179. What's wrong with TRTC?

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Zuckerberg

Our local tech superstars are competing to have hospitals named after them. I haven't yet visited Marc Benioff's UCSF Children's Hospitals in SF and Oakland, but last week I walked around the new Zuckerberg SF General Hospital and it is quite the impressive building. And since SFGH is the main trauma center for this area, this is undoubtedly money well spent. Here are a couple shots of the building,

This is a sculpture near the entrance with the new building on the right and one of the (grand) original wings on the left.

This time the new is on the left and the old on the right. The brickwork is intended to tie the buildings together visually. 

First let me say that I wasn't intending to document the building when I was there, so I just shot what interested me visually. You can find info on the hospital HERE and better views of the building HERE. The brickwork that is the most obvious link to the older buildings is at the very top where it it almost invisible from street level. From the rooftop garden you can see that brickwork, but you can't see the older buildings so there is no context. 

In general, the interior of the hospital looks less like a government institution and more like a corporate building with lots of art and high end materials on view.

Heading off to lunch after touring SFGH, we ran into a curious little structure only a block or two away that is seemingly stuck in time. Again, I didn't capture the structure as a whole, only some details that I loved. I think this was originally a filling station and garage and it is still a garage,

I'm such a sucker for outside lighting fixtures here and...

...also here. But, surprisingly, that isn't what first caught my eye.

I'm not sure what these things did, but I'm guessing either air or water that you could pull down to service a car.

So what's wrong with The Road To Character?

If there really was an obvious lesson to learn from studying these lives, it would have been best to just lay them out there and let the reader make the connections. Obviously, you would present the biographies in a way that you would hope would emphasize the similarities. In The Brothers K, Dostoevsky laid out his characters and plot for the reader to make sense of, and then, just to be safe, followed up with the prosecutors speech at the end of the trial where he made sure his interpretation or intention was not overlooked by the reader. 

Here Brooks starts out talking about the points he plans to make (using a confusing variety of different terms and dichotomies), then presents the stories (with constant references to what he hopes to be showing), and than ends with a treatise on his moral topic that his character studies contradict as often as they support.

Becoming Wise was an awkward re-purposing of interview content for other mediums. This is a sophomoric mashup of "things I read this summer." Of course, for my purposes, this makes for a juicy read. It ranks right up there with the delightfully irritating Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler. 

Still, there is a sense in which Brooks's conclusions aren't wrong. The values he's talking about -- and the benefits one derives from accepting them -- are the same as (and were much more convincingly presented) in the account of the illness and death of Zosima's older brother in The Brothers K. (And reprized at least one more time in the novel.) And this is also the conclusion Victoria Sweet arrived at at the end of God's Hotel, with respect to the patient who required AA to get free of his chemical dependence problems (and so Annie Lamott is also a much better spokesperson for Brooks's position.)

Finally, because this is my blog, I have to add that Brooks's value system is also the equivalent of the Berghof in The Magic Mountain, the place Joachim Ziemssen finally agreed to return to when he had burned through his last shot at living in the flat land. It's a refuge, but it isn't really living. I'm overstating the case, but then, so does Brooks.


This brings to an end my coverage of The Road to Character. And I have nothing else ready to go, so there will be another gap of unknown duration.

Postscript

I almost forgot something. So there's this thing called Nextdoor.com that is a sort of community bulletin board and gossip tool. A week or so ago I was invited to join the one for this neighborhood and signed up. It seems to be equal parts informative and annoying. Yesterday I finally got the first weird and wonderful posting of the type I was hoping for. Here's the quote:

Some guy named Danny McCullough posted on here about needing a hammer to borrow a few weeks ago. I met up with him, and let him borrow my nice, heavy duty hammer. After reaching out a few times to try and retrieve it, I'm putting Danny on blast. 

If Danny the tool thief posts about needing to "borrow" anything else, don't do it. I'm certain that he has no intention of returning items. I also think he probably is a collector of borrowed things.

Here we have moral romanticism turning into moral realism. William Godwin turning into Edmund Burke -- at least that's the way I see it. 

Next - 180. Kite Festival 2017

178. Big vs Little Me

Previous - 177. Johnson & Montaigne

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The Big Me

This is Brooks's wrapping up chapter. He starts out talking about the cultural shift represented by Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath in Super Bowl III. Unitas represents the traditional "Little Me" values Brooks is advocating for, while Namath is a classic "Big Me" figure. He goes on to identify Unitas with moral realism and Namath with moral romanticism. He doesn't talk about 18th and 19th century romanticism. (If he had, he could have brought up the shift to valuing this world over the next. Brooks seems to have less of a grip on what is the source of the problem he's warning about than Dostoevsky had over a century earlier.) Instead, he sees the Greatest Generation as turning its back on moral realism as a result of the Depression and WW2. (If he were British, he would probably push this back to the Lost Generation after the Great War.)

All this puts me in an awkward position. I'm a realist (Burkean conservative) and I blame the Greatest Generation (or their parents) for the transition to an auto-centric national infrastructure following the war. I have no problem with Brooks throwing some moral stones in their direction as well.

This is similar to the (quite natural) tendency to blame those damn Millennials for everything wrong with the world today, forgetting that the Millennials are literally the children of Boomer values.


The Soul of Man Under Meritocracy
p251 The purification of the mertocracy has also reinforced the idea that each of us is wonderful inside. It has also encouraged self-aggrandizing tendencies... You have, like me, spent your life trying to make something of yourself, trying to have an impact, trying to be reasonably successful in this world. That's meant lot of competition and a lot of emphasis on individual achievement... moving toward success and status. 

How is this different from Johnson and the exemplar strivers in this book?

This competitive pressure meant that we all have to spend more time, energy, and attention on the external Adam I climb toward success and we have less time, energy, and attention to devote to the internal world of Adam II. [Still not seeing this.]

I've found in myself, and I think I've observed in others, a certain meritocratic mentality, which is based on the self-trusting, self-puffing insights of the Romantic tradition, but which is also depoeticized and despiritualized. If moral realists saw the self as a wilderness to be tamed, and if people in the New Age 1970s saw the self as an Eden to be actualized, people living in a high-pressure meritocracy are more likely to see the self as a resource base to be cultivated. The self is less likely to be seen as the seat of the soul, or as the repository of some transcendent spirit. Instead, the self is a vessel of human capital. It is a series of talents to be cultivated efficiently and prudently... The self is about talent, not character.

Once again, and hopefully for the last time, I would know what Dostoevsky was getting at here but with Brooks I'm at a loss. He seems to be praising classic middle class character and values while sniping at middle class meritocracy. 

p253 The shrewd [meritocratic] animal has streamlined his inner humanity to make his ascent more aerodynamic. He carefully manages his time and his emotional commitments. Things once done in a poetic frame of mind, such as going to college, meeting a potential lover, or bonding with an employer, are now done in a more professional frame of mind. Is this person, opportunity, or experience of use to me? There just isn't time to get carried away by love and passion... If you commit to one big thing you will close off options toward other big things. You will be plagued by a Fear of Missing Out.

Now, starting on page 262, we get Brooks's list of propositions that make up a "Humility Code" intended to address the flaws in our meritocracy. 1. has to do with "holiness" and 2. and 3. concern our flawed nature and tendency to sin. I love it when people jump into drawing up an ethics before tackling metaphysics or meta-ethics. Are we all supposed to be closeted Christians, just needing a gentle prod to follow Alyosha into the monastery? 

It's true of course that if this book contained a full-throated call to Jesus, I wouldn't be reading it, but this goes beyond burying the lede to not even mentioning the main point. I suppose he is leaving it to Dorothy Day and Augustine to speak for him here. And I have to wonder if his failure to include any Jewish people indicates he identifies Jews with the middle class world order he is attacking? That would surprise me, as he hasn't seemed to think things through that far in what he's actually written.

I'm in the middle of his "Humility Code" now. We are deep into "the struggle against sin and for virtue," "Character is built on your inner confrontation" and achieving "self-mastery." And all this reminds me of Dorothy Day's daughter Tamar. Granted, all I know about her is the few sentences Brooks has given us, but as I've already compared her to Lizaveta, I think I'm safe in using her as an example of someone who doesn't struggle with self-mastery and sin. It's interesting that people like this are of very little interest to people like Brooks. Someone who is a natural in this respect seems to be less worthy than someone who can only avoid sin (some of the time) with the daily help of Jesus and all the saints.

I'm still not sure what Dostoevsky meant to show by contrasting Lizaveta with the monks -- who were so like high school Mean Girls. Perhaps he simply wanted a moral opposite of Fyodor so he could breed them and get Pavel. Regardless, he presents her as someone who is naturally good. Just as Brooks gives us Montaigne who is naturally (or at least as a result of nature and nurture both) reasonable and comparatively untroubled. I'm actually surprised Brooks included him since he can do so little with him aside from contrasting him with Johnson.

AIDS Walk

Today I took the bus all the way out to Golden Gate Park to work only four hours at the AIDS Walk event. Take a moment to think well of me... I'll wait.

The truth here is that I missed Oyster Fest (not sure why) so when I saw this event posted my first thought was "Pass" but then I saw "at Sharon Meadow" and realized it would be an excuse to have a late breakfast at the Pork Store, where I haven't been since April when they raised their prices. So really I'm just getting paid to have my favorite breakfast and put in a fairly token four hours of work in the park. Or so I thought.

This is as difficult as an even gets without being Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Lots of sponsors buying too much food and coffee to hand out and then throwing the rest away at the end. And the walk started and ended late so the cleanup was also delayed. And we were as poorly organized as I've ever seen us. At the end of the day, no one was in charge. 

The result was a pile of bags and trashed boxes like we rarely see these days, and only a couple people left to deal with it all. Two additional people were called in to take charge while I stayed an additional couple hours and the others also worked past their scheduled quitting time.

I had almost forgotten how much I hate back-end sorting but doing some without tables to sort on or cans to sort into quickly reminded me. We also ran out of space in the dumpsters. It was a mess.

But here's what I don't know, Would it have gone better if I had been doing my usual roving sorting a couple hours earlier (and thus longer)? Actually I do know it would have gone better, but would it have made enough of a difference to prevent the mess at the end. Maybe. Maybe not.

Next - 179. What's wrong with TRTC?

177. Johnson & Montaigne

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Johnson & Montaigne

Finally back to Montaigne. Reading this, short, section is such a pleasure to me. This is a mongrel of a book, I'm not sure all these people really fit together in any meaningful way, regardless of how many This or That categories you come up with. And Montaigne is the one who is most out of place. He's comfortable in his own skin and amused by what he finds in the world and in himself. He's philosophical in the best sense of the term.

But he also, if only by contrast, shows how all these other people are either naturally, or because of the culture they grew up in, at odds with their nature and struggling -- mostly unsuccessfully -- against themselves. This reminds me of the Buddhist/Hindu tendency to want to transcend and stop the wheel from turning, which is countered by the tantra (I think?) notion that even transcendence is something of an illusion. That there's nothing wrong with this world we are already in.

Montaigne would understand that, but Augustine and Day and Johnson would not. This book is supposedly about character building, but there is a sense in which our characters can't be altered. Day and Johnson could perpetually struggle against their character, but they could not transcend it. Even Eisenhower was at best able to keep a lid on his temper most of the time. He never became a person who didn't have issues with anger management. "The Road to Recovery" might have been a better title for this book. 

It should come as no surprise that Brooks's judgement of Johnson and Montaigne is rather different than mine,

p234  We can each of us decide if we are a little more like Montaigne or a little more like Johnson, or which master we can learn from on which occasion. For my part I'd say that Johnson, through arduous effort, built a superior greatness. He was more a creature of the active world... Most important, Johnson understood that it takes some hard pressure to sculpt a character... There has to be some pushing, some sharp cutting, and hacking. It has to be done in confrontation with the intense events of the real world, not in retreat from them. Montaigne had such a genial nature, maybe he could be shaped through gentle observation. Most of us will end up mediocre and self-forgiving if we try to do that.

I have to confess that I've been unfair to Johnson and Brooks both by not including the account of Johnson's childhood and youth. That he achieved so much is truly astonishing, and a great story of someone overcoming every obstacle in life. My point is that, while he became a great success (and I do envy his association with Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and the rest), as presented here by Brooks, he did not become a particularly happy person. Though this may just mean that I would not want to trade places with him while I could trade places with Montaigne. (Perhaps "trade minds", would be a better way of putting it.)

And Brooks isn't blind to the difference in the two that I'm talking about,

p236  ...He [Johnson] never achieved the equanimity that seems to have marked Montaigne's mature years, or the calmness and reserve he admired in others. He lived all his life with periodic feelings of despair, depression, shame, masochism, and guilt...

Bastille Day

I've been greening events now for 10 years and I have to say that this was the oddest one I've ever worked. When I arrived at 11:00 AM, the vendors were all setup and doing a bit of business. There was a stage for music that was still being hooked-up. The music didn't start until 6 PM, and that's when a crowd finally arrived and the vendors started taking down their booths. 

There was never much in the way of trash for us to sort. I pulled from all the stations on a regular basis, but I had to wait between each round to give the trash some time to build up. After 6 PM the "beer garden" finally got crowded so there was a steady stream of empty wine bottles to pull, but that was the only time a trash can got full.

Which brings me to the highlight of my day. After my second or third trip to empty the wine bottle can (and also collect the packing material used to protect the bottles -- it's the same paper product used in egg cartons, but bigger, though still very light in weight) I suggested to the crew chief that we take another can to them so they would have a backup and thus wouldn't run out of space even if we were delayed in cleaning out the cans. 

He came with me bringing the can and we cleaned out everything that vendor had and set them up with the backup can. But then we noticed the vendor next to them had a stack of the same paper packing thingies. We were on the other side of a little fence and couldn't reach them, but Tyler finally got the attention of someone at that other vendor station. First the guy was very suspicious of what we wanted with the pile of trash, as though we were random people trying to steal something valuable. Once we convinced him (green shirts with company logo and trash toter being our tokens of authority) he proceeded to hand them to Tyler one at a time, rather than just picking up the entire pile which together weight almost nothing. We were cracking up. Tyler was going to carry them to the dumpsters, but I still had room in the toter and said that, and added that he should just give them to me... one at a time.

Perhaps we had been in the hot sun too long.

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176. Grace & satori

Previous - 175. Agency

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Grace

There's a long quote from Paul Tillich about the nature of grace, 

p206 ... "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much... Simply accept the fact that you are accepted." If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.
...

p207 If you are passionately in love with a person [see chapter on George Eliot], you naturally seek to delight her all the time. You want to buy her presents... This is a replica of the way those who feel touched by grace seek to delight God. [I'm sticking with my notion that it works the other way, that grace is an extension of the other love.] They take pleasure in tasks that might please him. They work tirelessly at tasks that they think might glorify him. The desire to rise up and meet God's love can arouse mighty energies.

...In prayer, people gradually reform their desires so that more and more they want the things they believe will delight God rather than the things they used to think would delight themselves.
...

... One day you turn around and notice that everything inside has been realigned...

I suppose the high you get at the end of a workout is a kind of grace. And if you chase that high, you will indeed slowly change yourself as you get in better and better condition. I'm not even going to judge people who chase the high that follows pain -- as in S&M. But to personify the source of this feeling and then draw moral conclusions (out of what, exactly?) is where I think people start running into trouble. 

Is a convoluted narrative about an invisible sky fairy really any worse than an odd (to me) S&M fetish scene? Probably not. And it obviously works for some people -- at least in the same sense that methadone maintenance "works."

p210 Describing a spiritual conversation Augustine had with his mother shortly before her death,  ...the tumult of the flesh was hushed, all dreams and shallow visions were hushed, tongues were hushed, everything that passes away was hushed, the self was hushed in moving beyond the self into a sort of silence... And Augustine and Monica heard God's word "not through any tongue of flesh, or Angels' voices, not sound or thunder, nor in the dark riddle of similitude," but they heard "his very Self." And they sighed after a moment of pure understanding.

Clearly a meditative state. I'm even thinking of Zen here, like the moment in The Elegance of the Hedgehog when Paloma is alone in the kitchen watching a flower petal (?) fall. And I'm much more comfortable with that interpretation. 

Augustine is describing a perfect moment of elevation... All the clamors of the world slip into silence. Then a desire to praise the creator comes over them, but then even that praise is hushed amid the kenosis, the self-emptying. And then comes the infusing vision of eternal wisdom, what Augustine calls the "glad hidden depths." ...
...

p211 ... If you set out trying to achieve inner peace and a sense of holiness, you won't get it. That happens only obliquely, when your attention is... focused on something external. That happens only as a byproduct of a state of self-forgetfulness, when your energies are focused on something large.

Now, of course, I'm thinking of Levin as well as of Paloma, but I don't get the "something large."

I'm not at all confident that my "Methodist" interpretation of Absalom Absalom! would be shared by the author, but I have more confidence (thanks to our shared interest in philosophy) that Barbery would share my focus on these two apparently isolated passages in Hedgehog. Tolstoy would give Levin's moment of grace a Christian interpretation probably also involving kenosis. But I think Barbery would be interested in what his moment scything away in the fields had in common with Paloma's moment of Zen satori. And it only makes my skin crawl when you try to bring in "The Book."

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175. Agency

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Agency

p204 ... You may have the feeling that you are on trial in this life, that you have to work and achieve and make your mark to earn a good verdict... But as Tim Keller put it, in Christian thought, the trial is already over. The verdict came in before you even began your presentation. That's because Jesus stood trial for you. He took the condemnation that you deserve.

...

A little confused here, since, as I understand it, Calvin and the Puritans wouldn't entirely agree with this. You work hard in this life to show that you are among the Elect. (Though it's true that the outcome is already decided.) The Protestant Work Ethic would seem to demand a bit more effort than the Catholic or Russian Orthodox traditions. Though I can see the Grand Inquisitor selling this concept of "surrender and receptivity to God." This is how we surrender our freedom which is too much for us to bear.

The problem with the willful mindset is, as Jennifer Herdt put it in her book Putting On Virtue, "God wants to give us a gift, and we want to buy it." We continually want to earn salvation and meaning through work and achievement. But salvation and meaning are actually won, in this way of thinking, when you raise the white flag of surrender and allow grace to flood your soul.

... Augustine wants you to adopt this sort of surrendered posture. That posture flows from an awareness of need, of one's insufficiency. Only God has the power to order your inner world, not you. Only God has the power to orient your desires and reshape your emotions, not you.
...

p205 ...It's not that worldly achievement and public acclaim are automatically bad, it's just that they are won on a planet that is just a resting place for the soul and not our final destination. Success here, acquired badly, can make ultimate success less likely, and that ultimate success is not achieved through competition with others. 

We're about to get to the part where we get Augustine's assessment of human capability, an assessment it is hard to argue with for the most part. And yet... Let's say there was a scientific cult that asked me to surrender my own will to the guidance of Quantum Field Theory. I'm quite fond of QFT (especially QED, but don't bring up QCD or I'll walk out) and it has tons of experimental results to support it that a belief in some particular life after death totally lacks, but it is still just a theory and I'm open to alternatives or refinements of QFT as it is currently understood. So I'm holding on to my will and my reason even in the face of my inability to do the math. My point is that a belief in QFT is relatively low risk compared to Christianity. There are really only two ways Christianity pays off in the end: If they have the whole life-after-death story right and you are among the elect (in either the Calvinist sense or simply in the sense of a person who wins a trip to Heaven); or, if you are such a basket case that the only way you can live this life with any sense of peace is to surrender control of your life and let others direct you.

It's not quite right to say that Augustine had a low view of human nature... It's more accurate to say that he believed human beings are incapable of living well on their own, as autonomous individuals -- incapable of ordering their desires on their own. They can find that order, and that proper love, only by submitting their will to God's. It's not that human beings are pathetic; it's just that they will be restless until they rest in Him.

Sounds pretty pathetic to me, but this is also the lesson of Annie Lamott and Victoria Sweet (in God's Hotel). So I'm not prepared to say he's wrong, I just don't like that he's right and would prefer to keep my own freedom... even, I admit, if it means many others are unhappy having to deal with their own freedom. And there's a political corollary to this as well, which is becoming more and more obvious, that the average citizen is not particularly capable of making reasoned political decisions. And here we come back, again to National Socialism and Communism, forfeiting ones individuality to the nation or class.

Random

SF recently changed vendors for the city wide bike rental program. The sidewalk stations where you pick up or drop off the bikes look about the same, though I suspect there are minor differences, and the new bikes are re-branded with "Ford" prominently displayed. I've read a bit about similar systems in China where the bikes do not have dedicated parking places but can be left anywhere. Most of these bikes include a "GPS" chip so you can use a phone app to locate the nearest available bike and then rent it. I can see advantaged to either of these systems, the one where, like here, you know where the bikes are going to be; and the ones like there where you can leave the bike anyplace. Actually the latter system would be more convenient since you skip the step of going from where you drop off the bike to your actual destination.

But I also read recently about yet another Chinese bike rental firm that may be the ultimate startup bad idea. They decided to save a little money by not having the GPS chip to report the location of the bikes. Think about that for a second.

There are no dedicated stands and no way to locate where the last person left the bike. The reason the company went out of business, you will not be surprised to learn, was that a huge percentage of their bikes disappeared. Either stolen or just left in random places. 

I'm 100% confident there were enthusiastic marketing meetings and a rosy business plan for this company. And the scary part is that, unlike with a big con (which this could be confused with, since someone must have put up some venture capital for this) it would seem like the people selling this idea must have actually believed that it had some chance of success. I've been part of some pretty far fetched meetings with investors, where we were aware that everything would have to go perfectly for the business plan to generate a profit, but I just don't see how this particular pitch didn't come to a moment of silence where everyone was thinking "But how will anyone know where these bikes are?"

Magical thinking always looks puzzling from outside the magical event horizon, but I would love to know what these geniuses were thinking.

Next - 176. Grace & satori

174. God's Presence

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God's Presence

This section of the chapter is almost exactly a page and I skimmed through it the first time because, blah blah blah. But, it is the core of this chapter and of all the chapters that have to do with religion (especially Day, but also Perkins and (Ida) Eisenhower and even Johnson. You can even add Eliot when you take into account her childhood.) 

p196 The second large observation [the first being "...though people are born with magnificent qualities, original sin had perverted their desires..."] that flows from Augustine's internal excavation is that the human mind does not contain itself, but stretches out toward infinity. It's not only rottenness Augustine finds within, but also intimations of perfection, sensations of transcendence, emotions and thoughts and feelings that extend beyond the finite and into another realm...

As Reinhold Niebuhr put it, Ausgustine's study of memory led him to the "understanding that the human spirit in its depth and heights reaches into eternity and that this vertical dimension is more important for the understanding of man than merely his rational capacity for forming general concepts."

The path inward leads upward. A person goes into himself but finds himself directed toward God's infinity. He senses the nature of God and his eternal creation even in his own mind, a small piece of creation... 

p197 ... Human life points beyond itself. Augustine looks inside himself and makes contact with certain universal moral sentiments. He is simultaneously aware that he can conceive of perfection, but it is also far beyond his power to attain. There must be a higher power, and eternal moral order.

As Niebuhr put it, "man is an individual but he is not self-sufficing. The law of his nature is love, a harmonious relation of life to life in obedience to the divine center and source of his life. This law is violated when man seeks to make himself the center and source of his own life."

This is the counter-argument to Voltaire and the Enlightenment. To the entire middle-class value system and world order. 

On the other hand, it isn't so different from early Greek, mystical, thought where the cosmos was not just atoms and the void. Or like any other form of pantheism. You could even plug in the Dionysian religious underlying order that Nietzsche argued for in The Birth of Tragedy. 

But then there's the sociological/cultural anthropological way of viewing this: We have evolved to have mystical (positively reinforcing) reactions to sharing religious feelings with our primary group. Since mystical states can be induced or inhibited by chemistry, we can only say what we experience without concluding much about an underlying reality as a basis for these experiences. Even so, it may still be true that true happiness for many, if not most, people requires we follow the conclusions of Augustine and Niebuhr. Not that that much limits our options, since this would allow for most any kind of mystical religion as well as the secular cults of National Socialism and Communism. The Aztecs (I'm guessing), Mussolini, and Mao were also good at selling this notion of not making yourself the center and source of your own life.

Martha Grimes, again

I was wrong about never having read The Lamorna Wink. I have read it, but probably 14 years ago and I'd forgotten most of the early details because I had been rushing through trying to find some plot -- never a good idea with Grimes.

I'm still, slowly, working my way through and something related to what I wrote last time, but very sad, struck me this evening. Richard Jury has finally shown up now that we're down to the final quarter of the book, so we had the first scene with Jury and Plant. The sad thought I had was that, when Martha Grimes dies (or stops writing) we, her readers, will lose not just herself, but all these characters she trots out every mystery plus the whole Emma and Hotel Paradise tribe. The shear number of cats and minor characters that depend on Ms Grimes for their continued existence gives one pause.  

Fortunately, what she's written can't be unwritten, so they will continue to live on in that sense. And, really, how much longer can Emma remain 12? But this does make me concerned for her health.

Next - 175. Agency

163. It's been a while

Previous - 162. Becoming Wise

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Sorry to leave you hanging if you were at all interested in Becoming Wise. This pause was not planned.

Becoming Wise

p162 Western Christianity lost some of the cleansing power of mystery when it became a bedfellow with empire and later, again, in its headlock with science. I sensed a discomfort in my grandfather at his own large and active mind, a nervous reluctance to acknowledge things the Bible did not or could not explain. For they might be delivered over to science's godless certainties, and then they were lost to the faithful forever...

p163 As this century opened, physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers were no longer pushing mystery out, but welcoming it back in...

p226  Shane Claybourne claims that "spittin' image" is shorthand for "the spirit and image." I like that. But does it really work if no one remembers that's what it means?


What I'm getting in all this is that Tippett -- even more perhaps than Lamott -- sees faith as a tribal human characteristic. It's something that binds groups together, often in opposition with other groups. The Amish and Ultra Orthodox Jews and Wahabi Arab women are like the tribal peoples who wear neck-rings or lip-plates. The fashions they use to distinguish themselves from others are arbitrary -- as are all fashions. What is important is that they adhere to the tribal fashion.

The tricky part when it comes to religion is, how to you sell the fashion to the young of the tribe without making judgements against outsiders? Can you say, "This is completely meaningless and stupid but it's this thing we do"?

And beyond that, can you say, Our religion and our God is this wonderful thing we've made up and we're better for believing it, but, you know, don't try to peek behind the curtains?


And she never does even touch on the problem of evil. To be fair, the kind of faith described in the previous paragraph doesn't require confronting that problem. Religion is simply one of the ways we deal with the evil we run into. If your God is pretend you can sidestep so many tiresome meta-ethical problems. 

She does talk very briefly about people who were recent victims of evil, secular martyrs. (Secular in that they didn't suffer and die for their faith, exactly.) Still, I don't think -- in a book like this -- you can just pass over evil without comment. 

Dostoevsky was not arguing for a pretend God, so he, through Ivan Karamazov, spent a great deal of time talking about evil. But did he come up with a neat explanation or justification? Didn't he just leave it at mystery? Both Dostoevsky and Tippett I think hope the problem will go away when people get in touch with their inner vulnerability. To which Michel Foucault says, "Ha!" Or to stick to The Brothers Karamazov, Pavel, de Sade's stand-in (or the straw-man representing de Sade), says, "Ha!" 

Martha Grimes mysteries

Here's something I can't explain, when I put back the books on my "featured fiction" shelf, there wasn't room for them all. I had to pick a title to remove and noticed a Richard Jury mystery, The Lamorna Wink that I didn't remember. I'm reading it now and I really don't think I've read it before. I'm around a third into it and so far Jury has not really been in it, it's all about Melrose Plant. 

In every Jury mystery Grimes has to visit her characters in Northants and in London, and we just wrapped our short visit to London where everyone, including Cyril the cat, are mostly just waiting for Jury to reappear. 

I'm not complaining, I was wondering when we would see Cyril, and it was nice to finally get some crucial backstory on Melrose. There's a murder and a disappeared person and we still haven't a clue what Jury is doing in Ireland. All that is fine, I'm reading slowly and just enjoying going where Grimes wants to take me. 
 

Photo update

Time passes. Here's how Salesforce Tower has progressed,

Before.

Now.

And here's how the work on the Van Ness BRT is coming along. The median is entirely removed and paved over except where the few trees are being preserved. It looks pretty silly,

Before.

Now.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

I'm still not sure how best to deal with this book. This is why I have not been posting for a while now. I want to build up a backlog so I can post regularly once I start up again, but wasn't sure how much detail I wanted to get into. 

This book is building up and cross-pollinating in a way that I'm not even sure is conscious to the author. Either he is being very stealthy about bringing up some interesting theological concepts, or he is accidentally bumping into things that I see connections between but he doesn't. The smart thing would be to wait until I've read it all and then go back and blog as I make a second pass through the material... so that's off the table.

I'm going to go ahead and post what I have as I complete my first pass with the understanding that I will be coming back to some of this later. My other problem is that Christian minutia relating to Augustine and Jansen (that I have so little interest in parsing) seems to be as central to this as are the more interesting (to me) religious ideas of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And if I can paraphrase Clausewitz, this book could be viewed as The Magic Mountain's "regieren" by other means. And with Brooks arguing Naphtha's position. 

Again, I can't tell how conscious the author is of all this. I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky would be appalled by some of the people presented as exemplars. Though this would be less true of Naphtha. (I'm almost at the end now and am even more puzzled by Brooks's actual position. Either he's oblivious or using misdirection to prevent us from seeing what he's actually arguing for.)

In any event, I can promise you a return of the Port Royal gang, or at least some of their core ideas, yet another questioning of the secular, bourgeois world order, another pass at George Eliot, and some great stuff about Montaigne -- who keeps popping up, or rather who has occasionally shouted something or other from off-stage, but now can finally take a bow.

Next - 164. The Road to Character