Month: November 2020

Venite Adoremus. Happy Advent, whoever reads this.

I listened to a bit of Christmas-y music last night for the first time this year. What a pleasure to meet those familiar melodies in the middle of winter.

Chesterton says in The Everlasting Man that even speaking merely historically, the celebration of Christmas is one of the great gifts that the world has received from the Christian faith. It’s an enchanting thought, and ever since I read this suggestion, I’ve never been able to escape it.

The remarkable thing about Christmas, for Chesterton, is how it brings together, irrevocably, the idea of childhood and the idea of divinity. Jesus in the manger is God made weak and frail.

Before the Church, according to Chesterton, there was no particular reason for associating divinity with a human birth, and perhaps many reasons not to, even though there was no reason why it should have been strictly impossible either. It just wasn’t an association that was made with any particular force or frequency in the pre-Christian world.

However, once the Church drew such a strong connection between the imagery of the child and the notion of divine incarnation, and gave it such a prominent place in the liturgy, the connection could never be unmade. No one who ever saw this juxtaposition, which was made so earnestly, would be able to forget it, whether or not they accepted the faith to which that juxtaposition belonged.

Childhood and divinity are now permanently and inextricably linked across the world. Now we cannot look at a baby without having some intuition of divinity, and we likewise cannot pray without a sense of the eternal youthfulness and innocence of God. 

I was reminded of Chesterton’s reflections last night as the Christmas music meandered through the house while I watched my little son, who was intensely focused on some small puzzle that was resisting his efforts.

“O come let us adore him,” the music invited. My eyes, watching my child, were full of love. It was a powerful moment, beyond words.

There was so much that I found enlightening and wondrous in Plato the first time I read through his dialogues. I couldn’t believe that we have possessed his thought, and later reflections upon his thought, for centuries upon centuries and yet so little of it has really managed to permeate society, in some ways, that page after page seemed in my eyes to contain new and unimagined revelations.

Some have tried to say that Christianity repackaged Platonism for the common people, and I can see the grain of truth in this … and yet, when I was first reading Plato, I already had a full undergraduate degree in Christian theology, and I must admit that to me, Plato’s thought felt not familiar but outrageous and revolutionary.

Intelligent friends of mine had even told me about Plato, and I thought I knew pretty much what to expect. I was wrong.

Out of all the thoughts in Plato that challenged and shaped me, one that I thought to be most profound, most incisive, is his ardent assertion that it is worse to commit an injustice than to suffer an injustice.

To put it in language that would be at once less strange to us and also far more explosive: the victim is better off than the victimizer.

Rephrased again: the one who commits aggressions (and perhaps, we might even suggest, microaggressions) has the worse end of the interaction.

This is not only counterintuitive. It sounds offensive, and dangerous, and maybe evil.

But I truly believe that within it is hidden the true understanding of goodness and happiness.

It’s not a rhetorical ploy. It’s not just the weaker party trying to puff up and look more powerful than reality will allow, for the sake of saving face.

It’s also not a tool to be used by the powerful to justify their violences and injustices, although doubtless it can be, and has been, so used.

Rather, it is the necessary starting place for moral growth. One of the hardest lessons to learn, a lesson that requires revisiting again and again and again, is that when we feel faced with a choice between suffering an evil on the one hand, or escaping that evil by committing some other evil, we should always strive to convince ourselves to choose whatever course will not involve actively engaging in deeds that we know are not right.

That doesn’t mean that we’ll be happy when an evil befalls us. It doesn’t mean that we’ll give the victimizer the permission or the ability to go on perpetrating injustice upon the world.

It does mean, at the bare minimum, that we would not be wrong in any such circumstances to tell ourselves, “At least I can be proud of how I acted.” To suffer injustice without being drawn into continuing the cycle is a difficult and praiseworthy accomplishment indeed.

Of course there has been a surprisingly effective propaganda war happening against religion for many years now. As scholars have pointed out from early on, the irony of the “New Atheists” was just how much of a lack of genius for innovation they evinced. Every one of their characteristic arguments was well-worn, familiar, decades or even centuries old, and perhaps some would say, a little bit tired.

I’m not sure that irreligion has ever done a very good job of making the case publicly in favour of itself, in any way that has truly been absorbed into the popular consciousness, but so far it hasn’t needed to. If they can make religion look bad enough, then what other option will people have?

It’s the intellectual equivalent of a political “smear campaign.” Vote for me — after all, look at the other guy, am I right?

One of the tactics employed to this end has been to emphasize the propensity of religious people toward extremism. But to me, that’s like warning against courage because it could lead to rashness. It’s like criticizing studiousness on the grounds that some truly evil things have been done in the name of scientific learning.

To my mind, it makes far more sense to characterize religion as the mean between two opposing extremes, just as courage rests between cowardice and rashness, and studiousness between blissful ignorance and boundless curiosity.

Religion is the good and praiseworthy middle ground. Religion can degenerate into extremes, of course. One such extreme is obviously its inherent tendency toward superstition or bigotry. Religion’s other extreme, though, its other darker self — is irreligion.

Religion is deeply in touch with the inescapable reality of human ignorance: our ignorance about that which is beyond the physical world, for one thing, but also our inability to understand comprehensively what is at the heart of a human person or a human society.

Religions (and keep in mind that I distinguish religions from superstitions) know that when we forget our fundamental ignorance, we are continually in danger of growing hubristic, insatiable, destructive. Hence, to keep us from forgetting, it enshrines rituals and imagery to ensure that the powerful unknown will never be too far from our thoughts.

Superstition forgets our ignorance unintentionally, by convincing itself that it knows just how to manipulate all the unseen forces to bring about desirable outcomes.

Irreligion forgets our ignorance intentionally, convincing itself there is nothing to fear in forgetting because perhaps indeed there is nothing to forget.

To my eyes, both extremes are irrational and unwise. Some might wish to deliberate upon which extreme is more dangerous or less rational, but that doesn’t interest me here. I only want to suggest that they are both deficiencies.

My intention is not to rebuke or alienate people on these extremes. Not at all! My goal for this blog is always to encourage myself more and more toward virtue, and secondly, to encourage my readers likewise. I believe that to practice religion well, as I have described here, is a virtuous endeavour. I realize that we all find ourselves in different situations as well, however, and so whatever small steps we can take in a good direction should be celebrated as progress, in the sort of virtue that is worth progressing in.

I don’t get any money from Duolingo. (Honestly, I don’t actually even care if you use Duolingo or one of the many other free language learning apps.)

But I’m going to convince you to start using Duolingo.

I’ve been using Duolingo continuously since January 2019 — so, almost two years, as of this writing. And I couldn’t recommend it more.

I have only a rough recollection of the day I decided to start using Duolingo again. I had tried starting it many times in the past, and seemed unable to stay with it for more than a month or two. In fact, that seemed like a very good reason not even to try. Certainly, I believed that such would be my fate once again.

But what I remember is that I thought back to the person I was when I first tried it. This was back when Duolingo was just beginning, in 2011. I had heard an interview with the company’s founder on the radio, and decided to give it a try.

As I thought back to all the time that had passed since then, all the places I’d gone and paths I’d travelled, I wondered how different I might be now, if I had managed to keep Duolingo as a habit through all those years.

Some people say that Duolingo isn’t the best or most efficient way to learn a language, and I have no doubt they’re right. But ten minutes a day of studying a language with any methodology, no matter how flawed, is going to teach you a huge amount about that language, if you can stick with it long enough.

What if I had become, perhaps not fluent, but at least conversant, in French, Italian, Spanish, German? What friendships might that have opened up to me? What job opportunities, career trajectories, educational settings?

Most importantly, what great books would have been available to me for reading in the original language?

I thought back over all those years with an increasing dismay. I could not think of a single day when I wouldn’t have had five or ten minutes to spare for Duolingo, ten minutes which I had instead carelessly spent on frivolities.

The whole time, Duolingo was free, and the whole time I had access to it. It was only a tap of a button away.

And the only thing that kept me from benefiting from it was that I lacked the virtue to be able to force myself through the tiniest bit of boredom or discouragement.

But I didn’t waste too long regretting my failures. As I reflected, it became rapidly apparent to me that it would be twice as shameful if, after this realization, I allowed another half a decade to pass in the same way.

So I downloaded the app, did a lesson, put it away, and didn’t think of it again until the next day.

Now, to be forthright, I haven’t actually learned any languages. If you set me down in Moscow or Beijing I’d probably seem virtually every bit as ignorant as any English tourist. I’ve been in no hurry, and I’ve given myself the freedom to jump from language to language whenever I like, so long as I keep in the habit of doing a daily lesson.

Still, when I study a language with Duolingo, I do get better at it. Most recently I’ve been doing German, only for a few months, but I’ve learned quite a bit, made some good progress, and when I look at the remaining lessons in the course, I know that if I stuck with German for the next couple years, I could gain a pretty strong grasp of the language.

Now, maybe it’s true, as all the whiners online are constantly insisting, that no matter how long you study a language on Duolingo, it will never make you perfectly fluent. Maybe so.

I say: who cares? I wasn’t getting perfectly fluent in any languages anyway! It’s not like Duolingo is interrupting all the worthwhile language work I’d otherwise be engaged in. And now, since I’ve been using Duolingo every day instead of wasting those ten minutes every day, I’m that much closer to fluency than I would have been otherwise. Thus, if I ever were in a position where I suddenly needed to become completely fluent in German or one of my other languages … won’t I then be glad for all the time I’ve already put into studying?

I don’t know whether I will stick with German continuously for the next couple years. I might take a year away from German to return to Russian or Mandarin, or even to try a new language. But even if that happens, I know that any time I want to, I can return to German, quickly relearn whatever I will have forgotten, and then pick up from where I leave off.

The best part about it is that all of this is now absolutely automatic for me. I do a lesson every morning, as early as I reasonably can, and it takes a few minutes, and then I don’t have to think about it again for the day.

There was one day when Duo told me I hadn’t completed my lesson the previous day even when I was sure I had. I don’t know if my mind is deceiving itself, or if there was some sort of technical glitch with my phone syncing the completed lesson. What I can say is that starting over from day one after weeks of building up a streak was the hardest day in Duolingo history, but thank goodness, I did it.

I’ve kept this habit through times of financial distress, through the labour and birth and first days of life of my son, through sickness and travel, through losing my job with Covid.

And in this way it has also become, not only an opportunity for me to practice virtue, but a way to remind myself of the attainability of virtue, and the power of it. There are days when it felt like nothing was as it should be, and everything was coming apart.

On those days, you would not believe what a comfort and a strength it gave me to remember that I could continue to take these small steps toward learning a language, not because anyone told me I had to, not because I was afraid, but just because it is a good thing to do, and because I am strong enough to do it.

What about you? Do you have the minuscule reserve of virtue needed to build this easy and enjoyable habit? If so, I think the burden is on you to explain why you haven’t yet embraced it.

I’ve learned some tips for getting the most out of your lessons and I’d be happy to share. Leave a comment if you have any questions, and please don’t forget to add me as a friend on Duolingo once you get going!

What is the “West” that is implicit in a phrase like “the history of Western civilization”? Clearly it refers to something more than a point on a compass.

Western civilization encompasses a broad range of different political arrangements and artistic heritages and economies and traditions and peoples. Still, there does seem to be a kinship, a sort of shared framework, that this group holds in common.

When you grow up in a context that is said to owe so much to this Western civilization, I think it is natural for some kinds of people to be drawn to wonder more about that history, as a journey of self-discovery if nothing else.

But there are many intelligent people (along with some more unintelligent and misinformed personalities, I won’t deny it) who think that Western civilization is valuable as more than just a sort of family history. These are people who think that our history should be not just a museum to be visited but also, in some respects, a source of inspiration and guidance for us.

If there was something praiseworthy at the heart of the West, something that would be worth preserving and passing on, I would assert that a compelling case could be made that it is Socrates.

I know some tedious people who would very eagerly want to tell you that the greatness and glory of the West is capitalism. Let’s not say anything more about them for the moment. Others might try to say it’s democracy, or freedom, or equality, or charity, or popular government, or scientific method; I think all of these are problematic in a variety of ways, but I realize that a case could just as easily be made for them as for what I will say.

A few other proposals that I would find more interesting might be that what is valuable is our inheritance of “Roman culture” or “Germanic virtues” or “Christian communion.” I think that someone who proposed one of these as the answers would be probably getting more right than wrong.

But for me, the expansion of the Roman imperial power was really the expansion of the Socratic way of thinking through the world.

For me, the wars of the Greeks (from Themistocles to Alexander and the Macedonians) were ultimately important because they protected and established the Greek language and Greek learning.

Sparta was important as one of Socrates’ inspirations, and because of how it added to the military strength of the Greeks in a way that ended up defending some of the work of the Greek Enlightenment.

The pre-socratic philosophers and the sophists ultimately matter because of how their work contributed to the education of Socrates, and Athens in the end is important most of all because it was the home of Socrates.

Historically speaking, to be a part of the West is to exist within the context of a political structure or a legal system or a social group or a religion (etc) which derives from that nexus of ancient forces that swirled around and moved outward from the speech of Socrates.

Perhaps, though, we might say that existentially speaking, every person becomes more or less truly a child of the West, depending how much we learn of and accept this Socratic heritage.

The longer I have studied, the more I have begun to feel a suspicion that nearly all of the most intractable and incompatible opinions can be brought into agreement with one another.

We are raised thinking that there is one Truth (generally whatever we happen to believe at the moment, especially if we have lots of friends who agree with us, and even more if some of the people who disagree with us are easily ridiculed) and that contrary to that one Truth there is a vast multitude of Falsehoods all around us.

It seems to me that figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, each in his own fashion, modelled a different way of relating to the many unreasonable and mutually contradictory opinions that constantly float around us.

None of these three philosophers said, “You’re all so stupid, and so now let’s just try and forget all those wrong opinions and find the one Truth!”

Instead, each looked around himself and saw, not a jungle of threatening Falsehoods, but a banquet of partial truths.

Socrates famously taught that every action is oriented towards goodness, even if sometimes only in a deeply uninformed way. Based on the manner in which he went out and asked questions of the wise and of those who could represent the views of the many, it seems probable that he likewise accepted that every opinion is oriented toward truth, and must contain at least some grain of insight into reality, simply because of what it means to be human. This is the deeper meaning of Socratic “remembering,” and Socratic “midwifery.”

Plato, by writing in dialogues, and Aristotle, by constantly surveying the varieties of opinions in his treatises, both show their continued acceptance of Socrates’ approach to seeking for truth.

Here’s one implication of that approach. If every opinion is a partial truth, then that means every opinion is ultimately able to be reconciled to every other opinion. Truth does not disagree with itself, and so the truth in one opinion will cohere with the truth in any other opinion, when we are actually able to discern what is truth in a given instance.

Since slowly absorbing that way of thinking, I’ve noticed an unexpected effect. When I encounter two incompatible opinions, whether on social media or in the world of scholarship, I do not think, “Which one is right?”

I don’t think, “What’s my own distinctive solution to the problem, which puts these first two to shame?”

Instead, I wonder how the two views could be synthesized, how the truth revealed in each can combine with the other to give us a broader way of seeing into the matter.

It’s become instinctive to me, but I know very well that it is a rare and odd way of thinking today. Still, I do find myself wondering how the world would be a different place if there were more people exposed to this sort of approach.

For many years I’ve been disillusioned with many aspects of what is called conservatism.

But there is one thing that could be called conservatism which strongly appeals to me, and which G K Chesterton and Leo Strauss both illuminate by a similarly counterintuitive line of reasoning.

They both approached this particular strand of conservative thought by asking what made the great revolutionary thinkers of the past great. Those gigantic personalities who could imagine and begin to bring about a genuinely new and strange future order — what made them capable of such feats?

Leo Strauss speaks of how,

We cannot expect that liberal education will lead all who benefit from it to understand their civic responsibility in the same way or to agree politically. Karl Marx, the father of communism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the step-grandfather of fascism, were liberally educated on a level to which we cannot even hope to aspire.

Leo Strauss, “What Is Liberal Education?”

Strauss goes on to suggest that Marx and Nietzsche failed to practice moderation in how they used the advantages received in their classical studies. And yet still, you can’t read him without having a sense that their classical learning is praiseworthy, and that it even somehow explains and ennobles whatever mangled legacy they have managed to leave behind themselves.

Those who are familiar with Strauss’s work will recognize that Strauss credits early modern thinkers like Machiavelli with a similarly impressive grasp of the classical heritage.

Chesterton looks back even further and brings forth a wider array of examples:

The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods.

G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World?

Chesterton appears to be rather less concerned about moderation than Strauss was, but he links even more tightly and clearly the capacity to shape the future with a profound familiarity with the best of the past.

For my part, I think also of Sigmund Freud. In his book On the Interpretation of Dreams, he gives a knowledgeable account of some of the architectural and archaeological history of the city of Rome, simply to illustrate some points about the relationship of the conscious and the unconscious mind.

Freud also describes a dream of his own, a dream about the Punic wars, in which he is Hannibal, come to tear down the civilization founded upon Rome. Clearly it is noteworthy that he describes himself as the enemy of the West, but surely it is also important that his dreams are saturated with stories of ancient Rome.

Today, left and right are divided between progressive and regressive, revolutionary and reactive, and conservatism is identified with the regressive and reactive right. That is not my conservatism.

I believe we should indeed be straining constantly toward a more just, more virtuous, more peaceful and more flourishing future, whether rapidly with Chesterton or slowly with Strauss, and not simply trying to return to a golden age of sixty or six hundred or six thousand years ago.

However, the only way to know what that future could look like, and how that future could grow out of our present, and the only way to have a chance of succeeding in those efforts, against the powerful forces of economic and political and military self-interest — is to look to the past. The inspirations of the greatest thinkers and greatest lessons humanity has ever produced are available to us, if we will only look. It is the only path, really.

As Chesterton says so charmingly in the same section of that book of his which I quoted from a moment ago:

For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past.

Chesterton

I was reflecting this morning and something strange occurred to me. There is a surprising overlap between biblical faith, Socratic philosophy, and the doctrine of Nietzsche, a place where all three meet and have some kind of agreement.

It is in their exhortation to an acceptance, or even an embrace, or celebration, of sorrow and pain.

People raised in a Catholic context (and also other religious groups from the Abrahamic faiths) are often portrayed in popular depictions as holding an almost fatalistic resignation to the inevitability of misfortunes and unhappiness. This stereotype grows ultimately from deep and ancient theological reflections on the beneficial place of suffering in the spiritual life.

Socrates says that a rhetorician with a true understanding of what is good would go about persuading juries to indict him and punish him for his failings and turn him toward virtue.
And the phrase of Nietzsche that is most ubiquitous in at least the English-speaking world, is, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

On one level, we might say this fact means only that all three seek to encourage bravery and discourage cowardice, and there is some truth to that. But I think it merits some unpacking as well.

Someone could also seek to draw out the incompatibilities of how each arrived at its similar conclusion. Christians interpret pain typologically, as a participation in Christ’s suffering. A Platonist might degrade physical pain as inhabiting a lower, non-intellectual plane of reality. Perhaps the Nietzschean sees pain as a necessary feature of the road to power.

That sort of differentiation is a very basic step in the process of thinking through these relationships, and although it’s an important step, it’s not all that interesting to me here and so I won’t dwell on it.

The image that is most enticing to me as I reflect on these three intersecting viewpoints, is the accomplishment of the Renaissance.

In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche speaks approvingly of the Italian Renaissance. He believes that its legacy was spoiled by the interruption of the Reformation, but that for an instant it was a thing of glory. He says that the Christian faith strained to become something great in the Renaissance, in that moment of flourishing culture brought about in large part by the recovery of classical learning.

The Renaissance was, in the main, a deeply Christian movement. It had a powerful fascination with the Socratic philosophical tradition as it was elaborated throughout the Greek and Latin classical literary tradition. And it was an event that, according to Nietzsche, nearly accomplished in itself precisely what Nietzsche claimed to be seeking to bring about in the modern world.

Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be so surprising that there would be at least one area of profound agreement (or possible agreement) between the three.

But then, what does pain have to do with anything? Why do they meet on this point?

Here’s something that comes to mind: If we believe that pain is the worst thing that can happen, then we make pain our master. It is almost the essence of nobility, in contrast with what is ignoble, to know there are things that are worse than pain, things that must be avoided at all costs, things that can relativize pain and open us to a larger perspective.

___

PS: It is fair to comment that we could probably expand this investigation and say that the question of pain is a central concern of Buddhism and Hinduism and Taoism etc as well, but as I’m not knowledgeable enough about them to speak intelligently, I’ve tried to stick to subjects where my observations might have some worth.

There’s something that I find really striking about Thomistic legal theory — that is, about St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching about positive law, the law prescribed by the state.

St. Thomas holds that laws exist to help people become more virtuous.

Isn’t that kind of wild? I suspect that that is, for the most part, far, far away from the way most of us tend to think of the law today.

Here, take a look at what he actually says:

The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz. that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils.

ST I-II q. 96, a. 2.

You’ll note in the first place that this is clearly not the teaching of some sort of Puritanical bigot, who wants to put to the torch anyone who has the slightest hint of sin or impropriety. That’s a very important point.

You’ll notice also, however, how Aquinas begins that passage: “The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue”!

(N.B. that “men” here is of course “homines” in the Latin, rather than the specifically masculine “vir,” and so a more modern translation would properly render it as “people,” or “humans,” or something along those lines.)

I don’t want to overstate my point. Obviously people today will understand the law to have some role in funnelling citizens toward a life of virtue, insofar as we believe in anything in the ballpark of virtue. For instance, we generally want the law to help the impoverished become hard-working wage-earners, rather than listless beneficiaries of government handouts.

However, I don’t believe that is the central way that we think of the law today. To our minds, the law protects us. It keeps our society orderly, and minimizes the crimes that would interfere with the peaceful living of our lives. For us, law essentially provides the framework within which capitalism and governmental support can function most efficiently, in a way that is least destructive of human wellbeing.

St. Thomas has a much more exalted view of human law. I think it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that he sees law as a civilizational road to sainthood. The true goal of a good law is to increase human virtue in the world.

The increase of human virtue is more important than an improvement of the economy, or an increase of knowledge, or an expansion of power. Human virtue is the central purpose of the law, and also of the government, and of the economy, and of our educational institutions. Everything is oriented toward virtue, or it is pointless.

Don’t think that this is a sectarian or fundamentalist approach to society, either. St. Thomas gets this from his philosophical guide, Aristotle. He appeals to the Nicomachean Ethics, book five, where Aristotle is discussing the different meanings of justice, and brings in the question of the relationship of law and virtue.

What if we recalibrated our world to begin thinking in these ways again? I wish there were a political party that thought in this way. Both the political right and the political left today claim to care about good and evil, and both try to smear their opponents as amoralists.

The right says that they represent morality, and religious freedom, and that the left is trying to destroy every last vestige of our capacity to discriminate between good and bad.

The left says that they are the ones who stand up for what is good for people, as opposed to the conservatives who only care about corporations and power and military might and financial profits.

Both are correct in their denunciations of the other side, as far as I can tell. I do not have confidence, however, that either tells the truth when it is praising itself.

I wish there were a political party that would say, we care most of all about good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and vice, and we want to structure society to help people become the best they can be.

If such a party existed, then I could get excited about partisan politics.

Until then, I will try to do the best I can, at least, for myself and my family and my friends.