Eric Voegelin on the Essence of Christianity, and Our Reaction to It

"The nature of this drive [to pull the Christian eschaton from the divine to the immanent] cannot be discovered by submitting the structure of the fallacy to an even closer analysis. The attention must rather concentrate on what the thinkers achived by their fallacious construction. On this point there is no doubt. They achieved a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their own place in it, which otherwise they would not have had. Certainties, now, are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with thier accompaniment of anxiety; and the next question would be: What specific uncertainty was so disturbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious imanentization? One does not have to look far afield for an answer. Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a "world full of gods" is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the subtance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epitemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dulness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss - the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience. The danger of a breakdown of faith to a socially relevant degree, now, will increase in the measure inwhich Christianity is a worldly success, that is, it will grow when Christianity penetrates a civilizational area thoroughly, supported by institutional pressure, and when, at the same time, it undergoes an internal process of spiritualization, of a more complete realization of its essence. The more people are drawn or pressured into the Christian orbit, the greater will be the number among them who do not have the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity; and the likeliness of a fall from faith will increase when civilizational progress of education, literacy, and intellectual debate will bring the full seriousness of Christianity to the understanding of ever more individuals. Both of these processes characterized the high Middle Ages. The historical detail is not the present concern; it will be sufficient to refer summarily to the growing town societies with their intense spiritual culture as the primary centers from which the danger radiated into Western society at large."

- The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 132-133.
(Image rambunctiously bobbed from http://www.thoughtsongod.com/?p=6008)

Update: 8CHRSAOK

Dear readers, you have spoken! and I owe an apology to both of you. I was mistaken: the New York DMV does allow eight-character license plates for a personalized Empire State plate. The type of plate I referenced is different from the one in the picture. My error lay in believing that personal license plates were all the same, but obviously not.

Apologies also to Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Murdoch, and Ms. Maddow are also in order. Especially to Ms. Maddow: gravely have I insulted thee by lumping you together with Murdoch!

Yes, the post was about getting facts straight, so the irony weighs heavily. I try to teach my students to be accurate in their research, and believe it or not, I try to live up to that myself. But even Homer nods, and I'm nowhere near Homer's stature. Live and learn.

More importantly, though, truth in research presupposes honesty. Fact-checking is just a special case of that; necessary retractions are another. And so I want to reiterate that. Correct me where I'm wrong.

The original topic in the 2008 post had to do with photojournalistic fraud - photoshopping pictures that are supposedly factual - which is not merely a lapse in the fact-checking but a deliberate breach of trust in the media/audience relation. What's so insidious about it, it seems to me, is that it takes advantage of two beliefs: the first one being that "seeing is believing" and the second being "publication = true".

Maybe you're thinking, "Oh come on, don't be so naive. Wake up and pay attention: there are plenty of sharks out there, ready to put one over on you." I'm aware of that. But it doesn't excuse the shysters' conduct. Everyone makes mistakes, that's bad but unavoidable; but not everyone commits fraud, which is really bad and definitely avoidable.

The Virtues of Spinning the Pic

I've posted before about how an increase in the plasticity of the media results in a corresponding decrease in trust of the media. When things like this find their way into books and TV news, it lends temporary credibility to the particular hosts; however, they are followed by a lasting credibility gap in their general domains (read: the media). When you get burned, you'll run from any flame.

But I also said I'd post about the potential benefits of this sort of thing. Here goes.

Basically, the media seem to be teaching the public to discern fakes to a finer degree - thanks to the combination of increased accessibility of information on the one hand, and the media's own lack of use on the other hand. If journalists will not police themselves or each other, it's up to us to play "spot the phony." Which the snarky Internet generation is only too glad to do. By supplying fake pictures, then, the media are potentially educating us in critical thinking and observation - but only inadvertently.

(Now watch, Rupert Murdoch or Rachel Maddow will take this up and use it to spin their errors to their own advantage.)

2LNG2BEREAL

A recent ripple in the news media and blogosphere concerns some material published in the latest book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, and also on his website. A picture appears to show the vanity plate that was spotted in Greenwich, CT. The plates read "2BG2FAIL". On a Porsche. Owned by a banker.

Sounds too good to be true - it would be like them, wouldn't it? But a sharp-eyed reader of The Blue Marble pointed out that the New York DMV allows personalized plates to be no more than six characters long. The alleged vanity plate has eight characters; in other words, it must have been photoshopped. Yet another case of journalists presenting fake evidence. It's things like this that make it unsurprising that folks today are so jaded.

Journalists are people too, I know. But this sort of thing is so politically charged, the lack of attention is inexcusable. The resentment against bankers (which I can't help sharing) runs so high that things like this only feed the fire. Truth would be a better fuel.

The Case of the Case in Point

If there's one thing that's misunderstood about philosophy, it's the thought-experiments. Some are good, some are bad; how do you tell the difference? I want to try and articulate that here, because it can spell the difference between a genuine conversation and a mere bull session. Seems to me that real problems reflect reality (pace Rorty), and their significance is directly proportionate to the amount of discussion they attract. Paradoxes are great examples of philosophical problems, and I do have a pet theory about them. But that's another post. Anyway...

Philosophers sometimes get ridiculed for their examples and thought-experiments - just implausible, its said, implausible or downright silly. There couldn't be any connection to reality, right?

Truth truly is stranger than fiction. Case in point: during my ethics course Monday, we were covering Rawls. In chapter 7 of A Theory of Justice, Rawls distinguishes between the unjust, the bad, and the evil. He cites the example of a person who pursues excessive wealth, pointing out the difference between the unjust man, the bad man, and the evil man (TJ 439). An unjust man commits an act that is unfair to other folks, though the motive would be considered legitimate if kept within limits - say, acquiring money for security. He would be bad if the action was unjust but pursued for its own sake; he enjoyed the mastery of money, for example. Again, that motive would be regarded as legitimate if restrained. He would be evil if he deliberately set out to fleece people because it was unjust to do so; if he enjoyed the unjust act, he'd be evil.

Some of the students asked for another example to clarify the point. "Sure," I said, "consider the case of a person pursuing excessive sex - interpret that any place you wish, it doesn't matter." They considered this to be silly. How could you be regarded as unjust, bad or evil for pursuing excessive sex? Simple: when the libido of one partner outstrips that of the other, and they simply act on it, it is unjust. Depending on the motive, the action could be judged bad or evil. If it were excessively violent, the same principle applies.

By chance a friend of mine posted a news item on Facebook about a British couple that was banned from having sex on account of the excessive noise. The woman appealed the case, and lost. In Rawls's language, their lovemaking was unjust in the sense that they were disturbing the peace. Had it been a party, or a football game, the end result would be the same: too loud.

Unjust indeed. I am so vindicated.

You see, my example was pretty tame as philosophical examples go. There is the brain in a vat, which is a variation on the theme of Descartes's evil genius and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Such problems pose the question of epistemology - how do you know what's real? - and metaphysics - what is the really real? There's the whole zombie philosophy thing, which has to do with identifying consciousness.

And then you have the medieval philosophers. They came up with some doozies, but we ridicule them because we misunderstand them. For instance, "Did Christ carry a purse or not?" This was an economic question: the Mendicant Order of monks complained about the discrepancy between the poverty of Jesus, their ideal, and the growing wealth of the Church. They had serious intent behind them. Questions about angels - such as whether they were created in beatitude or not - have a great deal to say about rational creatures such as ourselves.

The take-home lesson: don't knock something until you understand what it's really about.

(By the way, the "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" is of disputed origin, but it seems only to have become well known because of its use in ridiculing the medievals. Not surprisingly, the only folks citing this question use it lampoon the medievals - without once considering whether there might actually be a real reason for posing such apparently silly questions.)

Now this brings out at least three things:

1. Generally speaking, we don't get to exercise our imagination enough. We could all use the exercise.
2. When an otherwise sane-looking person poses an otherwise ludicrous question in a philosophical debate, there's probably (or, should I say hopefully) good reasons behind their doing so.
3. When considering theoretical questions, ludicrous questions can prove to be remarkably concise ways of taking the inquiry to its extreme - and that's where we really learn something.

The problem this brings out is: how do you know when it's a real philosophical problem, as opposed to a BS question? There seems to be a palpable difference between questions such as

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound?

and

What if your tail chased you?

Triumph the insult comic dog - bon jovi
Uploaded by AC310DC. - Watch funny animal videos.

Badly needed comic relief intermezzo

Well, if you're talking with the guy who poses the puzzler, and the reason isn't apparent, ask. If you're reading a text and find said conundrum, look for the rationale in the text itself. Usually it's right there. And if it isn't? Time to hit the library. Do some research, find out everything you can about said person and their circumstances; if they did not write about this themselves, chances are somebody else did. And if that turns up dry? I mean, really turns up with nothing to show for it dry? Then it's time you did some digging into the world of the author. There may well be notions they assume the reader will have; that's not unusual, since folks usually and mainly write for an audience of their own time.

Once you get an explanation, consider the ideas being challenged. Philosophers love to enjoy doubting the most ordinary-looking things. It may be BS, but then again, it may present a genuine problem. How to tell the difference? My reflex answer is basically, you learn by experience. That is, if it kicks up a living doubt in you, you'll be concerned and set out to find an answer. Sometimes the problem can be settled quickly - say, with some detail that was forgotten when the question originally came up. Or it may niggle at you for days, or even months. The greater the irritation of doubt, the more significant the problem relative to our current state of mind.

If a problem seems genuine, a good way of double-checking this is to talk it over with someone. It's happened that I mulled over some difficulty for days, and then it vanished when I brought it up with a friend. Putting the question out in public threw it into a different light, and I discovered that I had simply ignored some basic fact or other; once that was obvious, the doubt went up in smoke *poof*. Then again, a genuine problem will rarely fail to get somebody's attention. Maybe not always immediately, but when it finds an audience that will take it seriously, the problem will show itself to be a window on some avenue of thought that hasn't been covered yet.

How Scientific Can Philosophy Be? or, Scientific Progress Really Does Go Boink On Occasion

This was originally going to be a comment; it only seemed to be fair to talk directly to someone when giving feedback. But since the site wouldn't let me post it (no idea why)...here it comes.

A study done recently claims that people tend not to assume an objective standard in morality. The writers of the study argue that, contrary to the view of many philosophers, most normal people have a fairly relativistic view of ethics. The conclusion isn't what I have a beef with; it's the method of arriving at that conclusion that irks me.

The experiment is as follows. Subjects were asked to imagine two people who are asked to evaluate a situation involving killing. One of these hypothetical people is a college student, the other is (a) also a college student, (b) from an Amazonian culture, or (c) a cruel extraterrestrial race. In this imaginary scenario, one person thinks the act is morally permissible, the other thinks it's morally wrong. The subjects were then asked whether the hypothetical evaluators would agree or disagree in terms of their moral judgment.

Depending on how closely related the two speculative people are, the subjects responded variously. In the case of (a) two college students from the same campus, they were imagined to agree. In (b) a college student and an Amazon, they were imagined to be less in agreement. In the case of (c), a college student and Evil ET, the imagined level of agreement was even lower.

In other words, a few college students in philosophy courses believe that between two individuals, the level of agreement is inversely proportional to the closeness of the similarity of those two individuals. The greater the difference between cultures, the greater the difference of agreement on ethical issues.

I'm afraid the experiment seems quite flawed. Leaving aside the more general problem of the extent to which statistics should determine how we actually think about ethical questions (doesn't every logic textbook consider the argumentum ad populum to be a fallacy? Har-har); leaving aside the even more serious problem of the extent that those numbers should influence how we ought to think about such problems, there are serious difficulties with the experiment presented here.

Basically, the actual sample is not representative - of anything, let alone of "ordinary folks." All the participants were students taking philosophy courses at one college. Hardly the average Joe. And it was a small sample at that: only 223. Let's put that into perspective. In 2006-7 alone there were 11,969 philosophy BAs awarded. This comes from a total number of 1,524,092 BAs awarded in that year. (Figures taken from the National Center for Educational Statistics.) The study doesn't specify whether all the subjects were philosophy majors, but for the sake of perspective and generosity, let's assume they are. And because we're feeling extra generous today, let's assume that all the undergrads completed their studies.

In other words, the sample consisted of 1.45 x 10^-4 of the total undergrad population. This out of an estimated general population of 301.6 million. Assuming the number didn't rise between then and now, this means the sample would only account for less than 2% of the philosophy undergrad population, which itself constitutes less than 1% of the total undergrad population. In the US. (The Census Bureau's estimate for 2007 can be found here; world population figures taken from the Population Reference Bureau.)

That means the study yields a sample of 7.4 x 10^-7 of the US population, or 3.38 x10^-8 of the world's population - in a snapshot of the world's history. Representative it ain't.

Now I confess to knowing little about what experimental philosophy is up to. But if it's trying to be more scientific about philosophy by collecting data, it has to be more scientific in its data collection than is presented here. If a physicist published such dismally designed research, she'd be laughed out of court. Philosophers have been criticized for their "unscientific armchair theorizing." Experimental philosophy is attempting to use scientific methods of gathering information. Put simply, it's doubly important for philosophers to do the work right: to curry favor with scientists and the broader community that esteems natural science so highly. Take a tip from them - get bigger, more representative samples.

Ode to Turkish Coffee

Today's post is half-and-half: one part serious, the other not so much. I'm not sure myself how seriously it should be taken, so - sensitive or snobbish? delicate or dorky? You be the judge. (Oh, and it'll morph like a Wikipedia entry, so mind the timestamp when you cite me for your term paper.)

I want to make a case for the supremacy of Turkish coffee; I'll do this by way of analysis of the idea of civilization. If there ever was a pretentious-sounding word, it's "civilized." With that one word (or its negation) you can piss on anything you want, verbally speaking:

"He doesn't wash his hands? How uncivilized."

"Oh, you can't eat with utensils - use your fingers, like civilized people."

I'm no sociologist, but it seems to me that civilization is marked by at least two things: gratuitous objects and exercise of self-control. And I want to say that it's not merely a matter of one or the other, but the instances of both occurring in an object - something you lovingly devote a fair amount of effort to, even though it serves no purpose beyond its own existence. When, say, you start playing with the decor just because you can, that strikes me as one of those things: there's no reason to move the furniture around except to stave off boredom. But see? you can afford to be bored by the decor.

Let me take coffee as one of those indexes of civilization. If I'm right about all this, the highest form would be Turkish coffee.

Think about it: you don't need coffee to begin with, but there it is, waiting for you to cradle in your hands. Doesn't that feel nice? There's no nutritional value in coffee; we got along just fine without it. So right there we've got something totally useless. "But I need it to stay awake!" you protest. Fine, have a Red Bull then. Mmmm, cough syrup with a kick. And you can chug it.

Too much Red Bull?

We like fast. (How else can you justify the fast food feed bag, even as a joke?) Now you can run by a Starbucks for a triple-shot skim-milk cappuccino - wet or dry - or you can go in some drive-thru joint and grab a paper cuppa. And it's all fast. But a Turkish coffee can't be made fast. You could easily automate it, but you can't speed it up much: its essence is precisely the process of slowly heating up the brew, stopping just short of a full boil - three times. To make good Turkish coffee, you have to be patient.

And even when you get it in your hands, you have to be patient. First you wait - some more - to let the fine coffee silt settle. Then when you do drink the coffee, you can't just swill it down: it's one sip at a time. At best you can hasten slowly. But why would anyone want to hurry down a cup of this deep, rich, gratuitous drink?

This sort of patience is an exercise in delayed gratification - or, put another way, self-control. Little kids think that way: more is better, so a lot more must be a lot better. Faster is better here, so it must be better everywhere, and the faster the better.

Self-control seems generally to be considered the path to quality. Ask any artist or athlete, they'll tell you it takes a lot of work and discipline to make it. You've heard it all before: "Talent will only take you so far; to go that extra mile, you gotta work."

Have I learned this valuable lesson? Not fully, I have to confess; there are plenty of times I've gone for the quick-and-easy way out. I need more practice. Hmmm. Think I'll have me another Turkish coffee. It's good practice.

(Images perilously purloined from http://www.flickr.com/photos/blhphotography/501306828/ and http://www.troys-drums.com/archive/2006_10_01_troys-drums.htm)