Mid year resolution

Events, dear boy, events. I hope the events are largely over, so I am planning to start blogging again. I have also just started The Theory of Moral Sentiments, so there will be plenty of material. Reviewing the posts of the last six months was disappointing; I think I was getting sloppy and, worse, crabbed. A couple of friends will be reading the book with me, which might diminish the urge to write, but I will try.

Instead of discussing the first three chapters, I have a moral case to share. The garage at work is sometimes used by people who want to smoke meth (as I have seen them do) or drink malt liquor out of the rain. As a result cars are broken into every few months, though really that is much less often than I would have thought. It was my turn, along with several other people, last week. The thief got little from me, just some headphones and a few CDs, but he left a perfect scene in exchange. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was lying face up on the passenger seat; looking in at the cover, he had smashed the window, burying the book under glass, then leaned across it to rifle through what little I had left in the car. Seeing the title of the book just visible through all the glass made the experience almost, though perhaps not quite, worth it.

Online dating

Online dating is a weird thing, to say the least. Part of the weirdness is only that I don't really feel like dating anyone, so I tinker with my profile for entertainment, with a small side bet on the chance of meeting someone so great, I'd change my mind. The other weirdness is stuff like this instant messenger conversation. Okcupid has a built-in messenger, which I'm going to disable now, but I'm glad I didn't know it was on because it gave me this. Both names changed of course; hers only slightly.

First "roseforreal82" contacted me as I was about to leave for home. Her profile was illiterate, wandering, and deranged, but what the hell, okcupid keeps things anonymous so I asked her to use okcupid's internal email and said I'd reply. She sent an empty message, so lacking anything else to say I replied that her profile said she wanted a never-married Christian, and that I was an atheist and divorced. She responded with this instant messenger conversation:

[12:00:05 am]roseforreal82:hi
[12:00:36 am]roseforreal82:so u have kids
[12:00:40 am]eeyore:no
[12:01:53 am]roseforreal82:but u had a wife
[12:01:57 am]eeyore:yes
[12:02:07 am]roseforreal82:aethiest means no God right??
[12:02:34 am]roseforreal82:so u mean u prefer an aethiest woman also??
[12:03:10 am]eeyore:either an atheist or someone who is familiar with it and comfortable with the idea
[12:04:31 am]roseforreal82:hmmm is being an aethiest really matters to u?
[12:04:40 am]eeyore:yes I'm afraid so
[12:05:40 am]roseforreal82:ohhhh...so i think we are not compatible coz im a devoted catholics
[12:06:15 am]eeyore:yes that would be awkward
[12:06:24 am]eeyore:but thanks for thinking of me
[12:06:30 am]eeyore:hope you have luck soon
[12:07:28 am]roseforreal82:and im happy for ur honesty

I have no idea why she contacted me. I'm thinking bottom trawling.

Evolutionary mistakes

Paul Johnson continues to use his supposedly historical column to deliver lectures about secularism. Since his ideas on that subject are long since fixed, there is little value in each new column, and I miss his reflections on history. Still, it is interesting to read arguments that are elements of who I thought I was, worn and familiar as an old blanket. Johnson dislikes and rejects Darwinism for the same reasons I did, primarily because of perceived moral and social consequences, mixed with a vibrant dislike of scientific dogmatism (more often brash, philosophically naive confidence than actual dogmatism, but it feels much the same if you do not sympathize with it).

The temptation to bow before scientism is given an extra edge by the current deification of Darwin, who finds himself, poor fellow, in the role of the anti-Christ, with his natural selection as an alternative to Christianity. Some people might argue that the survival of the fittest is a sound principle. Indeed that was the principle underpinning Hitler’s race-theory and other manifestations of social Darwinism. I believe it will lead rapidly and inevitably to the self-destruction of the human race. The crisis in the world economy, and the great war it seems likely to promote, make all these issues highly topical.

I need to read some Spencer (I read a little once for class, without retention), but I trust Jonah Goldberg when he says this use of Social Darwinism is inaccurate. The reductio ad Hitlerum, sadly, has come to subtract from an argument. What is really interesting here is the category error at the center. "Survival of the fittest" cannot be considered a "sound principle" because those two phrases belong to distinct categories, and the meanings of the words in "survival of the fittest" are different in each category. Principles make use of moral vocabulary, because a principle is a basis for moral action, while Spencer's phrase is meant to use scientific vocabulary, which freely eliminates secondary meanings from words or invents new words and meanings to serve a technical purpose.

If "survival of the fittest" is used as a principle, it becomes an implicit metaphor, with "survival" and "fittest" both changing meaning. In biology, survival only means the propagation of a genome (or perhaps individual genes, per Dawkins) and fittest only means "most able to propagate." So, "survival of the fittest" is a technical reduction, re-casting survival in the barest terms. In moral terms, however, the phrase evokes the "the flourishing of the best," which does leave room for nasty ideas like lebensraum and a master race. In moral terms, survival implies many additional things; it is in the moral world that man does not live by bread alone. Equally, "fitness" in the moral world has in view the entire organism of a man with all his behaviors, verging on "worth." The connection between the two uses of "survival of the fittest" is no more sound than the connection between chaos theory as in mathematics and chaos theory as used in Jurassic Park, where the words slide into their popular meanings, as though it were "science says [theory] that complexity is unpredictable [chaos]."

I am not trying to get at the is-ought problem here. Converting descriptive biology to prescriptive morality requires additional premisses, certainly, but in this case the conversion is by slipperiness of language. The is-ought problem would only arise if someone were arguing that evolution meant he had a moral obligation to spread his genes.

Update: Michael Shermer has an article in Scientific American making a similar point.

In a weary land

Wisdom from one unwise man to another:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There as a king reigned in the east:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

Whether happiness may be found in political change

Dalrymple's essay in the current City Journal is unlocked now. It is a little wandering, but as always it is rewarding to read him. He quotes John Stuart Mill's self-reflection on happiness and political change:

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

It is humbling to compare my own experience, not all that different in nature, with Mill's. In 2000, when it briefly looked as though Gore would win on the day of the election, it was as though my own hope for the future was dying. For an hour I was inconsolable, though strangely I was not a great supporter of Bush himself. The sudden access of grief and despair, so manifestly out of proportion to a mere election, shocked me into a thorough examination of not just my beliefs but the place they had in my life; my political maturity began that day. Yet Mill was able to ask himself this question of his own genius, without the rough impetus of a noisy campaign and political defeat.

Like Mill, I was young, though at 25, not so very young. Unlike Mill, whose remarkable genius had been paired from early childhood with an astonishing education, I had been happy only to try to make sense of the world through comparatively scanty reading; he, of course, had already constructed a philosophical view of considerable power. Yet the same falsehood had gripped us both, the belief that a rightly ordered world would bring happiness, not just to a greater number of men, but personally; that the work of increasing happiness in the world is at one with working towards one's own happiness. Escaping that falsehood means abandoning the hope that all the struggle to learn about man (for ethics, economics, and politics are only branches of the study of man) has any meaning beyond the pleasure of learning itself.

Minds of great power, like Mill's, may alter the world a little, but then again they may not, and the changes worked often bear little resemblance to the intention. I doubt Mill would approve of the excesses of libertarianism, despite its closest resemblance to his thought; he did not mean to include the exuberant hedonism libertarians so often present as their highest good. Nor again would the use of cold utilitarian calculus to justify great cruelty to a few suit his character, yet it might well be that such abuses in the 20th century by totalitarians would have been harder to dress in a presentable rhetoric without Mill's work. Thoughts die as well; we scarcely know if Pythagoras really existed or what Heraclitus meant, even in the little of his writing that survives. If great minds can little expect to know the consequences of their thoughts, or even to see effects at all, lesser minds must expect no return on their efforts.

Thus the happiness in the study of man can be nothing more than the happiness in learning itself. Imlac describes the pleasure of knowledge (I think it is safe to take this as Johnson's own opinion) in Rasselas:

Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas. Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction, and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget. I am therefore inclined to conclude that if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.

That man is so various, so utterly resistant to reduction to a system, makes his nature a study that can bring happiness for a lifetime. And yet it is so painful to learn about man and see it bear so little fruit! Imlac himself faults ignorance because it produces nothing, yet how much does the study of man produce? I have learned a little better to preserve an aequus animus; that is an increase in my happiness, at the cost of some intense pleasures; I have learned, a little, to hear the underlying sense in men's incoherence; that is an increase in happiness, though at the cost of alienation of words from sense; I have learned at last and greatest cost how tenuous are the threads that tie reason to the self; a slight understanding, that forgives much and costs more. Little enough; and when I die it will pass away with me. Surely happiness, though the emotion of it may fade, ought in its essence to partake of eternity?

I can easily believe that my mind is simply too weak to learn enough to win an unambiguous increase in personal happiness above the happiness of learning itself, but it does not seem that anyone has ever had a strong enough mind. There is, then, no happiness to be found either in contributing to the right formation of society or in the understanding of man that must precede a correct theory of society. In the end, I can only believe that in good or bad thought, in well or badly ordered societies, in knowledge or ignorance, there can be more or less happiness in the world, but only the pleasure of the learning falls to the learner, and to whom the excess or deficiency of happiness falls is the work of chance alone.

Romance

A routine essay in Luddite sentiment here, but the last sentence implies something astonishing:

Seventy per cent of women said they would rather receive a love letter or poem than a text message or email, while 53 per cent of men agreed.

That is, 30% of women would rather get a text message or email. Who are these women? All the functional illiterates and the hard-faced club girls, sure, but can that really be 30%? What a horrifying thought.

Quotations too good to die

One of the many almost-quotations everyone knows is the one Paul Johnson uses here:

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense.

Like the spurious quotation from Dostoevsky about all things being permitted if God is dead, the quotation accurately reflects the thought of the writer. In this case, it mimics Chesterton's paradoxical style as well. However, it's just as well to point out that Chesterton, in all his millions of words, never wrote exactly that.

I admire Johnson, but he goes on to commit a common error among conservative Christians:

The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect.

The global temperature has been rising, if not all that rapidly, for quite a long time now; barring some revolutionary discoveries, it is not reasonable to disbelieve in "global warming." Feel free to disagree with man-made global warming (AGW or anthropogenic global warming), or more reasonably, disagree that the warming is 100% man-made; it is also a fine position to take that the warming is not all that big a threat compared to other environmental problems.

The reflex rejection of global warming tout court is embarrassing, but it is borderline lunacy to throw in the greenhouse effect, which is a well-confirmed theory about the insulating effect of atmospheres. Venus is otherwise terribly hard to explain, and we ourselves would be v. v. cold. Johnson most likely means the bundle of policy recommendations popular with the people who talk most about those things, but flabby writing like that is what helps further the stupid caricature of conservatism as the enemy of science.

Women and squirrels

My opinion exactly.

Charity

In the last post I called charity, in the alms-giving sense, a grievance. I almost qualified it with "to an inflamed soul," but with men if the soul is not at least a little inflamed it is crushed. The offenses of charity are many, for both the giver and the object of it, though it is the object of charity who suffers most.

To be compelled by circumstances to accept a gift is a wound to pride, painful when it cuts into swollen ego, but a fatal poison to an honest sense of private honor. Charity demands gratitude, an elusive sensation that when spontaneous is a form of joy but that when forced cannibalizes joy in life. Charity makes one man more human at the expense of another, who is an object; apart from the injury to pride, the object is reduced in status before his family and the world. Charity is alien, often absurdly so, being given from the giver's interests and resources, so that the object's very world is made to seem strange and small. (Stevenson mentions a similar effect on the steerage passengers from the polite attentions of first class passengers on the steamship.) Charity imposes a debt, and debts weigh heavily on serious souls: "pay it forward" is a cheery high-energy American sort of thing to say, but that need to repay is a burden, and one that the object of charity cannot always set down.

It is then much easier to hate and resent the charitable man and to carry his gifts as grievances, or to despise him and consider his gifts only a partial payment on what is owed. Still, there is want in the world, and almost as much as that, man needs to give. So Jesus said,

Take heed that ye do not do your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have the glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand known what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thy openly.

It may be that his reason for saying so was only to protect the purity of man's relationship with God as embodied in temple offerings, but that description sounds to me like a wonderfully precise solution to the problem of charity. Its foremost advantage is that God is the center and object of the gift. Christianity at its best has interpreted charity to individuals in this way, which greatly relieves the strain on the recipient. God, not he, is the object of charity; the difference in status between giver and recipient is obscured by the infinitely higher reference point of God. The gift is given in secret, so much so that the giver should almost keep it secret from himself; the recipient need not then lose status in the eyes of the world, and ideally not in the eyes of the giver either, who is enjoined not to dwell on his gift. Moreover the gift is a discharge of duty, and if it puts the recipient in debt, he may pay it off in holiness of life or in prayers; gratitude too is owing only to God and demonstrable in worship. That the prayers may be nonsense directed at nothing does not prevent them from relieving the recipient's obligations.

I think in practical terms that the best charity is to someone whose needs you know well. It did not really need an economic study, but there is a marvelous paper called "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas," showing that gifts destroy increasing amounts of value as the relationship between giver and recipient grows more distant. As an economics paper it is concerned with the material loss, but anyone who has ever gotten a severely mistaken gift knows there is an additional loss in the form of feelings of alienation and isolation. For instance, my grandparents once gave me a book by Bill O'Reilly. I was a little happier not knowing they liked him, and especially not knowing they thought I would like him. Of course that is a trivial example, but it is a serious problem for relationships so distant they are merely notional, as when Americans show up at a Mexican orphanage to paint it. I went with a church youth group to do just that. It was painfully evident that we should have left our food with them and gone back on the first day. God only knows if they ever forgave us for our sleekness and our barbecues.

The very worst charity, so much so that it is simply a wicked act, is giving money to modern-day beggars. Starting from that point, you can pretty much work out all that I just wrote.

The best I have seen written about charity is in accounts of Maimonides' "Laws of Gifts to the Poor," though I have not read any Maimonides myself. I am pretty sure I just gave an amateurish version of what he wrote, but there is no helping the fact that no matter how hard you think something through, someone got there first and did it better.

What I would like to see is a solution to the problem of charity that does not require God. I suspect none exists, with mutual aid societies a partial answer.

Inaugural poem

Elizabeth Alexander's poem could hardly have been worse, except by being longer. The response to it explains how poetry has become a personal hobby, like knitting. In Samuel Johnson's day, a poem that bad would be mocked savagely; today, the expected response is to ignore the poem itself in favor of congratulating the poet for the sincerity of her emotion. It is like complimenting the knitter on the color of the yarn. Well, poetry used to aspire to more than keeping you warm. It is not just the lack of any meter or rhyme, though that loss hurts, but the wandering diction and vague thoughts that make it such a bad poem.

Alexander is deaf to all sense of words; how else can this highly unfortunate evocation of the chicken crossing the road be explained?

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

Yes, others did say that: they were chickens.

John Derbyshire and the Asia Times complained about these lines especially:

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

I might have an explanation for the wretched confusion in the last line. One of the difficulties for racial activists in the U.S. is that nearly everyone wants to help and to see disadvantaged people get on, which I think is what she means by love here, but most people expect that in return the people who are helped will stop feeling so aggrieved. Since in African-American studies existential grievance exceeds honest affection for black American and African history, Alexander as a professor of African-American Studies would intuitively feel that grievance is not a negative term and that love might threaten it.

It is of course also a mistake to think that someone with a grievance will be happier and less aggrieved after being helped. Charity itself is a grievance.

Over-correction

Being attached to correct usage has many advantages, earning respect, delighting listeners with pure speech, educating the ignorant, and attracting lots of chicks. It is not all good, though, since rebarbative cavilers watch closely for errors. In that spirit, I was entertained this morning by a van painted with the slogan, "Completely custom-made furniture upholstery is our business, but design is our forté." The correct pronunciation is only one syllable, but the two syllable pronunciation is so common that it is not worth minding. What delighted me was that the slogan-writer went the extra step of marking the second syllable the way it might be written if the two-syllable pronunciation were correct.

Prickly

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a funny article arguing that Mexico is misrepresented in the U.S. press as the land of burritos and drug gang beheadings, when it should really be seen as the home of a lively literary tradition. The writer is especially impressed by the Guadalajara book fair, which does sound pretty neat. That a big city could support eight daily papers is also impressive; I wish Seattle could do the same. The article, though, is funny for its prickly pride about literacy as a corrective for the impression created by thousands of savage drug murders in the last year and the breakdown of law in large stretches of Mexico. Who could seriously think that reporting on social chaos and a terrifying rise in murder, rather than on a book fair, is unfair and biased?

Also, the writer tries to make the U.S. look relatively illiterate; the U.S. is certainly unlettered, but the writer might be a little less puffed up if she took a look at the U.S. literacy rate (99%) and the Mexican literacy rate (91.7%). Given how little Americans do with their ability to read, it may well be the case that the U.S. could benefit from Mexico's cultural example, but the writer's attitude of mixed condescension and wounded pride is just silly.

The state of life

Dalrymple is the best, sometimes for no reason other than the poetry he quotes. Concluding his essay on relativism in social standards, he writes

Unfortunately, the solipsistic pursuit of happiness by people who live in close proximity to one another can, indeed often does, result in conflict. And thus it is that we come to create a hostile environment for ourselves:

for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That is from "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold; it has the more famous lines about the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith. Everyone has heard the phrase "darkling plain" but I at least had not read the poem before. The poem seems to struggle a little as a whole, but these lines are powerful and deeply moving.

The quoted passage omits a line and a half, "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" The omitted text clearly links the poem to the topos of Catullus 5, which has the beautiful lines "nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux / nox est perpetua una dormienda": when our brief light has once set, our night is one unending sleeping.

So da mihi basia mille, milia multa: let's kiss, a thousand, many thousand times. I would have thought pop music, being mostly about love, would use so potent an idea often, but the closest song I know of is Crowded House in "It's Only Natural":

Ice will melt, water will boil
You and I can shake off this mortal coil
It's bigger than us
You don't have to worry about it.
...
It's only natural
That I should want to be there with you.
It's only natural
That you should feel the same way too.

Arnold and Catullus have by far the better of the idea, though. They tell their lovers, you do have to worry about the clash of armies on the darkling plain; it will tear up and lay claim to your life. You will sleep one unending sleep, your day will end. Life has no beauty, no truth, no faith, no eternity, but what you choose to make with me.

Eloise and Abelard

The deficient technology of the 12th century meant Eloise and Abelard had to conduct their correspondence by letters. In the modern day, though, they would use online cartoons.