Presbyter Iohannes's Corner

I Give Up.

2005-08-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

Forget it. I've had this nagging desire to follow up that last post with something intelligent, even drafted a huge essay, and then scrapped it because all I could say was that neither way works. I've satisfied myself, below, with the notion that true art cannot thrive (note: it can exist) in a modern capitalist society, and in fact the decline we see now is likely to continue. However, I cannot come up with a solution to the problem that does not involve a group of elites forcing their aesthetic notions onto the rest of the world.

Mind you, that's a great idea as long as the elites are doing their job right. The problem is selecting new elites. Because fifty years from now I might be forced to underwrite Justin Timberlake with my tax dollars because the Bubblegum Music Association got a member on the board of the new, fully empowered NEA. See what I'm talking about? This is why I keep searching for new forms of government but keep coming up dry. It is a choice between three-hundred-million idiots or just a few doing the ruling, but at least if there are three-hundred-million, a lot of them might cancel each other out.

For the record: Robert Hamilton considers the State of the Arts Question to be a complete, unsolveable Catch-22. That is hopefully not going to be a life-long position, so stay tuned.

Bad Art and Red Ink

2005-06-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

I recently received a circular email which announced, in somewhat alarmist terms, the imminent death of several public arts outlets: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and others. As it turns out, the email was a sham; I had read, only a few days before, a news article which touted instead a new, less controversial NEA, the budget of which was likely to be passed without murmur by Congress. In any case, these two pieces of media have brought my mind back to a question that has nagged me for a long while: how should the arts be funded? And of course, the perhaps even more pressing question: why do the arts struggle so much to gain funding in the first place?

The two questions, of course, are inextricably linked. If individual painters, opera companies, art museums, etc. were perpetually in the black, there would be no need to even debate the merit of public grants. However, as affairs lie, such institutions are far from flush with capital. And considering that the stereotyped “starving artist” is fairly well ingrained into the national consciousness, it appears to have been the case for some time. Perhaps this is just a fact which we have to accommodate, but surely there are rational causes for this state of affairs. This post will examine the fundamental problem; it will be followed soon by another which debates potential solutions.

At the risk of sounding snobbish, I will venture that one of the reasons is humanity’s tendency to take the path of least resistance. I implicate myself as much as any other: it is pure human nature. After all, if one path seems easier than all others, and promises roughly the same benefits, who would not choose it? Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that the most truly beneficial course often includes difficulty early on, and humans are notoriously reluctant to take the “long view” of affairs. Thus it comes about that producers of objects d’art who have a mind more fixed on profit than creative integrity will market “art” that is pre-packaged, easily digestible, unchallenging, full of hooks and gimmicks. The nobler artist, while not necessarily shunning the tastes of the public, allows ease and accessibility to take second place to the Idea and Craft that shape his work. Naturally, the appreciation of the second is ultimately better than that of the first, but the second artisan will find it difficult to compete with his rival, simply because the instant gratification offered by the rival is so hard for humans to overlook. Any film critic will tell you that Kurosawa is the superior craftsman to James Cameron, but who produced the largest grossing film in history?

The second obstacle to the success of the Arts is the joint-stock corporate paradigm. While simple human motivation helps explain artistic foundering on an individual level, this paradigm operates on a more systemic level. The joint-stock corporation, as most are aware, is one of the most brilliant innovations of the Anglo-Saxon mind, developed around the time of the discovery of the New World. It came to early fruition in the shipping industry: no longer would the Antonios and Bassanios of the world wait with trepidation on the Rialto for news of sunken schooners. Instead, a “board of trustees” would all invest a stake in a single ship, and thus minimalize risk the risk for each individual. A capitalist could therefore invest in ten ships instead of just one, so even if two or three went down, he would still be far from ruin. This is now the model which dominates all business in the Western world, and a company’s “going public” is a major business event that usually results in great multiplication of profit for the newly-created corporation.

Of course, the system comes with some built in stipulations: for one, no group of investors will throw money into a venture which no one believes will be profitable. As with any purely market-driven system, the arrangement fails to work if marginal benefits cannot be offered to both parties — investors and company executives. Here we see how problem one creates problem two, and problem two feeds problem one in a sort of unfortunate symbiosis: if an artistic institution is run as a joint-stock company, then it cannot simply suck money away from investors, but must give them a reasonable expectation of profit. No investor without a profound streak of altruism would invest in the found-sound histrionics of German band Einsteurzende Neubauten, the experimental novels of William T. Vollman, or the expensive and little-known Berlioz opera, Les Troyens. While debate could rage on about the merits of the former two, the last is an undisputed classic of the opera world which just a few years ago finally received a second competent recording — and that was a live recording; studio technology would simply be prohibitively expensive.

Consequently, pressure arises from boards of trustees and the result is our current artistic moonscape: bevies of whipped-cream-lite chick lit stacked on Barnes & Noble’s “literature” table, the proliferation of repetitive hack-painters like Thomas Kinkade, pre-packaged and overproduced concoctions of lowest-common-denominator collaborations passed off as the original work of a singer-songwriter who is actually a glorified lip-synch artist, opera companies forced to put on little more than doggedly traditional productions of one or two Puccini or Verdi standards a year, symphonies channelling more than half their energy into relatively frothy “pops” concerts that advertise film score suites with pictures of Darth Vader.

Undoubtedly, I have overlooked a significant number of other causes, but this is the fundamental cycle which I see perpetrated in the modern world, and perhaps the main reason for the current poverty of what is passed off as “art.” This, then is the problem, and I shall soon post some stabs at the solution.

Can I vote for the Other Party?

2005-05-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

This show, too, is back on the road now; furthermore, being fed up, I'm going to just come out and talk politics. Be warned that I'm rather tired right now and seriously allergic to some herbage outside, so if this sounds like it comes from an altered mind-state ...

A few things lead me to this extremity. One is recently starting (to my shame) a Facebook profile, which contains a category for political views. The options are (very) liberal, moderate, (very) conservative, apathetic, and other. Conservative, without the "very," would have been an easy choice and not horribly inaccurate. But then, I support things like public funding for the arts and have serious trouble supporting things like the Iraq war, which would make me suspect to most conservatives. But I don't qualify as a liberal because of my views on social issues like abortion and homosexuality, and my (albeit ambivalent) association with Austrian economic theory.

So, I gave "apathetic" a thought; it's true, I can be rather apathetic when I feel that I'm not being offered any decent choices or that politics has just become sensationalised, etc. But I thought that the sheer fact that I obsess over these things proves that I'm not utterly apathetic; I feel guilty if I don't vote on something important.

What did that leave me? Other. So I went ahead and picked that. I mean, anything can thrive under such a broad shade; we can find room for Philosopher King Supporter, Christian Anarchist, Constitutional Monarchist, Oligarchical Timocrat, and so on (all things which I have toyed with to a much greater or much lesser extent).

I guess one of my big problems is that I'm just not impressed with democracy, at least the way we do it. One product of our style is that we do only have these two monstrous, bloated old parties that are practically worthless; like two old boxers who had strikingly different fighting techniques fifty years ago, now drooling on the porch and taking random swipes at one another. Sure, one party will always be pro-abortion and the other anti-; the Republican candidate is always going to propose a bit less of a tax increase -- the problem is that there's no striking vision, no vigour -- and this is coming from a former groupie of the Young Republicans, so trust me, I'm familiar with the most ardent and vigourous of young politics junkies.

Another problem (exacerbated by the above) is the simple fact that human action is difficult to motivate. The quotient of positive or negative incentives which have to be dangled in front of the average man in order to spur him out of lethargy is awesomely huge. Otherwise how could despots endure when, after all, the populace at large always outnumbers the tyrant and his minions? So when it comes to changing something in a democracy, the most leveled-off, status-quo sort of society -- there's no need to hurry. There's no real need to even go and vote, unless you've a special axe to grind. Thus, by choice, only radicals have a say in the political process.

I guess my question is, Is my position of flux and confusion a good thing? Is it actually better to settle in to a party and let yourself be defined as "a conservative" or "a libertarian" or "a socialist" or whatever? Or is it better to play at the outskirts of everyone's party and not ever accept anything quod ipse dixit -- just because they say so? What would happen if more people felt that way?

The second question is also informed by an internet trifle, namely a quiz which showed me being exactly fifty percent conservative and fifty percent liberal (Glencora tells me they cancel out and therefore I have no views ... ). One of the questions, with a yes-or-no answer, was "All authority, by its very nature, should be questioned." I pondered away at that one for a long time. My knee-jerk would be to say No, but then I realised that to call something "authority" had better mean that you have a reason to submit to it. So, isn't dialectically coming up with that reason "questioning" the validity of the authority? I don't mean this in some sort of nineteen-sixties rebellious sense -- just in the sense that blind submission is foolhardy and dangerous. One's answer can be quite definite and range from "he has a shotgun and I don't" to "he saved me from my sins and I owe him my loyalty," but it had better exist. So I hesitantly answered "yes." Any comments?

I welcome comments on anything in this post, or anything related. I know most of my readers think the Iraq war is justified and I know you all have some good arguments, even perhaps in the wake of a new round of slaughter and a whole new operation starting up, so if you want to talk war please be my guest. I shall try to add some more posts soon on related topics and see what I can't work out.

Feels good to be back. Till soon, Prester J.

A Problem With the Below

2005-01-04T23:10:00.000-08:00

While pondering the import of the post below, I came to a thought-problem. As is relatively plain, I propounded a quasi-existential way of sorting out weltanschauungen: essentially, man as homo interpretans makes a series of choices in reaction to, on one level, the entire world; on a deeper level, to the Bible and its interpretive community. He was described as being in submission to this text and community.

Fine, but what struck me was the sudden stab of fear that I had perhaps just sired a brainchild that would, parricide-wise, destroy me upon maturation. After all, this system makes everything depend finally upon the individual, does it not? And is not individualism run rampant the salient characteristic of two of my less favourite establishments, namely, democracy and fundamentalist Baptistry? Sure are. Loath to simply torpedo my lovely little epistomological fancy, I began work upon an expanded theory: communal existentialism.

What think you, is this possible? Homines interpretantes, inseperable units forming a single body, a body which takes as its axioms (first and foremost) God and His Word, and as its pilots the Patristic community (which by mystical extension is absorbed into the current community, or rather we into them) and established (or re-established) rituals: the celebration of the Eucharist, the rhythms of growth and decay, the regular beat of holy feast days.

In this manner, I think the original solution is extended; furthermore, the old problem would be trumped even if every man in the community was not sufficiently broad-minded to avoid absorption into a clique: since, in the community I have described, truth is achieved in a sort of dialectical manner, our pressing questions (like Realism vs. Nominalism or the Postmodern question) begin to look, over time, very small, and are finally swamped in the flood of truth, redemptive narrative, and sacred tradition.

A pipe dream? With a gigantic influx of divine aid, perhaps not.

Repudiating 'Ism's

2005-01-02T23:35:00.000-08:00

Debate has been raging lately on Reformed blogs germane to the question of Postmodernism and how it relates to theology. I think that the discourse has been beneficial (though I hope not too divisive), but there are some issues with the entire parameters of the debate that trouble me, and which I would like to address.

The first thing that struck me is just how much of a novelty Postmodernism is. I don't bristle when someone questions whether traditional Reformed Christians ought to accept Realism or Nominalism, because that question is centuries old. Same goes for infralapsarianism, Pelagianism, and a host of others. However, the sheer juvenility of PoMo, as far as thought-schools go, brought me up short: how on earth could it be that something so brand-spanking-new could actually inform the Christian worldview or Scriptural exegesis? I've heard some funny terms tossed around before, neologisms like "Biblicism," proposed as an alternative; somehow this doesn't sit too well with me either. Let me strip things down for a moment (and a moment only) to see if I can't come up with something a little better, epistemologically speaking. I'm not, thank goodness, trying to propose any novel epistemology; I'm just trying to look at the way a Christian might accept or reject patterns of thought.

We begin, of course, with a Man, because epistemology is (usually) about human knowing. He is surrounded by data, in the form of literally Everything: the stars, the grass, people around him, concepts, triangles, Justice, Pity, the feeling of his socks against his feet. He is homo interpretans, since he really does nothing but relate to and act upon these data. This also implies that he has no reasonable cause to doubt the efficacy of his perception or to suspect that the cosmos is a massive, Matrix-style fabrication.

So far, so good. Being presuppositionalist Christians, we will add the noumenal realm in the form of God the Trinity; this God is of course something that must be interpreted by the fellow -- and here is found the (granted) assertion that this God is knowable, not a sequestered Force. The man finds a copy of the Bible, which is the main way in which this God makes Himself knowable, and there he reads that Scripture "is of no private interpretation." So he joins a good church and begins reading not only the Bible, but the best available interpretations of it.

Now here we come to the point of contention, I think. What does he do now? Faced with hundreds if not thousands of 'ism's, he cannot help but wonder which one to choose. In fact, it might seem that polarization and contention has reached such a degree that he cannot help but actually choose one of them. He has to become a Mennonite, an Arian, an Anglican, a Freewill Baptist, a Clarkian, an Auburn Avenuer, a Catholic, a Shaker, a Propositionalist, a Thomist, or a Postmodern-Radically-Orthodox-Presbyterian, doesn't he? Surely, this is too bleak. I can see at least two alternatives, and I shall give the less interesting one first.

First, he could do what some students manage to do in their high-schools: clique-hop. He's not a jock, a nerd, or a goth, but he has friends who belong to all those groups and takes a bit from each to compile his own personal style. In other words, he's a pursuer of the 'Golden Mean.' He's sure to get closer to the Truth than the partisan types.

Second, though: what is there to prevent him from seeking the truth, period? What if he reads Van Til or Wilson or whomever and decides that no, all truth is not propositional, but then hears someone saying that all truth is vague, or that not even Christians have a monopoly on the truth, and, with the help of some Bible verses and pertinent Patristic quotations, shoots down these oddities? Why on earth should he struggle to fit into some taxonomic category, bend it, stretch it, try to make it fit with his Christian paradigm?

Obviously, even language like 'Christian paradigm' is straying close to 'ism' language. I almost said 'Biblical-Traditionalist.' But 'Traditionalism,' for all its virtues, has led people to invent all sorts of weird doctrines to explain little curios that develop in an almost Darwinian way through the eons of tradition. So, I think it's rather plain that clutching after the vagaries of 'isms' and trying to shape them to what you yourself already believe is going to produce a lot of heat but not much light. What we need to do is focus, in the tradition of lectio divina, upon reading the revealed Word and allowing it to shape our consciousness, unimpeded by the protests of Reason. From there, we read the manifestos of the 'isms,' and while we can read them as entire 'metanarratives,' to use a Postmodern term, we can also take them thought-by-thought and interact with each concept on our own (and hopefully, God's) terms. And of course, this process is communal, and linking up with like-minded people even to the point of forming 'movements' is sometimes beneficial. But for goodness' sake, let's not act as though Posmodernism is the next hermeneutical breakthrough; let's remember that God and the Bible have been around a hell of a lot longer than Jacques Derrida.

Musa Nativitatis

2004-12-22T17:37:00.000-08:00

Christmas always delights and appalls me simultaneously, though my ideas about many things have usually changed by the time another year cycles by. Affairs are no different this year, but something in particular -- for once, not something wholly negative -- has seized my attention. This something is the Christmas Muse.

The Christmas Muse is an odd lady. Within her purvey are surely the most recognizeable tunes, ditties, and holy hymns in the world -- anyone who does not recognize "O Holy Night" or "Jingle Bells" is unhealthily detached from society. I also used to say that anyone who didn't enjoy Christmas music was touched in the head; since then, however, I've run into a good many who don't like the stuff one bit.

It's not as though they don't have their reasons: indeed, the Christmas Muse has in her repetoire some pretty miserable tripe, and even the better ones have been beaten into a sort of milky pallor by an endless stream of hack tunemongers and advertisers. All this leads me to wonder just why the designation "Christmas song" has preserved such odd anachronisms that would never have survived on their own. For instance, I was listening to "Jingle Bells" the other day and realized that it was nothing more than a 19th century pop song, and not a terribly accomplished one at that. Such is the case with more modern "carols," such as the woozy, hopelessly dated offerings from the likes of Mel Torme and Johnny Marks.

So, what is the purport of all this? I think it must simply have to do with the amazingly deep-rooted, quasi-Mediaeval resonance of the single holy day which we in America still significantly observe. Of course the holiday has been ravaged by Madison Avenue heathens; of course St. Nicholas is reduced to a hip-hop dancing geriatric, telling us that anything we want can be found at Circuit City. Such is life in a Postmodern republic. Even so, the sacred events which all this stuff commemorates are, somewhere, still manifest to average Americans -- and therefore, even the transient fluff that surrounds it takes on a sort of sacral aura, or at least is found more important than other commercial tripe. Anything with the power to make perennial favourites out of vapid pop jingles, to withstand the onslaught of wire-frame reindeer with electric revolving heads, and to bring "O Holy Night" preserved through the myriad murder attempts of every warbling tenor-atrocity of the century, deserves some sort of respect from anyone. Hail the Christmas Muse.

Civilisation and Artifice

2004-11-06T01:41:00.000-08:00

It has been far too long since I wrote on here; I shall try to do better for those few who read.

It is late now, but I simply want to ask a question: what is the relation between rational civilisation and human nature? Here is what I find odd and fascinating. What we think of as a "state of nature" is generally described as a primitive state characterized by instinct and lack of reason. Essentially, in this state, no structures exist. The hand of the artificer has failed to touch these "innocents" in the natural state.

This is all well and good, and it is easy to understand how, for the sake of convenience and mutual concord, artificial structures would have organically arisen. What is strange is that these works of artifice are universally taken to characterize that which makes us human. For is not humanity defined as reason, refinement, leisure, and study? I think that none of these exist in what we call the natural state.

So the question is, is the natural state really natural -- is it actually possible to live a life with no art of civilisation? Or have we simply improved ourselves through these means?

Another question is raised: is someone like Kant correct in assuming that after history has taken its full course, a new state of nature will evolve in which virtue will be integral to human existance? I'm reminded of passages in Jeremiah which speak of no man teaching his neighbour to love the Lord, since all will have the law written perfectly in their hearts.

On the other hand, the primal garden of paradise was a cultivated garden -- or at least destined for cultivation. The destination of the blessed is a monumental cubic city -- indeed, a city "foresquare." I think that the work of an artificer is likely rooted in the Creator's shaping of the Chaos into form, and is therefore fundamental to existance as a rational entity.

Most likely both will co-exist. Ah, synthesis.

Sunsets and Other Transitories

2004-10-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was walking back to Gregory Hall with Scott Laverick. As we went, we both noticed a slightly pale sunset, visible from the parking lot above Gregory. My inclination was to say "nice" and continue walking, but (fortunately) Scott decided to stop and look for a while, so I did the same.

As I said, this particular sunset started out rather modestly: a neat band of orange along the horizon, and higher up a nice swath of pale blue in an opening in the stormclouds. As we watched, however, the sun's position grew obvious due to a misty rose-coloured cloud growing toward the left of the entire scheme. As the sun dropped further, the low-lying clouds grew more livid, glowing fiercely at the rims as the magenta haze intensified. Finally the clouds split imperceptibly, allowing a perfect spectrum of individual orange rays to burst through. The lower clouds were illuminated most brilliantly, bathed in orange and magenta aurae, while the scattered clouds higher up were brightened in lower degrees -- though they were still very bright. For a few moments, the entire campus lit up with the orange reflections on the clouds overhead. Then the blaze was over, and the clouds, which now had the look of magma, smouldered to a milder pink and finally yeilded to the grays of night.

Now, Scott and I watched several people come by and photograph the sight several times, and no doubt they will look over those pictures later -- perhaps even years from now -- and recall the brilliant sight with awe. Nevertheless, the horizon is far too large to be contained in a photographic lens; and besides, the continual changes and gradations of light provided the most spectacular elements of the sunset, and those could not be caught even in a series of photographs. Again, a video camera could catch the gradations, but not the scope. Even a conflation of many video images projected upon a sophisticated IMAX screen would not be able to capture the same experience. Who, in any case, would pay to watch a sunset on a video screen?

All this lead me to one conclusion: though we desire with all our being to catch fleeting moments like the deliate light-changes of a sunset, they can only be experienced once, in a single time span, and we must take them on their own terms -- this includes not only patiently waiting for the most brilliant colours to emerge, but also accepting the comforting darkness when it descends. Assiduously as we try, we cannot force eternity upon such an event; it simply will not be held down. It refuses our every attempt to extend its life beyond the natural course. This is such with many things in our experience -- the most salient being human life itself. Apparently, any attempt to force artificial eternity on mortal phenomena results in a tragic dimunition -- or mutilation -- of the phenomena. Thus, any human tonic of eternal youth is to be shunned. For literary understandings of this truth, think of the Ring of Power in Tolkien or the bodiless head in That Hideous Strength.

Perhaps this is just the nature of things; perhaps God just wishes to sternly remind us that our counterfeits of His greatest gift are miserable and tragic in comparison to the original. Not that this should lead us to a morbid fixation on death, but rather to an acceptance that mortal things indeed have a beginning and an end -- and to a firm decrying of modernist dreams of extending life indefinitely through material means. Though life is an amazing gift, prologing it unnaturally can only spread it so thinly that it can barely hold. Thank God for the real eternal life that brings only bliss.

Reification

2004-09-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

When analysing anything in a philosophical manner, it is important to remember that reality is generally reality. Merely a tautological admonition? I think not.

But why not? I think the answer is simple: reality is messy. The various grids, pidgeonholes, and abstractions we construct to try to confine it are generally quite neat and tidy. We form them and adhere to them without seeming to notice poor reality, bucking and kicking at the straitjacket we are attempting to cram it into.

The epistomological consequences, if not absolutely devastating, are quite disconcerting. Hence, the reformations that rippled through the European church from the 14th to the 16th centuries become reified as The Reformation. Hence, convenient but messy concepts like three oxen, three ships, three noses become reified as threeness, a concept that is perhaps totally absurd. Not to say that these abstractions cannot be helpful to us, sort of like cognitive shortcuts, but they should never be confused for objective reality or, worse, be exalted above objective reality. Reality is a tussle, a sea, a song, a war, a love poem. Let's hear for the Nominalists.

Technological Times

2004-08-26T01:41:00.000-07:00

On a random hunch, I checked out a novel from the library entitled The Adventures of the Artifical Woman. It's the story of a man who, dissatisfied with the females in his life, creates a cybernetic wife for himself who is capable of learning and becoming "more human" over time ... eventually she runs amok and ends up campaigning for president, etc. Vagaries of fancy, right?

Yeah, we hope so. Just a few days later, I received a Sharper Image catalog that features a full-page ad for what is called "Robosapien." Read: "Meet Robosapien, the dynamic robot-humanoid who is loaded with as much personality as you can handle -- rambunctious, fiesty, moody, animated, intelligent ... and yours to guide and master with easy remote-controlled programming. You will find yourself believing Robosapien is a thinking, feeling person! The rubust but advanced Robosapien is a robot companion and entertainer that enthusiasts of any age can enjoy for only $99.95."

Now, all redundancies and unintentional alliterations aside, does anyone find this paragraph a little unsettling? Don't get me wrong, here -- this thing mostly looks like a hundred-dollar gag. It belches, knocks things down, etc. It's the sort of thing a petit-bourgeois with unrefined taste and some spare pocket-change would give to a drinking buddy. But the mindset behind it is the same mindset that impelled the character in the novel: essentially, real people are no fun, because their desires get in the way of mine. Of course we long for personality, so this robot has it built in "attitude," but it is also "yours to control." Is there not something faintly sadistic, not to mention overweeningly autocratic, about desiring a companion who is at once friend and slave? Something that will perform for you on call, with no feelings -- something you can treat any way you like without feeling an iota of guilt?

Of course robotics is a valid and useful field -- it may help the working man, in time, be relieved of some of the most detrimental and repetitive processes in the labour market, among many other positive things. But I think the countless sci-fi tales of robots becoming all too intelligent and dominating humans are misguided: the real danger of robots is what they can do to us. Artificial intelligence isn't going to make man a slave; rather, the enslavement of artificial intelligence is more likely to make him a tyrant. As much as you replace social interaction with AI, you're going to have to deal with humans at some time. When you do, will you treat him like one made imago Dei, or like just another unfeeling Robosapien?

Doing Grammar Good

2004-08-24T01:06:00.000-07:00

At my place of work, some anticipatory banners have been rigged from the ceiling rafters for advertising purposes. These banners read, verbatim: "R U Ready 4 School?" The irony, I think, is at least double-edged. First of all, the subliminal implication of this advertisement seems to be that education is "hip" in precisely the same way as rap/pop music, which both utilise these abbreviations regularly. Perhaps lingering around the edges of the subliminal message is also the idea that education is "hip" in the same way as Instant Messenger conversations with friends, which also prominently feature such dictional shortcuts.

That is all somewhat ironic, since "hip" as education might be, it certainly has not the "hipness" of Britney Spears, ghetto culture, or late-night digital palaver about "that-hot-guy-who-works-at-Dairy-Queen-who-might-B-the-one-4-U." However, the irony digs deeper; the school, after all, is a place where we learn to communicate like rational, sentient beings. Phonetic-hyper-abbreviation, or whatever you want to call this (hopefully transient) fad, is certainly not a phenomenon that leads to rational discourse, and even D. Grammarian (the world's most hardened descriptive grammar theorist) finds this trend "worthy of being arrested as it does not significantly benefit the structure of the language or bear historical precedent." P. Grammarian (the ultimate in the prescriptive school) is, of course, rocking back and forth on his floor hugging an unsplit infinitive to his chest, calling for mother. To be considerably more blunt: who came up with the idea of advertising educational material with moronic teeny-bopper banners? Don't parents buy the stuff themselves anyway? Or wait ... maybe the mothers like Britney too.

Scientizers Strike Again

2004-08-19T00:06:00.000-07:00

I did a frightening thing today. In my employee lunchroom sits a television, and for the last five minutes or so of my lunch break, I broke my usual pattern of facing away from it and reading, and reluctantly gazed into the idiot box. The program, it turns out, was a sort of investigative report on dating and romance services of every sort.

Now, I find such things rather disturbing in the first place. I'm sure that many people have come to find a lasting relationship through some sort of dating service, but all in all I think it reflects a sort of existential wandering in the kingdom of Eros that leads more to one-night-stands and superficial infatuation than to lasting commitment based upon inner, rather than outer, qualities. In any case, however, it wasn't so much watching aging boomers trying to "revive that spark of youth" that disturbed me, but rather a new program being instituted by Match.com.

This program was enthusiastically described as a sort of "wave of the future" and a "science of love" by one of Match.com's executives. In essence, it is a computer program that generates comparative images and descriptions, asking the participant to choose between the two (something like a test for eyeglasses: which is clearer; one ... or two?). When you're all finished choosing hair colour, waist dimensions, etc., the computer will generate for you your "ideal man/woman." Next, the dating service looks for individuals whose images most closely match your personal "ideal," and directs your attention toward them.

Stephen Jay Gould warned us about this sort of thing; Neil Postman interacted with it directly. Both men are dead now, but they still warn from the grave. Surely it is not difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to tell the immediate problems with this program. It places physical beauty at the top of the list of criteria for a successful "relationship." It discriminates against those people who have been blessed with glorious souls yet are stuck with very imperfect bodies. It presumes that humans can appreciate only one kind of external beauty. It exercises an incredible, odious reductionism in believing that love partakes not of soul, not of magic, but of sheer evolutionary statistics. It contravenes nearly every important sentiment about love held by every artist, every philosopher, even the mindless hack poetasters who work for Hallmark.

Worse than all this, though, it lays bare a vein in our society that has done its very best job at destroying any frame of reference left over from the days of faith: the idea that anything which is proclaimed "scientific" by any clean-shaven personage in a white coat and thick glasses can be taken as gospel. It doesn't matter if the "science" consists merely of opinion or aesthetics; it is taken as fact, not possibility or, God forbid, myth. I know little about women or love, but I do know that if anything impresses me, it is the sheer diversity of beauty that exists in the human race. How two women can be nearly opposites of one another, and still equally lovely. Yet tell the public that its "ideal partner" can be scientifically determined on a computer (which cannot lie or err), and it will believe it, and subsequently select the closest earthly approximation of this nonpareil off the pages of Match dot com. No matter this ideal pair will be divorced in five years; one can then repeat the process (in a variety of blind-date bars and other such foofaraw) until growing so old that, not caring anymore, Joe Citizen buys himself a motorhome and roams the country with wife number n, getting ready to die.

Surely, my friends, life can be lived in a way superior to this Social Darwinist, technocratic nightmare? I think so.

Substance, Accident, and all that Jazz

2004-08-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

Briefly: I have been thinking about the conflicting doctrines of the Eucharist, and of course one of the most prominent positions is that of Transubstantiation; i.e., the substance of the elements is transformed into the very body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, while the accidents remain mere bread and wine. This is very well, and makes perfect sense in the Greek/Thomist view of the world.

But what happens to the doctrine if this view of the world is wrong? What, exactly, is the meaning of a substance or an accident? My understanding (surely very brutish and primitive) is thus: take a chair for an example. I presume the substance would be the non-physical "chairness," or the blueprint for what makes a chair a chair: it must have legs, a seat, and a back, for instance. The accidents would then be the particular French-style legs, the upholstered seat, the engraving carved into the back.

What, then, can we say of a glass of wine or a Communion wafer? What does the substance of a wafer comprise? Roundness? Certain proportions of wheat and water? It seems to me that the system begins to fray a little in this case, though I'm certain that arguments can be made to explain all this.

So I must resort to a deeper question: why should we, as Christians, accept these Greek ontologies that exalt the invisible so highly above the visible, the spirit so far above the matter? Is not our theology a thoroughly incarnational one? Are not both Testaments of the Bible literally alive with feasting, drinking, and lovemaking, with blood and wine and marauding Chaldeans, with harps and songs and shouts that bring down cities? Surely the sacred authors did not simply forget to include the fact that all these things are less real than their ghostly "substances;" that all this roiling life is to be ever so slightly sneered at, since it is mere "accident."

In this case, we seem to be left with new categories altogether; reality, it seems, is reality. What bearing this has on the Eucharist I have yet to figure out exactly; for now I leave you to more mature believers. Try www.leithart.com for a start.

Doing Grammar Good

2004-08-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

When a noun is followed by a descriptive phrase, the plural of this unit is formed by simply rendering the noun plural, not the subsequent phrase. Some examples make this quite obvious: Rainforest of Guinea-Bissau clearly becomes Rainforests of Guneau-Bissau, rather than Rainforest of Guinea-Bissaus. Nobody wants Dostoevsky to rename his book The Brother Karamazovs. Nonetheless, this is not always an obvious point; most print material does correctly utilize the lovely little compound passersby, but a number of people at my workplace have ordered such things as "Two sausage on a sticks." I fear that even the most committed of descriptive grammarians would be forced to censure such usage.

On Prester John and Luddite Blogging

2004-08-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

Prester John -- or Presbyter Iohannes -- was the benevolent Christian king of vast uncharted Oriental lands and a renowned fighter of barbarians. As presbyter, he was both priest and king, church and state; the ideal Christian monarch. His story is myth and his very existence is dubious, but I say all the better. Truth in all its glory is best contained in the splendid vessel of myth and tale, and this particular myth dreams of an ideal: the whole earth ruled benevolently by a unified catholic church and a religious state, one which has crushed and extirpated the ways and deeds of the barbarians.

Prester John fought valiantly against Islamic barbarians; while some of these are still with us, the most important foes we face today are the barbarians of Modernism (and its nascent cousin Post-Modernism), marauding Visigoths who proclaim that there is no God, that man is the measure of all, and that every motion, action, intention, and creation can be reduced to matter, laws, and time.

Now, this foul cadaver of reductionism is undoubtedly king and pontiff of the modern soul; the hope of confronting this beast and, unnoticed due to my insignificance, stick a knife into it and wear down its defenses, is the chief hope that leads me to begin this site. Of course, everything I write will not be spirito-cultural; but even that which is most light and least germane to "big issues" is part of the battle, for though the modernist loves hedonism he cannot stand the true mirth of the good life.

And so I -- and those who know me well know my ambivalence toward technology -- begin another website. I do not think this is a contradiction; no, I object more to the exaltation of technology than its mere existence. Culturally minded Christians know that most everything can be redeemed, and the Egyptians, as it were, can be spoiled. The Internet may mostly be a slough of moral degradation; all the more reason to begin working to change it.

Three cheers, then, for the good life that looks to God as author of all benefits, for the beauty and hurly-burly of myth, for the reunification of the Church, for the redemption of the state. And may God help me promote His cause in my weak voice, from my little insignificant corner. Who knows; those who dwell in insignificant corners may find that the walls behind them suddenly amplify their voices.