A Poem As I Approach Gaudete Sunday

Advent

Consider the angels.

Because maybe the broken men get too much attention.

Drunk with power and impotent with the kind of blind rage

That will carelessly hurl their countrymen down to the grave,

They try, in fiery futility, to salve some inner wound

By wasting the lives of others in blind fury and then,

(Perhaps in a final moment of penitent clarity,

or in obedience to the last demonic urge)

Waste themselves,

As mothers wail.

This monotone litany of nightmares,

It’s a constant, manicured, damnable drone.  The same words

We have heard again and again.  I am no wise man,

I can find no meaning in them.

Cameras frame parents hunched over, clutching each other

Like living icons of passion and grief, offered so that we might worship.

And I’m ashamed at how hard it is not to continue to stare

At this flickering, televised altar of perfect priests and the grief they sell.

What I need now doesn’t come from gazing at monsters.

But from giving thanks for the angels:

For brave souls in badges and brims,

Who run towards the fire, not away,

Who guide the children to safety,

Who help legs paralyzed with fear find their feet and find their home again;

For dumbstruck neighbors who stop everything,

And cry together so no one has to cry alone;

For men and women and children on the other side of the world,

Who do not know us but mourn with us anyway,

Knowing that we are family;

For people who see the darkness of despair descending,

And resolve to be light today, and keep that resolution tomorrow.

And for the teachers.  The teachers

Who will somehow find a way to make their feet walk back into their schools;

Who have seen the monsters, and know they are real, and yet,

Who refuse to worship their fear.

They know it is better

To kneel on the floor, and read, and play,

Remembering for all of us,

With good will and with daily acts of intercession,

That nothing must be allowed to stop

The sacred work

Of children.

***

David L. O’Hara

12/15/2012

Charles Peirce on Criminal Justice

I have posted briefly about Peirce's interest in criminal justice before.  I haven't time to comment on it extensively now, so for now I will post this link to his piece entitled "Dmesis"* and these brief comments:

More than once commentators on Peirce's Pragmatism have argued that he does not pay attention to politics or to political, social, and ethical theory.  This piece is not alone in refuting that thesis.  It would be more accurate to say that for Peirce, it is impossible to treat social and ethical issues apart from the rest of his philosophy.  Peirce was a synechist, which means he held that ideas are not independent atoms of thought but interdependent and interconnected with one another.  Ideas affect one another.

One great implication of this is that just as one idea affects another in our private thinking, so our personal beliefs affect other persons.  Our ideas are not atoms, and neither are we.  The foundation of ethics, and of all philosophy, is agape, or love.  As Peirce wrote elsewhere,  

“He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is illogical in all his inferences, collectively.”

Peirce makes the especially trenchant observation that if we really cared about criminals, then our criminal justice system would make positive habituation a guiding principle in the housing and treatment of prisoners.  I'm willing to concede that Peirce may not be right in all he says here, but this point seems spot on: it is inconsistent to habituate people to prison life if our aim is to return them to society.

Peirce's conclusion in the third paragraph also seems right: the fact is, we imprison people "because we detest them."

*  ("Dmesis" is a Greek word that means "taming," or "breaking.")

Prayer and Forgiveness

Years ago I was wronged by someone I worked with.  The details don't matter, because as Viktor Frankl says, pain is like a gas, expanding to fill the available space.  Even if it was a small offense, it swelled until it filled me.

I told a friend about it, who listened patiently to my story.  When I was done, he said, sympathetically, "You need to pray for him and ask God to bless him."

What I had hoped to hear was something more like "Wow, what a waste of skin that guy is.  Your anger is justified."

Now that I have the increasing clarity that comes when time separates us from painful events, I think my friend was right.  His idea of God is that God wants all of us to be better than we are.

Praying for my former co-worker has allowed me to remove him from the center of my consciousness, where his image lived as a threatening villain, and to think of him as someone in need of healing and transformation.  Blessing him has given me a way to articulate my desire to see him change and become a kinder person, for everyone's sake.

No doubt theology matters here.  In plainer terms, how we imagine the God we pray to matters, because that will shape the way we act towards others.  At the risk of declaring the obvious: what we think about God has consequences for the way we live with other people.  In her book, Lit, Mary Karr talks about a friend who tells her that God doesn't have a plan for her, God has a dream for her.  God wants good things for her.

That's an attractive idea of God, one who wants us to forgive others so we can be set free from their tyranny; and one who wants us to bless others so that we can begin to see ourselves as agents of positive change rather than as victims.

The Course Of Nature and Laws of Nature

As part of the sabbatical leave I am currently enjoying I am spending a lot of time reading ancient and medieval texts, mostly on science and mathematics.  The plan is to incorporate them into my ancient and medieval philosophy class next fall.  I teach that class more as a history of texts than as a class on philosophical problems.  The historical development of astronomy is one of the main threads we follow, tying it to discoveries in geometry, optics, metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, and politics.

Today I was reading this text from Book I of Manilius' Astronomica.  I'll translate the relevant part below.

Nam neque fortuitos ortus surgentibus astris

nec totiens possum nascentem credere mundum

solisve assiduous partus et fata diurna,

cum facies eadem signis per saecula constet,

idem Phoebus eat caeli de partibus isdem

lunaque per totidem luces mutetur et orbes

et natura vias servet, quas fecerat ipsa,

nec tirocinio peccet, circumque feratur

aeterna cum luce dies, qui tempora monstrat

nunc his nunc illis eadem regionibus orbis,

semper et ulterior vadentibus ortus ad ortum

occasumve obitus, caelum et cum sole perennet.

The boldface text could be (loosely) translated like this: "Nature follows paths that she herself has made, and she does not stray as the inexperienced do." 

On the one hand, this sounds like an early articulation of the idea of laws of nature.  If nature follows paths laid down by nature itself and from which it does not deviate, that would be compatible with our idea of a natural law.

Yet there's an important difference between law and path. As you walk along a path, your feet may fall more to one side of the path or the other; and over time, paths may shift, broadening with use or narrowing with desuetude. Charles Peirce, responding to advocates of Hume's argument against miracles, argues that nature is like this as well, and that what we now call laws were once called  the course of nature, and Peirce thinks of them as habits that nature has taken on.

The name makes a difference, if only a slight one. Peirce was not trying to argue for particular miracles, but he was urging students of science not to insist that nature behave according to their preconceptions of law.  Manilius' idea is not so far-fetched: the laws might not have been there at all, but nature took them on and then, once they became habits, nature has stuck to them. Thinking about science this way alerts us to two possibilities: first, that things might not always have been as they are, and second, that nature might still be taking on new habits.  We shouldn't expect nature to stray far from its habitual paths, but on the other hand, what would prevent it from doing so?

Charles Peirce's Version Of The "Lord's Prayer"

Charles Peirce's writings frequently touch on religious topics.  As Douglas Anderson, Michael Raposa, Hermann Deuser and others (myself included) have argued this is not accidental but integral to his philosophy.

Throughout his life he wrote on prayer, usually tersely, though occasionally he wrote at length, as when he proposed some changes to the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer based on his semeiotic theory.

Here is one piece from his journal, written while he was a student at Harvard in 1859.  It appears to be a re-writing of the Lord's Prayer:

"I pray thee, O Father, to help me regard my innate ideas as objectively valid.  I would like to live as purely in accordance with thy laws as inert matter does with nature's.  May I, at last, have no thoughts but thine, no wishes but thine, no will but thine.  Grant me, O God, health, valor, and strength.  Forgive the misuse, pray of thy former good gifts, as I do the ingratitude of my friends.  Pity my weakness and deliver me, O Lord; deliver me and support me."

(This is from MS 891, “Private Thoughts,” number XLVI.  Peirce's writings include his vast unpublished writings, mostly held at Harvard, with copies at IUPUI and Texas Tech)

Look Up!

Just saw this over at Slate and had to post it here. It's a beautiful animation of a full year of the phases of the moon, done by NASA.

If you like that, you might also like something I wrote about looking at the moon a year ago.

Guarda la luna, la bella luna!

Social Media As Lessons In Writing

I sometimes suspect that when my colleagues find out that I am on Twitter (@davoh) they decide to take me just a little less seriously.  They don't need to say it out loud; the slight rise of the eyebrows, the gentle curving of the upper lip say it all.  You're not serious, right?  Aren't you an academic? The implication is that if you can tweet it it's not serious.  Facebook and some blogs are only a little better. 

As it turns out, Twitter is pretty useful for academics.  It's helpful a way of staying in touch with new things in my field.  People use Twitter to share new discoveries and announcements about grants and conferences.  By following others in my field and engaging them in conversation, I've made a few friends

But Twitter is also a good tool for learning to write.  When I teach writing, I urge my students to use short words and short sentences.  This seems to fly in the face of what they learn in high school, where they're taught to use ten-cent words when a one-cent word will do.

As odd as it may sound, I use Twitter and Facebook as a means of training myself to say things that matter to me in short form.  James K.A. Smith says something similar in the sidebar to his Fors Clavigera blog; like me, he uses his blog to practice writing quickly and without much editing. 

Twitter rewards brevity.  If you can't say it quickly, you can't tweet it.  And if you can't say it well, it will go unread.  I can't say my tweets are great writing yet, but like any habit, the only way I can imagine changing my writing is by practice.

Is It Time For A New Transcendentalism?

For the last few weeks I have found myself returning to this question: Is it time for a new Transcendentalism?

I normally try to write simple blog posts, but this one might get a little technical.  I'll try to minimize the jargon (and so, no doubt, will do some injustice to the technical stuff) but feel free to skip the following section if you like. 

The Seeds Of Transcendentalism 

When we teach Transcendentalism, we emphasize a few key texts by figures like Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Carlyle, Coleridge, Hedge, and others of their acquaintance.  Attention to nature, and terms like "self-reliance" and "civil disobedience" shape our understanding of the movement, though they are more like the fruit of the movement than its seeds. 

One of the most important seeds of Transcendentalism is the refusal to let one's self be owned, defined, or constrained by others.  Today, "self-reliance" sounds like a description of someone who owns a generator in case the power goes out, or who learns engine repair so she doesn't need to depend on a mechanic.  But closer to the heart of Transcendentalism is suspicion of others' descriptions of the self and the world.

Inspired in part by Kant's phenomenology and in part by German and English Romanticism, Emerson charted a course between the stifling atmosphere of inherited religion and the determinism of mechanistic philosophies.  Unable to find a reliable source of knowledge in the experienced world (our perceptions are always a little off, and maybe they're completely mistaken, as when we hallucinate) Kant located another source of knowledge in our innate ability to know the world at all.  Kant argued that we have innate structures of knowledge, intuitive forms that transcend all experience and so are not subject to the doubt directed at experience.  Emerson Platonized Kant's epistemology, taking Kant to mean that our inward reflections not only form the world, but give us direct access to the meaning of the world.  The individual knower knows some things without being taught them by anyone else. 

To put that in other terms, Emerson's Transcendentalism emphasized an "original relation to the universe," in which we trust our intuitions and exercise distrust towards beliefs that have come from outside us.  This calls for "prospective," not retrospective, thinking, meaning a willingness to look forward to new possibilities rather than looking backwards to the rules and traditions of our ancestors to acquire rules for our lives. 

In even simpler terms, when we let churches and other institutions (scientific, economic, cultural, etc) limit our self-understanding, we also allow them to constrain the scope of our possibilities. 

A New Transcendentalism 

It may seem we no longer need Transcendentalism because churches are losing their authority and many of us feel free to think what we wish.  I am skeptical of this latter claim.  Peirce argues that we do not seek the truth; we seek relief from the irritation of doubt.  We look for beliefs that are comfortable, and the most comfortable beliefs are the ones that mesh well with the beliefs of others around us.  C.S. Lewis, in his preface to Athanasius' De Incarnatione, argues that we should read old books because that is one of the surest ways to have our current beliefs challenged.  He adds that simply reading broadly in modern books will not do because people who live in any given age tend to share most of their beliefs. Training in history, and especially in the history of ideas, exposes our beliefs to a broader community that can cast doubt on what we believe.

Another way of saying this is that we agree with ideas that bear the imprimatur of our community.  One idea that has growing acceptance is the idea that to be human is to be describable.  I admit I am fascinated by this idea, and I delight in learning about the molecules that make our bodies, and the ways they interact.

But I find myself resisting this description of life.  Not because it seems wrong, but only because it seems incomplete.  It is tempting to turn a good description into a complete one, to be satisfied with a partial description precisely because there is no pressure not to accept it.  

Isn't this one of the things we mock in earlier ages, though?  I mean their unblinking acceptance of what everyone else around them believed.  Are we so free of that same tendency in our own age?  

Doubt As A Gardener

Let me add at this point that I find myself thinking about this in my quietest times of reflection, which makes me think it's not coming to me as a polemic against something so much as an apology for something.  I don't want to argue against science, because I think science is one of the finest things we've ever come up with.  What I want is something that will nevertheless act as a loyal opposition to science, a court jester, perhaps, who will listen patiently to court business about the latest discoveries, but then impudently ask "Yes, but why do you care?"  Or say "That's really beautiful, isn't it?  Now - tell me about beauty in a way that doesn't leave anything out."

It won't be easy.  Transcendentalists and jesters aren't often taken seriously, but their work is perhaps the most serious and important type of work.  What I am calling for is like what Cornel West calls prophecy, a missional work of justice, a forward-looking, love-driven endeavor that doesn't want to see anyone taken prisoner by a merely adequate account of what it means to be human.  I don't have a full vision of what this means; I'm writing about it here as a first step of externalizing a hunch that it's time to reclaim something of Emerson's vision and to plant the seeds of some doubt.  

Doubt is not the enemy of faith and knowledge; it is the gardener who prunes the plant so that it may flourish.