174. God's Presence

Previous - 173. Augustine, not a Cynic

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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

147. Certifiably a geezer

Previous - 146. Virginia Woolf

Birthday

It has occurred to me that I should be celebrating today -- the last day I'm 64 -- rather than tomorrow, when I'm definitively a senior citizen. 

TV

Growing up, my mother (the mystery reader) could always figure the killer early in the show, and I almost never could. Partly this is because I like to be told a story -- taken along for the ride. (The same reason I don't like to see "making of" and "behind the scenes of" features.) But now I could probably beat her in guessing the killer, though not because I'm better at solving mysteries. I just look for the most recognizable face around the murder. They usually give the juiciest part to the most experienced or talented actor, and that person has usually been around. 

I think I've even written about this before, but I'm finishing the 7th season of Castle and it keeps happening. The good thing about this is that I can pay attention to the murderer throughout the show and don't have to re-watch to see how she played the earlier scenes. It does feel like cheating though.
 

Birthday

You can't say I don't know how to celebrate a birthday, for lunch I had my favorite Vietnamese tofu sandwich, then I walked up Market to my usual Peet's were I ordered both my usual iced tea and a cookie. And now I'm reviewing an Advanced Health Care Directive a friend gave me. (No coupons for adult diapers, I checked.)

I hate these things. They are like a test with no right answers. Plus, selecting an "agent" to represent you is a nightmare. Who would you trust to do this? Who is likely to be around (or still be alive) when you need to surrender your agency? I have the same problem picking an executor for a will.

3. Life would no longer be worth living if I were not able to: Well, I can't really know that in advance, can I? I would like to say, "Survive a migration across the Serengeti with basic survival supplies." But I have reason to believe I could adapt to living in a less robust state. I even have reason to believe that I could learn something by living in that state.

I could drop down a gear to, "Use the bathroom without assistance." But, again, who can know for sure what I would be willing to put up with if I were in a blissed-out, semi-mystical, near-death state? 

How about, "Put me down if I need a bone-marrow transplant or the services of a Burn Treatment Center." But then, they can't do that.

Even the CPR question is a stumper. I still have problems with a minor rib injury from the early '80s, so CPR sounds like it would almost certainly be a bad idea, but I can imagine strange situations where -- nothing else major being wrong with me -- it might be worth the risk. This would be easier to answer in another 20 years. By that time I expect my answer to all these questions will be, "Just run me over with the ambulance."

My thoughts and feelings about where I would prefer to die: I put, "In my sleep... Probably." Again, who knows? This is contingent on what death is like. Would I rather die in the middle of a particularly irritating dream or while normally conscious? Don't know? Can't know. 

One answer to this is, "At home." But even that is not necessarily true. "At hospice or a good hotel," could be a better option for me.

I want my loved ones to know that if I am nearing my death, I would appreciate the following for comfort and support (prayers, rituals, music, etc.) "Strippers!" was the first thought that came to me, so maybe I should go with that. Would "rituals" include human sacrifice? Asking for a friend.

Religious or spiritual affiliation: "It's complicated." Chanting Tibetan monks might be a delight to have around while you're dying... or not. 

There is no conclusion here, at least not now. I don't even know if I would choose death by complete surprise (like being blind-sided by a bus) to a contemplative death in my own bed -- or a bed in a nice hotel. If given a choice, I would have to go with "surprise me," though quick bus death sounds like a lot less work.  


And now I've cleaned out my webmail folders for March. All ready for my next year of life.

Day after

Wrapped up my birthday last night at my favorite Burmese restaurant. We had all our favorite dishes. There are even a few left-overs for tonight. 

Today I went to the SFMTA office to get my Senior Clipper card so I get the senior discount when riding public transit... this is my big payoff for being a geezer. Turned into the ultimate MUNI experience. It was like taking the worst aspects of riding their buses and putting them indoors. 

I walked in and was assigned a number. As I was sitting down the number before mine was called so I figured this would go quickly. A half hour later I was still waiting. Here's what I think happened: I was not waiting for any window, but for window 10 which apparently was the only one dealing with my issue. The person before me took quite a long time to resolve their business. When they finally left I was poised to jump up and respond to my number being called... but it never was. Either the woman at 10 took a break, or she simply forgot to inform the system that she was free. After a half hour I went back to the guy who assigned me the number, who said my number was still in the cue and he didn't know why it hadn't been called. I finally just walked over to window 10 to see what was happening and the woman was doing something on her phone. When I said I'd been waiting 30 minutes she said my number had been called (no). We completed our business in a minute or two. So MUNI.

Next - 148. Kafka and memory

121. In which Hegel fails us

Previous - 120. A thought experiment

Trump

I can't remember now what I expected, but I am surprised how the bull shit is snowballing even week to week. You'd think they would want to pace themselves. 

That said, I do think I've made some sense out of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" assertion. Really I don't know what she meant, but I think it may be true that there are sociologically valid facts that are not "true" but that a substantial percentage of people believe anyway. Rather like religion. Actually a lot like religion. 

If large numbers of people are determined to believe a given conspiracy theory or that their favorite invisible sky-faeries have a particular characteristic, then these statements are "true" for them even when they are not true in any objective sense. The question then becomes, Why do they believe these particular statements? And to answer this "why" question you don't need journalists but psychologists and sociologists. And, as with Franco's Spain, scientists and journalists are only seen as being beneficial to society when they support the distorted view. 

Avoiding needless synthesis

Today I was helping an online friend reduce the word count in a piece of fiction she's working on. This got me thinking about the "don't mention things that are not crucial to your story" rule and how William Faulkner breaks this rule -- and how glad we are that he does. Just thinking about Faulkner took me back to Methodism and it occurred to me that Methodism played a similar role in America in the 19th century to the role Puritanism played in England in the 17th century. (And Calvinism in Europe in the 16th century?) 

So I'm seeing a natural (human?) cycle here but I'm not seeing synthesis in the Hegelian sense. If the secular trend in European history is the thesis, and the frantically religious response to that is the antithesis, where is the synthesis? As with the political fluctuation in the final century of the Roman Republic, I see a social machine getting more and more out of balance and on the verge of flying apart, not a culture on the verge of achieving some compromise viewpoint.

The Classics

Recently YouTube has decided I'm interested in seeing clips from the movie Gladiator -- and my then clicking on them hasn't discouraged this. But seeing these clips has got me thinking about Rome, and then Greece. 

When you read Thucydides and Xenophon, or Livy and Polybius, you inevitably come to identify with the Athenians and Romans. The Athenians are just so modern. And after learning the art of war and the art of politics by reading the history of generation after generation after generation of Romans, you feel like you are a Roman. So it's easy to overlook the reality that by their glory times both states were pretty despicable. Perhaps they are despicable in ways that are easier for us to comprehend than was the case with many of their contemporaries, but that doesn't change the fact that they were a nasty lot that you wouldn't want anything to do with if you weren't a member of their gang. 

It's hard to not wish there was some way Alcibiades could have been brought back into the Athenian state to lead their defense against the Persians, but then again, it's hard to argue that they didn't get exactly what they deserved. 

It's hard to not wish there were better defenders of the Republic at the end than the insufferable Cicero and the vapid Cato.  But even if we accept Cicero's account that he wasn't the usual rapacious provincial proconsul, he was supporting a system that was rapacious to the core. Again, it's hard to argue that the Republic deserved to continue in the form it had taken at that time.

And all this is equally true with America. Even if you give us a pass for our first hundred years on account of the times, even if you forgive the unparalleled terror tactics of WW2, as poetic justice for what the Germans and Japanese started, I don't see how you can justify the sins of the post war years. And even if you do decide the Cold War is an adequate excuse for what we did to the Congo and Chile and Somalia and all the rest, that still leaves everything since 9/11. 

So, when it comes down to it, Trump is just an instance of reaping what you sow and of just desserts. I still hope American Democracy will prove strong enough to shake off this disaster, but if not, it's not like we didn't have this coming.

Next - 122. Venice