  But it is primitive to examine the issue?  I don't think so.

Do humans have existence?  We're back to Kierkegaard's question; because, if we have it, what is it we have, and how do we prove it?  How do we establish existence?

But what is this unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man [sic] and his self-knowledge? It is the unknown. But it is not a human being, insofar as he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let us call this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it. It hardly occurs to the understanding to want to demonstrate that this unknown (the god) exists. If, namely the god does not exist, then of course it is impossible to demonstrate it. But if he does exist, then of course it is foolishness to want to demonstrate it, since I, in the very moment the demonstration commences, would presuppose it not as doubtful--which a presupposition cannot be, inasmuch as it is a presupposition--but as decided, because otherwise I would not begin, easily perceiving that the whole thing would be impossible if he did not exist. If, however, I interpret the expression "to demonstrate the existence of the god" to mean that I want to demonstrate that the unknown, which exists, is the god, than I do not express myself very felicitously, for then I demonstrate nothing, least of all an existence, but I develop the definiteness of a concept. 

I start there not because I'm interested in establishing the existence of God; but because S.K. gets us to this question of establishing existence at all, through the arguments about the existence of God.  As the argument goes:  if what you seek to establish as existing doesn't have existence, then it is impossible to establish that it exists (which takes us back to my example of the stone.  But even if the stone exists, are we now willing to say the stone has existence?  If so, what do we mean by that, now?).  If it does exist, then why demonstrate it?  From there the argument slides into the establishment of a concept ("the unknown"), and away form our purposes.  But it is still a good prologue to what follows:

It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists--worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

And our stone comes back for us to stumble over again!  It cannot be proven that a stone exists, or, in our example, has existence.  But we can establish that this thing which exists (look!  It's in my hand!  Even now it breaks forth!  Can you not perceive it?!) is a stone.  We can, in other words, identify it.  We can name it.

Never underestimate the power of naming.  Many have pointed out over the centuries it was the first power given to Adam.

But to prove existence, as Kiekegaard says, I continually start with the presupposition of existence.  This is, among other things, the bedrock principle of existentialism, although Sartre used it to turn against essentialism (which is another line of argument entirely).  Our question is this: if we are presupposing existence, what, precisely, are we presupposing?  That this stone in my hand exists because it has mass, weight, breadth, hardness?  Is that all it takes to exist?  Is that what existence comes down to?

Does the mind exist, then?  Eddington speaks approvingly of thoughts existing in the mind.  Does the mind have mass, weight, breadth, hardness?  Does a thought?

And we don't get any closer to a definition if we choose to settle on a single individual as our example:

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advance interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed he exists.

 Kierkegaard points out that existence can never be demonstrated.  But, again, this presupposes a definition of existence which is not itself clearly defined.  We've come quite a long way and gotten no further along.  Or maybe we have.

Existence seems to be a rather important property, because I gather that one of the main sources of division between different schools of philosophy is the question of whether certain things exist or not.  But I cannot even begin to understand these issues, because I can find no explanation of the term "exist".

Actually, the distinction between the Continental and Anglo-American schools of Western philosophy is not over whether "things" exist or not, but over whether existence itself is an important concept worth considering.  Kierkegaard follows the older line, the one that began to fall apart into the two schools we have now when European philosophy tripped over the stone of the Scot David Hume, and the German Immanuel Kant put the pieces back together again.  But before that split took hold and produced the flowering of the two schools, the consensus was pretty much here:  "Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated."

Indeed, why should it be?  How could it be?

We are up against the pretty problem of not being able to find what you don't know what to look for.  It's a basic issue in science:  if you don't know to look for it, you'll never find it.  If we don't know how to identify existence, to explain the term we are using, how are we ever going to demonstrate it?

Or are we stuck with Potter Stewart's definition of pornography?

Definitions are important in discussions.  Then again, Socrates should have taught us by now the perils of definition.  Just before his trial he meets the priest Euthyphro, who has brought an action for impiety against his father, whose negligence (and, we would say, cruelty, but we are anachronisms here) has resulted in the death of a slave.  Impressed with Euthyphro's piety, Socrates asks the priest to explain the concept to him, so that he, too (Socrates) will understand.

By the end of the dialogue Euthyphro has abandoned his suit and fled the scene, as the only possible way to escape Socrates' persistent destruction of every definition Euthyphro boldly puts forward.  Kierkegaard identified precisely this kind of "Socratic method" as the "Concept of Irony," and pointed out just how ultimately destructive and nihilistic the pursuit is.  Not, mind, without saying it has a value; just not the value we usually think it has.

So there are perils to insisting that definitions will give us, finally and precisely, clarity.  Definitions will only establish the boundaries of how we use a word and, as Socrates pointed out with poor Euthyphro as his foil (then again, Euthyphro is arrogant and we enjoy seeing his pompous balloon getting punctured), we use words in such contradictory and ultimately conflicting ways, and usually just to justify what we already want to think, or do.

Which sounds terribly cynical; but sometimes such cynicism can be the beginning of wisdom.