The Ignoramus Blog

Post #100

2009-05-22T18:36:00.000-07:00

So here it is, the centesimal post!

And there I was, in a half-lit room, battling with the Moose horn to horn! OK, so the room was actually rather bright. And it was not the Moose himself, nor even his agents, but his dupes who stood against me. And we didn't use horns--that was a metaphor.

But the fact remains that I went into the very lion's den (our local library), to a discussion group, and argued for a good forty-five minutes that moral absolutes exist. Against the notion that claiming to have truth is arrogant I threw out the idea that refusal to see truth is arrogant.

And the beauty part? They paid me to do it. Hate to admit to being on the Moose's payroll, but the irony is too delicious to keep to myself.

Food for thought

2009-04-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the long silence. I have in fact locked antlers with the Moose in the interim, but only now do I have time to speak about it.

For now, just a short note. Two days ago, on my way home, I saw an ambulance with all its lights on parked outside a cemetery. It was odd.

They were either picking somebody up or dropping somebody off, but either way, it's odd.

The Death of Tom Sawyer

2009-03-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Amazon Kindle2 has arrived, announces the world’s largest purveyor of books. Takes me back to my graduate school days, when MU would announce proudly to visitors at the new library that soon we will have “a library without books”. For years beyond recall, the Moose has taught us to think of technology only in terms of the immediate task accomplished: the car gets us there faster, so cars are better; the radio gets us news more efficiently, so radios are better; the light bulb provides endless, reliable, clear light at the flick of a finger, so electric lights are better. So if eBooks are more convenient and more pleasant to read than paper books, the eBook is better, right?

Enter Marshall McLuan and his famous dictum: "The medium is the message." That is to say, every technology has imbedded in it a new way of conceiving some part of the world. When the printing press arrived, the printed word itself ceased to be an object for the ear and became an object for the eye; similarly, our understanding of what a book is changed from a kind of communal product that can be corrected, interpolated, or plagiarized without any sense of dishonesty to a kind of private property of the original author, whose words cannot be used without acknowledgment.

Already, I think, computers and especially the Internet have begun to change our conceptions of what a text is and what a book is. McLuan maintained that in many ways such technologies are bringing us back towards a more oral and less printed culture.

It is interesting to speculate about what effect a successful "e-book" will have. Right away, I expect that the publishing industry will change, and with it our conception of the very act of writing a book; the book itself will not be the same thing for us. As books become more like our computer documents, the relationship between text and memory--already dramatically changed by the printing press, and by the computer after that--will move further in the direction of the atrophy of memory, because anything we want to know from our books can be searched. This in turn will likely further change our conception of what knowledge itself is--an idea that once was closely bound to memory but has been sliding more and more in the direction of "available information."

That much seems to me certain. More detailed theories are less certain, but more sensational and so make for better blog reading.

For example, the eBook will undoubtedly change the publishing business, making the publishing of a book almost cost free. Right now, the sheer cost of getting a book printed and distributed motivates publishers to insure that their books are of a high quality, and the publisher's requirements motivates authors to write at a high level if they intend to write a book. Take away the economic motivation, and now publishers can publish anyone, or perhaps individuals can even self-publish at the press of a button. This raises the possibility that the quality of books overall will decline towards the level of the blog; in fact, individual books will get shorter and shorter, since publishers no longer need a book of a certain length to justify the cost of publishing, and books look more and more like lengthy blog posts. Now everyone gets accustomed to reading books of this sort, and thinks of books as something like blog posts, and the idea of a book has changed. Finally, a generation raised with this new conception of "book" finds it difficult to read the Great Books, because they are trying to read Shakespeare like a blog. On top of that, our hypothetical readers have downloaded the entire Great Books set for free and it takes up zero room in their house, so they are immediately inclined to treat such a thing lightly.

I don't know that will happen, but it could. Here's another one, even less certain but perhaps eerier.

In any culture, when writing is first introduced there is a period when the written word itself is viewed as magical. This was true in the ancient world, but in the not-too-recent past, some third-world country citizens took to stealing shipping receipts because they thought the receipts themselves had a magical power to bring ships laden with wealth. But even after the aura of magic has worn off, and people do not write as many mystic runes as they used to, still the written word has a kind of authority about it because it eternalizes and disembodies the word: talk yourself blue in the face, that page just keeps repeating the same thing, and because no one in particular is saying it--it "is said"--the statements on the page have a strange kind of objectivity and hence authority about them. We have something of that instinct still today: people are more inclined to see things that are in print than things that are spoken.

But suppose we move to an eText world and people know, in the back of their minds, that the words in front of them are nothing but flickering lights. The text can change almost at the speed of thought, with the touch of a button; the one screen on which I read all my "books" itself serves as a reminder that the texts I see are passing illusions, and all supposed authoritativeness of the text is gone. With this changed instinct towards the text, people have more and more trouble experiencing a sacred text as sacred and authoritative; the eBible flickers and is gone like everything else.

Now, I don’t really know that my scenarios will play out. If an eBook becomes cheap enough for a college professor with a large family, then I will buy it. But some scenario or other will inevitably play out; the eBook will not leave us unchanged; a way of thinking about the book may well be passing away--as other ways of thinking about the book have passed away before.

Time only will tell whether the new way is better or worse, but the fact is the books we grew up with will no longer exist. Remember that no book exists until it has a reader: those blots of ink on wood pulp are only virtually a book. When the world no longer has a reader capable of thinking the book, the real book will have vanished; something called "Tom Sawyer" will still be marketed, and it may even be sold in print at special stores, but it will be unconsciously reconceived by the mind of the computer age. Historians will write learned articles about what it was like to live in a "paper culture," just as today they write books about what it was like to live in an "oral culture" or a “chirographic culture”. And we will be as foreign to our children as the ancients are to us.

Virtual freedom

2009-03-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

It's time to dispel a misunderstanding. Some of my readers--"some" and the plural form "readers" being a manifestation of my perpetual optimism--may have the impression that I hate technology, given the number of posts dedicated to my distaste for microphones, radios, and so on. Not at all.

First and foremost, I love the ability to blog. Here I am at a tiny Catholic college finishing up my degree in micromanagement, where we learn Catholic social justice principles such as the principle of subsidiarity, meaning that anything other than the boss's opinion or preference is a subsidiary concern, and yet I can venture out into the world under my true name, the Ignoramus, and do as I think best. It's not actual freedom, but it has a lot of the effects and rewards of freedom; you might call it a kind of virtual freedom.

The beauty part is that it is not really an escape under a pseudonym. Day in and day out I play a false part, that of the wise and educated man, and I use a pseudonym, "doctor"; here, in the shadows of my basement, alone in front of the computer, the mask drops. Here I gape and stare about me, aghast at the heights and the depths, in a state of trembling beyond wonder, and await the verdict of Reality.

Socrates and FOCA

2009-03-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Ray Moose's favorite game is to raise a big stink about something important while slipping something else in on the side. We all get excited about the economy--admittedly important--and while the air is still full of dust the issue of life itself--which gives the economy its importance--slips through. And so we end up with a president who wants to sign FOCA.

Thanks to the USCCB, most people know that FOCA would force hospitals to perform abortions. At once the religious freedom flag went up, and much dust has rightfully been kicked up about it; but we should take time to hear the argument in favor of this pro-abortion coercion and think about what it means.

The argument is this: abortion is part of basic health care.

Now apart from whether every hospital is bound to provide every part of basic health care, as though half a loaf were not better than none, notice that we have entered into a philosophical debate. How would you define what man is: based on sick people or based on healthy people? Obviously, the standard for what man is, or should be, is the healthy person. So the question of what constitutes basic health care is a question about what man is. It could have come from the mouth of Socrates.

Our president emphasizes common ground, and hopes that we can find reasonable comprimises on issues like abortion. But FOCA brings things into focus: the truth about man is not only philosophical, but political as well. Politics hinges on anthropology. Pragmatic unity cannot trump radical theoretical division.

The Shakespearean Cat

2009-02-25T20:26:00.000-08:00

Thinking again about my earlier post on atoms vs cat, I found this passage in E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed:

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. The truth is that the peculiar combination of letters is nothing but a property of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The French or German versions of the play "own" different combinations of letters.

This analogy captures perfectly the approach I suggested in my earlier post.

[E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper, 1977), 19.]

Moose or Monk?

2009-02-14T16:36:00.001-08:00

My daughter reads the New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism for school. It's a great book, with clear, crisp statements of dogma offering rich fodder for thought for years to come. Most of the time. But recently, my daughter came to the lesson on states of life, and to these three dyptichs, with left side labeled "THIS IS GOOD" and the right side "THIS IS BETTER":

First, a graphic explanation of the vow of obedience. On the left we have the lay vocation: as the family sits around the breakfast table, someone remarks, "I want to spend the day the way I think best." On the right we have the religious vocation, with a monkish looking fellow who says, "I want to spend the day the way God prefers." This ridiculous panel has become an inside joke in my family: every time I have to stop cooking to change a poopy diaper while talking with my boss on the telephone about the job that just can't wait, I comment to my wife, "I want to spend the day the way I think best!" And every time she scrubs vomit off the floor while keeping a toddler at bay with one foot before heading upstairs to wash dishes yet again, she says to me in her best infomercial voice, "I want to spend the day the way I think best!"

So here's the skinny: yes, the lay life brings more day-to-day responsibility for how you spend your day. No, a lay person is not free to spend the day in whatever selfish way he wants. Yes, a lay person can spend the day the way God would prefer him to spend it--in fact, a lay person may think that the best way to spend his day!

Next we have a graphic illustration of the vow of chastity. On the left we see a bride and a groom in church, and one of them says, "I want to marry the person of my choice." On the right we see a nun in the chapel, and she says, "I choose Christ as my spouse." Here's the problem: both the lay woman and the nun married the person of their choice! The right hand picture does show what is better, but freedom to choose whom you will marry is not the difference!

Finally, my favorite: a graphic explanation of the vow of poverty. On the left, under the heading "THIS IS GOOD", a little boy points to a sporting goods store and says, "I want an air rifle. I want a car. I want jewels. I want pretty clothes." On the right, under the heading, "THIS IS BETTER", St. Francis of Assissi says, "You can have all that. I want Christ."

Reality check, folks: this left-hand scene is NOT good. It is self-centered materialism, and it does NOT represent the ideal of the lay Christian life. If that little boy were mine, I would dock his allowance!

In all three dyptichs, the religious life is depicted fairly well, but each time the difference between the lay and the religious life is made out to be the difference between self-centeredness and Christian maturity: I want to spend my day doing what I want! I want to marry the one I want! I want to have all the stuff I want! I want what I want! Me, me, ME-E-E!" So the Baltimore Catechism elevates the religious life by denigrating the lay state.

The problem with this approach is that it implies that lay people can be selfish and that's OK. Christian maturity is for other people. Take that route, and not only will you have a lackadaisical laity, but few Catholic children will really understand the nature and attraction of the religious life. Why be good, when being bad is one of my legitimate options? But if sanctity is the goal for everyone, then the religious life will take on its real and almost irresistable attraction.

Gaaaah!

2009-02-12T13:20:00.001-08:00

I'm finally recovering from the trip last weekend. While at the conference, I and a reader of this blog saw a man struggling to address the audience without a microphone; when a working microphone was thrust in front of his face and his voice suddenly filled the room, we both burst out laughing--as quietly as we could manage, of course. "Did you see him grow bigger?", I asked. "Yes", my friend replied. "Did you see how he suddenly felt bigger to himself?"

Just today, a lector at Mass struggled for a couple of minutes to get the microphone turned on, but could not. Finally he resigned himself to projecting his voice, but almost as soon as he raised his voice the microphone clicked on. Gaaah! MegaLector takes the podium! Remarkable.

Talking about this with my friend in Florida, I remembered a time years ago when I went to Easter vigil with my wife and then three-year-old daughter. Standing amidst all the adults, she could not see what was happening, but she heard the booming voice that floated down from the rafters. She gazed up in awe, her perceptions untroubled by any sight of the podium. "Papa", she asked, "...is that God?"

Technoplace

2009-02-04T17:28:00.000-08:00

Lurking in the background of my last post is the issue of technology. While we live in the heavens by looking at the sky, we can extend our range even further with the telescope; while we create space by speaking, we can create an enormous space (of a qualitatively different sort) with a microphone and loudspeaker. All the powers by which we engage the world have a tool that can channel and magnify them.

As I come up on a business trip, my mind is especially on the cell phone. That little instrument makes me present both by hearing and by voice far, far away around the world. It’s a tenuous presence, admittedly, but at the touch of a few buttons—hey presto!—my wife is conjured up, is present to me; we speak and we hear. One of the oddest sensations is to talk on a cell phone in the middle of a group of people: one conversation continues around me, but at the same time I am far away, not only present in another place but vaguely imagining that place and myself speaking into it.

“Bilocation” might imply that I am equally present in both places, but it’s a weird sensation.

Even weirder is listening to the radio in my car. Here I am on the city street, now, in this familiar place, but suddenly as I hear the live voices over the waves I imagine myself transported far, far away. Strangely, I never hear the radio as voices speaking in my place but as voices speaking in their place, into which they draw me. Stranger still, I usually have no idea where the voices really are. While my speech into a cell phone puts me mentally into another place, into which I imagine myself speaking and from which my wife speaks to me, the radio whirls me out into an entirely indeterminate place. It is like reading a fairy tale in which the time and place are not specified: one thinks not of this place and this time, but of indeterminate time and indeterminate place. So the radio always makes me feel like I have personally been made present to indeterminate place—I am in the fairy tale.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t listen to the radio much anymore.

The microphone is much worse than the radio. Right away, by the fact that it magnifies the voice so, it makes the speaker seem huge. I remember being at a Mass when the microphone was off through the first reading and half of the gospel; when it suddenly came on during the gospel, the priest seemed to grow before my eyes! In a Q&A situation, the speaker enjoys an immediate rhetorical advantage because he seems huge in comparison to his tenuous inquisitors—not to mention the fact that he can drown out their voices. At the same time, and for the same reason, the microphone does not create a communal place for many persons: it creates a monarchical place of one person with many subjects. This is one reason I don’t like it at Mass: even though I don’t usually want anyone speaking but the priest, at the same time I want the place of the Mass to be the place of the people praying, not the place of the SuperPriest and his auditors. The quality of the air is wrong. (As a side note, the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite was impossible before the invention of the microphone. That little detail gets left out of a lot of the hot air exchanges on liturgical subjects.)

But another factor comes in with the microphone. I have spoken of our senses of hearing and sight, but there also another sense, the “common” sense, which integrates all of our senses into one experience. The sugar cube is not a sweet thing over here and a white thing over there, but a single sweet and white thing; sight and taste are integrated into once perception of the sugar cube. Similarly, when I see and hear a speaker, both senses come together into a single perception of him or her. But the microphone disrupts that by making the audible speaker many times bigger than the visible speaker and in a different place. When the microphone kicked in at Mass that one time, the priest’s megavoice floated down from the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, he seemed to be an enormous person floating somewhere above my head; if I opened my eyes, he shrunk somewhat and remained located at the podium, but I could feel the stress of a non-integrated sensory experience. My common sense was reeling.

All these technologies are important and useful. I’m not so much of a curmudgeon as to deny it. But it is also important to notice their effects and use them appropriately. They greatly magnify the scope and power of our presence; they also spread us out and change the quality of our places.

Hearing and the sense of place

2009-02-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

I want to pick up an idea from my earlier post, Living In Our Houses, and tug at it. In that post, I described how we live not just within the confines of our bodies but in the space around us. Although my argument had to do with the senses as such, my examples were taken from the sense of sight: when I look up in the heavens, I am—as Augustine would put it—living in the heavens.

But something similar is true of the sense of hearing. Even though my ability to locate an object by sound alone is notoriously inferior to a bat’s, nonetheless the area within which I hear creates a kind of space around me in which I live. You have probably had the same experience I have. I remember being engrossed in a conversation with a small group of people, and when the conversation died and silence fell then suddenly I was aware of the vast sky opening above me and of the great reaches of space on either side of me. It was as though I had been in a bubble, a tiny enclosure, while the conversation lasted. My sense of hearing was pulled in, focused in one place.

Now for clarity’s sake, I should say again that my sense of hearing does not change the air; there is nothing in the air by which it has a real relation to me, but there is something in me by which I have a real relation to the audible area around me. While it is truer to say that we live in the air around us, because this is true we can also make the air the grammatical subject of the sentence: the air in this place is full of people.

Now let me turn it around: sometimes I not only listen, but speak.

Up to this point I have spoken of the way in which the knower is present to the thing known, but, following the same article from Aquinas cited previously, we can also speak of a cause being present by its effect. Aquinas gives the example of a king who is said to be present everywhere in the kingdom because of his power to act everywhere in the kingdom. This is obviously a weaker sense of “presence” than the presence of God Aquinas means to explain, because God acts everywhere immediately while the king acts only through many intermediaries, but the act of speaking seems to fall between the two. To speak into a place is more direct than the king’s action through ministers but still involves the medium of the air. I am present in the area where I speak.

One sometimes sees an instinctive recognition of this idea in city traffic. Amidst the hubbub, where one can usually only hear a few feet away, suddenly a selfish punk cruises by in his pick-up or sports car blaring music over his speaker system as loudly as he can. He is using the speakers as an extension of himself to shout, so to speak, over all the noises around him; it makes him feel big; as a cause, he spreads his presence over a large area, coercing his fellow motorists into hearing him, being with him, and in a way being under him. He takes what should be a commons, the place around us, and turns it into his private yard. It is the audible version of puffing the chest.

But a beautiful version of the same truth comes out when a speaker addresses a small group without a microphone. The human voice “creates a place”, to borrow Ivan Illich’s phrase; the speaker is present in the place of his voice, and his willing auditors focus in on him, thus living in the same place, and speaker and audience blend their presences in one part of this world of ours.

Perhaps a more striking version comes out in the medieval custom of ringing church bells during a storm. True, the bell was a sacramental and was believed to have some virtue of dispersing a storm by the prayer of its sound, but at the same time the vast reach of the bell’s tone created a place around the entire town. Because it was the church bell, the entire town was brought with the ambit of the church; while all the people and houses could not fit in the church building at once, the church itself could be extended, audibly, over all the people and houses. Where else would you want to be during a storm but praying in the house of God? Conversely, in one dramatic ceremony dating from sometime after the eleventh century, a person who had been excommunicated was condemned to live beyond hearing of the church bells.

Restored Beauties of the English Language

2009-02-02T13:24:00.001-08:00

In view of the appalling number of words dropping from the English language every year, the Duck has urged that we all adopt a word. Besides the sheer number of words lost, which the adopt-a-word activists rightfully stress, one can also notice the kind of words lost: the latest Oxford Junior Dictionary, for example, has dropped all manner of religious words like "nun" and "priest" on the argument that kids today don't need to know those kinds of words. The same tome has dropped hundreds of nature related words; it has an entry for "Blackberry", the electronic communications device, but has no entry for "blackberry", the delectable edible of the fields of my youth.

The crisis reminds me of a pastime I used to enjoy, namely refurbishing words. Long ago, words such as "wonderful" and "terrible" lost their power through overuse, so in my writing I would try to recover the original beauty of the word by a simple rearrangement: the mountains were full of wonder, and the dark storm a thing of terror.

Along a similar vein, I enjoyed finding English words that had actually fallen from use and using them again, confident that the reader would know from context and from the feel of the word itself the meaning of the unfamiliar--but somehow strangely familiar--word. In honor of the Duck's call to action, therefore, I would like to resurrect on this blog a custom that fell away, namely the daily Lost Beauty. It won't really be daily, of course, but as often as I can get to it.

Today's lost beauty:

Toitish: "Ill-tempered, snappy." The old exclamation hoity-toity! expressed surprised at seeing someone in such a fit of temper.

The Moose wants our children

2009-01-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

One of my old teachers, Dr. Michael Waldstein, recently gave a terrific speech in Mexico City at the 6th World Meeting of Families. Since it is so anti-Moose, I have posted it below:

* * *

In his letter to the World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope Benedict wrote, "Today more than ever, the Christian family has a very noble mission that it cannot shirk: the transmission of the faith, which involves the gift of self to Jesus Christ who died and rose, and insertion into the Ecclesial Community. Parents are the first evangelizers of children, a precious gift from the Creator (cf. Gaudium et spes, n. 50), and begin by teaching them to say their first prayers. In this way a moral universe is built up, rooted in the will of God, where the child grows in the human and Christian values that give life its full meaning."

The vision of this statement is clear and strong. Do families in the United States and Canada live up to it? Do they introduce their children to the sincere gift of self to Christ? Do they help them become mature members of the Ecclesial Community? The positive side needs to be mentioned first. Many families do follow their mission with admirable strength and devotion.

At the same time one must admit that many families fall short of their mission. The United States and Canada built up extensive systems of Catholic schools. Catholic parents have traditionally delegated much of their responsibility as educators to these schools and they are still delegating it. The schools, however, have changed. Like all academic institutions, they have become increasingly secularized, which severely compromises the transmission of the faith.

Strong efforts are being made in some places to strengthen the identity and effectiveness of Catholic schools. A few weeks ago, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, published a pastoral letter that is spearheading a renewal of the Catholic school system in his diocese. He sees the urgency of the situation and is calling for broad cooperation in the renewal. Yet this is only one diocese among many.

A more fundamental problem, however, arises from the strong reliance of most parents on the schools. Children spend much time at school and relatively little time with their parents. Only during vacations is the situation different. Since the life they share with their parents is often reduced to a minimum when school is in session, it is not easy to build up such a life during vacations. Parents and children often do not know what to do with each other during vacations.

There is another major force that is taking much of education out of the hands of the family, namely, the global youth culture. It is important to realize that this youth culture is a new phenomenon. It only began after the Second World War.

Two forces are perhaps the most formative in this youth culture. One of them is the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution is a child of the dominant utilitarian and consumerist adult culture after the Second World War. Utilitarianism and consumerism inevitably destroy the link between sex and love, between sex and procreation by reducing the other person in erotic experience to a means for pleasure. In the formation of the teenager, the piercing sexual passions of adolescent children were suddenly released into destructive premature relationships. Instead of being introduced into a culture of love, children were and are abandoned to a culture of the use of each other for pleasure or, to use their own preferred word, fun.

The second major force, intimately connected with the first, is the rise of a new music produced specifically for adolescent children. It is a music tailor-made for the absence of deeper personal formation of sexual passion by authentic love. This music and its cultural trappings could not have achieved the power it achieved without a large economic muscle behind it. American and European adolescents after the Second World War were perhaps the first generation of children who constituted a strong market by themselves in distinction from the adult world, because they got large amounts of discretionary money from their parents. The parents were happy enough to let the children do what they wanted while they themselves pursued their professional lives. The removal of women from the home and their induction into the work force increased the cultural vacuum in which children lived. It also increased the economic power of this vacuum. The entertainment industry exploded, aided by technological progress, especially by the invention of the radio and the television. Music turned out to be the single most important article of trade in this exploding market. It is a music that consistently conquers market share by preying on the most intense and most immature passions of adolescents, above all on erotic passion and on anger. The hearts of children were simply abandoned to the formative power of this music.

What should we do in this difficult situation? Many parents feel completely helpless. They see their children taken out of their hands and increasingly formed by another culture. Sociologists call this phenomenon the "generation gap." History as a whole shows that the generation gap is not a normal developmental phase. The normal situation is for children to grow in the culture of their parents and their society. The generation gap is without precedent. Children in Jewish communities grew up Jewish; in Catholic communities they grew up Catholic; in Buddhist communities they grew up Buddhist. Now Jewish, Catholic and Buddhist children grow to be one and the same thing: they become copies of their peers in the global youth culture.

We parents must wake up and take action! We must recall that it is our inalienable duty and therefore also our inalienable right to educate our children. In his encyclical Divini illius magistri of 1929 Pius XI writes, "The family ... holds directly from the Creator the mission (munus) and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to a strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the state, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth" (Divini illius magistri, 59, DS 3690). Following Vatican II, John Paul II insists on the same point. "The task of giving education is rooted in the primary vocation of married couples to participate in God's creative activity: by begetting in love and for love a new person who has within himself or herself the vocation to growth and development, parents by that very fact take on the task of helping that person effectively to live a fully human life. As the Second Vatican Council recalled, 'since parents have conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obligation to educate their offspring. Hence, parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children. Their role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it. For it devolves on parents to create a family atmosphere so animated with love and reverence for God and others that a well-rounded personal and social development will be fostered among the children.'... (Vatican II, Gravissimum educationis, 3). The right and duty of parents to give education is [1-] essential since it is connected with the transmission of human life; [2-] it is original and primary with regard to the educational role of others, on account of the uniqueness of the loving relationship between parents and children; [3-] and it is irreplaceable and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others" (John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, 36).
The first and most important step is for us parents to embrace our duty and our right. We must defend this right as indeed inalienable. The second most important step is to spend time with our children, to build up a shared life. Only in a loving shared life can we transmit to our children what is dearest to us. The third most important step is to become involved in the education of our children. Archbishop Wuerl is calling on parents in his diocese to become involved in helping to renew the Catholic school system. For the majority of Catholic parents, such involvement in the children's schooling is the form this third most important step will take.

In describing the situation of the United States and Canada, however, I must also point to a more radical way in which parents are becoming involved in the education of their children, namely, homeschooling. According to recent credible estimates, there are about two million families in the United States that educate their children at home. My wife and I have eight children. We have been and are educating them from first grade all the way up to the end of high school. Four of them have already entered universities. The main reason why we began home schooling was the report we heard from close friends about the effect of home schooling on their family. The children, they said, became more friends with each other, because they shared the same experience of schooling in the home. The parents also became more friends with their children, because they shared more of their life. Like many other homeschoolers, we have seen that the global youth culture is not an irresistible force. It is possible to pass on our own Christian culture. The generation gap is not inevitable.

Last thought on the power of language

2009-01-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

Just a nugget that didn’t fit into the last post. I mentioned that the goal of language is the creation of society; I also described how the individual’s life as a rational creature is brought into being by language. To say it again: the individual’s good comes into being as a step towards the creation of society.

I think this would make a wonderful starting point for a lecture on the common good and the individual good.

The Power of Babel revisited

2009-01-07T22:35:00.000-08:00

Not long ago I wrote in praise of John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel. He demonstrates that language of itself changes constantly, like the random mutations of living creatures according to the theory of evolution—hence the subtitle of the book, A Natural History of Language.

After a great many examples illustrating his fundamental premises, McWhorter concludes:

One thing that follows simply and ineluctably from this is that, despite the almost irresistible pull of the sociologically based evaluations that attach to dialects, there is no such thing as human being speaking ‘bad grammar.’ There are no dialects in any way analyzable as ‘decayed’ versions of the standard or of anything else.

Any theory that just so happens to promote what Obama has called “the virtue of tolerance” prompts my eyebrows to seek a spot just a bit further from sea level. I will point out just two problems with McWhorter’s thesis, but I invite you to sound off in the combox.

First, McWhorter contrasts merely “sociologically based evaluations” with an objective view of language as good or bad. But keep in mind that language has a natural purpose, namely to cause communication between people; in other words, the creation and maintenance of society is what language is about. Language itself is sociological. To evaluate grammar based on where it places one in society is perfectly in accord with the nature of the thing.

Second, we have to recall that language exists first of all within the individual speaker: before the spoken word comes the imagined word. Although language is made for communication between people, before it can do that it must transform the interior life of each person. It operates right at the juncture between immaterial and material, between intellect and imagination, and it organizes the imagination in such a way that reason can effectively operate; kids who never learn language never become fully rational. Now it is hard to see why one would say that any old language creates the interior life of the human person as well as any other. Given that language organizes the imagination, it seems clear right away that the imagination can be organized better and worse, and that some tools for organizing it will do better than others. In other words, language is not just sets of sounds, but has a real nature—and yes, some languages are better and some are decayed.

Thing brings us back to McWhorter’s comparison of language development with evolution. From the fact that animals change from one species into another by a large number of tiny and random changes evolutionists commonly conclude that one species is pretty much the same as another, just happening to fit a different ecological niche; as McWhorter paraphrases it, “Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.” In the same way, he argues, language changes are not geared toward improvement: “Instead, languages change like the lava clump in a lava lamp: always different but at no point differentiable in any qualitative sense from the earlier stage.”

For you Aristotle buffs, let me put the issue succinctly. Modern scientists deny purpose and nature in things, admitting only material and efficient causality; McWhorter denies purpose and nature in language, admitting only arrangements of sounds (babel/babble) and forces of change. But things like humans do have purpose and nature, and so consequently does human language. Orangutans are closer to God than bacteria, and some humans do speak bad grammar.

Moose mouth muffled

2009-01-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

After so much negotiating about the non-negotiables, this was music to my ears:

The Congregation [for the Doctrine of the Faith] said that Father Haight, a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, should be barred from teaching Catholic theology.

Note that the Jesuit in question is a former president of the CTSA--which is about all I have to say about the CTSA. It's also nice to see that at least a few American Catholic theologians agree with the Vatican:

At a 1999 discussion of Haight’s book organized by the Catholic Theological Society of America, for example, William Loewe of the Catholic University of America suggested that by treating the second and third persons of the Trinity as “symbols,” Haight ends up with “a Unitarian God and a merely human Jesus.” Notre Dame theologian John Cavadini, a consulter to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, wrote in Commonweal in the same year that “there is a difference between rendering Christian faith intelligible to a culture, and reducing its central theological claim to a statement that even an atheist can affirm.” Haight’s fellow Jesuit Fr. Gerald O’Collins, widely considered among the church’s most eminent Christologists, told NCR in 2005, “I wouldn’t give my life for Roger Haight’s Jesus. It’s a triumph of relevance over orthodoxy.”

If you can't recall what Roger Haight thinks, just listen to Barack Obama for a while: one is the Moose and the other is the mouth.

Final random thought: what an odd last name for a man who promotes tolerance!

The Power of Babel

2009-01-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

All of my readers, or perhaps I should say both of my readers, would enjoy John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. McWhorter presents a compelling picture of why and how languages change over time, but all three hundred pages of his argument are contained in five principles:

1. Sound Change. Everyone everywhere tends to pronounce accented syllables more clearly and unaccented syllables less clearly. If the first generation brings the unaccented syllable in a word from a clarity of level ten to a clarity of level eight, then eight is now the new standard of clarity for the second generation; the second generation then brings it from eight to six, and six is now the standard of clarity for the third generation; eventually, the sound just drops off, as did all the case endings of Latin on the way to the formation of the Romance languages. McWhorter convincingly compares this to the erosion of soft rocks in the mountains.

2. Extension. A rule that applies only to a particular grammatical situation is eventually applied everywhere, as people find it easier to use one rule all the time. For example, the English genitive in apostrophe plus “s” was once only one of several possible genitive endings, but was extended to cover every case of possession.

3. The expressiveness cycle. We’re all familiar with this one; C.S. Lewis describes it in his essay, “The Death of Words”. A new phrase or word is introduced as an especially forceful description; the new phrase is so good that it is used again and again; eventually, it looses its force by long use and joins the ranks of “dead words”. “Awesome” originally spoke to an experience of the numinous, of the divine; it was applied to terrestrial things as an expression of extreme force, was used again and again, and now describes the taste of a cheeseburger.

4. Rebracketing. McWhorter tells about his mother’s experience as a girl at church. She was convinced that the congregation sang a song about a bear with an ocular misalignment: the story of “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.” She put “cross-eyed” together from the originally separate “cross I’d”, and created a new title entirely. Another example is the word “nickname”: it began as “an eke-name” (literally “an also-name”), but the “n” moved over so that now we have “a nickname”.

5. Semantic change. This is a kind of catch-all category for the general fact that words change meaning over time. McWhorter gives the example of “silly”, which originally meant “blessed”. Blessedness implies innocence, the innocent are deserving of compassion, those who deserve compassion are generally weak, and the weak are often foolish—and behold, “silly” has gone from “blessed” to “foolish”! This sort of “drift” happens to words all the time as people apply words creatively to new situations.

The important point to note about all five of these principles is that they are independent of changes in culture, location, or government. While a particular language change may relate to a particular event in history, the general phenomenon of language change is independent of any general force in history: language changes constantly by its very nature. McWhorter compares it to a lava lamp, or to cloud formations, always changing but not necessarily changing towards anything in particular: just changing. And in fact, his conclusion seems born out by history.

If this is true, then I can say several other geeky things:

1) Despite what some say, Hebrew was not the language spoken in Eden. Even on a young-earth theory, several thousand years elapsed between the death of the early generations and the first recorded words of Scripture, and so necessarily language had changed dramatically in the meantime.

2) If Adam had not sinned and so death had not entered the world, the original language and its speakers would have continued forever. Aside from the “expressiveness cycle”, each of the five principles of language change seems to depend to some degree on the fact that one generation gives way to another, but this would not have been the case. Once might argue that the expressiveness cycle itself would have been mitigated, because man’s unfallen imagination would not have needed the aid of ever-new linguistic explosions to maintain a vividness of perception. So the intriguing possibility is introduced that the splintering of language is a result of the fall and of death—a fact surely related to the interpretation of the story of Babel, whence McWhorter’s book takes its name. The only factor I can think to the contrary is geographical separation of speakers.

3) It’s fun to apply all of this to The Lord of the Rings, in which men and hobbits die but Elves do not. Hooray for Elvish!

Parental logic

2008-12-18T13:18:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Bunthorne's logic puzzles, and by a recent real-life conversation with my kids, I offer the following. One parent (P) tells three children (A, B, and C) to empty the laundry hamper. The following conversation unfolds:

P: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

A: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

B: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

C: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

P: I now know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

Rhetorical man

2008-12-14T22:08:00.000-08:00

The Duck asked me to write something about how and why people use figures of speech without thinking about them. Of course, most people use figures of speech without knowing anything about rhetoric, and in fact rhetoric itself came about as a codification of what good speakers already did without studying rhetoric.

This touches on a subject of which I am woefully ignorant, namely—but let me unpack it slowly. Language itself is a thing of wonder. It stands at the interface between man’s immaterial and material sides as an artificial specification on the side of the imagination. Man naturally knows the world first through his senses, which inform his interior powers of imagination and memory, which in turn supply material to the powerful light of his immaterial intellect. At the point where the intellect gazes into the phantasm, where immaterial and material must work together, language intervenes as an instrument whereby reason can order the imagination and the imagination can better present itself to reason. Children who learn language undergo a mental revolution; reasoning and art and everything else we think of as special to man comes with language, precisely because language acts at the joint, so to speak, between what is unique to man and what he shares with the animals.

The written word normally signifies a spoken word, but even the spoken word is first the imagined word. Even when we are not speaking to others we often speak to ourselves, and even when we are not “hearing” words inside our heads our language is nonetheless organizing our thoughts. Deaf people can have true language without speech, because the word is in the imagination before it is in speech. But the imagined word itself is first the word understood—the intellectual word. Not only are concepts associated with particular signs, but our way of thinking about a thing then because the way of signifying of the sign; for example, our way of thinking about motion becomes the way of signifying of the verb, and our way of thinking about a substance becomes the way of signifying of a noun. Similarly, and as a result, logical relationships between our thoughts become grammatical relationships between our words, as when a verb takes a noun as its direct object.

All this is remarkable enough. Our words become incarnate, so to speak; the immaterial clothes itself in the material, imposes meaning and order, and by so doing it transforms our material brains in a marvelous and documentable way. But something further happens at the same time.

Beyond what reason imposes, there seems to be already an analogy between material and immaterial things that language can seize onto. Many words that all have similar consonants create a sense of unity about a sentence, and so convey the impression of thoughts that hang together. The balance of parallel phrases persuades us that the thought behind them is beautifully structured. Ending an essay with the same words and phrases that began the essay creates an impression of completion even when no real completion has happened. Just as a straight line really is like “linear” thinking in some analogous way, rhetorically powerful speech really is like powerful thought—again, in some analogous way.

Because language itself occurs at the very interface between immaterial and immaterial, it was inevitable that this analogous relationship between the two would come out in language. Without reflection, grammatical man became rhetorical man—or rather, the two came into being simultaneously as linguistic man—or rather, man came to be man.

That at least is my own reflection on what happens all the time all around us. But as I say, this is a realm of marvels even for the true philosopher, much less for an ignoramus like the present author.

Philistine Perfection

2008-11-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

When a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death yesterday by Black Friday deal hunters, the nation was rightly outraged. The crowd, impatient from waiting all night in the parking lot, broke the doors down, flattened several employees in the process, and walked over them until one was dead. When police tried to clear the store, shoppers shouted angrily, "But I waited all night to get in!"--and kept on shopping.

But we should keep in mind that this was not only predictable, but planned. For several generations now Ray Moose has carefully and consciously designed advertisements to bypass reason; with the consent of all parties involved, companies have knowingly worked to cause customers to make decisions without thought, and even to induce a psychological need for their products. This is not a secret plot, but the open strategy one can find in any textbook on effective advertising. We the customers have enjoyed our titillation.

When the art of advertising was in its infancy and working on a previously unaffected populace, the best companies could manage was to induce imprudent purchases of unnecessary items, or an irrational decision in favor of one brand name over another. But now that the art has reached maturity, with the aid of television, Internet, and other media, and now that the populace has grown up already formed by advertisement, we can spark a real state of insanity that lasts for a number of hours. This is not a byproduct, but the goal.

In the dark old days of yesteryear, ignorant barbarians practiced black magic in the woods and sacrificed children for fertile fields. In the gloaming of culture, when barbarity is no longer suffered but sought, the Philistines celebrate Black Friday on the asphalt and sacrifice human life for a Nintendo Wii. There is here a kind of perfection.

The Disenfranchised Among Us

2008-11-24T23:00:00.000-08:00

Bunthorne has modestly proposed that folks with children vote not only for themselves, but also for their children. His reasoning is hard to counter: not only are children otherwise unrepresented and thus unable to exert a governmental influence equivalent to their percentage of the population, but adults with children have a greater stake in governmental policy (and how that policy affects the common good) than do adults without children.

To these points, one might add that the choice not to have children is often a selfish one, an attempt to retain all the fun of life for the me-monster. Conversely, the choice to have children is often a selfless one, a choice for generosity. It seems only fitting that the choice most often characterized by self concern have less influence on the common good than the choice that is most often characterized by concern for the common good over self.

Some may object that this would give less voting power to those who wish to have children and cannot. On the one hand, this doesn't touch Bunthorne's original arguments; on the other hand, these people can adopt if they feel the need for more voting power. And if I had three hands, I would add on the third one that those wishing but unable to have children will generally agree on policy with those wishing and able to have children, so Bunthorne's proposal is overall in the favor of all in favor of children.

Ironically, the strongest opponents of Bunthorne's proposal would probably be advocates of children's rights. They would perceive this attempt to give children a vote as a veiled return to the supremacy of parents over children. As the Moose once said to a friend of mine: "Obedience is the root of all evil."

From the Moose's mouth

2008-11-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday belief.net published the full and unedited text of a famous interview with Barack Obama about his religious beliefs. It's worth reading in full, but the heart of it is here:

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.
I think that, particularly as somebody who's now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there's an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

Obama is a straight-laced, orthodox Tolerationist. Anyone teaching through Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance should assign Obama's interview for a class discussion. Come to think of it, anyone discussing Obama's religious views should read Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance, which exposes the roots and the fruits of the tyrrany of tolerance. Under the banner of unity, which you will recall was the rallying cry of Obama's campaign, the "virtue of tolerance" bans the only possible basis of unity: truth.

Obama's take on Jesus Christ is the second most interesting point in the interview. It fits precisely within the boundaries of orthodox Tolerationism, and locates our president-elect within the debate over who is and isn't a real Christian:

FALSANI:
Who's Jesus to you?

(He laughs nervously)

OBAMA:
Right.

Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

Hope is not a program

2008-11-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder for all of us out there burnt out and depressed today. As Christians, we believe on faith that things are going to get worse before they get better. God has not assured us that truth and goodness will slowly ascend to victory over time; quite the contrary, Scripture tells us at every turn that evil will win, and win more, and finally reach its hour of triumph before our God intervenes suddenly and supernaturally.

For our children, we hope that the ascendancy of evil will not be in our day. For our neighbors' salvation, we hope that truth will not be discredited in the eyes of all. For ourselves perhaps, we hope that our legacy will be the good we accomplished in our lives.

But as for the course of the world, we do not hope that we will achieve the victory of good. We will fail in every measurable way. The hope that Obama proclaims is not finally our hope; at best he proclaims hope for a time and a season.

Our hope is not a program.

Our hope is in God, the master of history, who has brought Obama to the presidency; our hope is in the root of all being, who turns the heart of the worlds' leaders wherever he wills; our hope is a final hope, that seems so distant but closes around us with each death of someone we loved; our hope is hope not for America, not for prosperity, not for equal rights, not for just wages, but for the attainment of the goal towards which all of history strives. And this hope will be achieved by a force from outside the flow of history.

This just in: Ray Moose elected President!

2008-11-04T21:13:00.001-08:00

It would appear to be final, since McCain has made his concession speech. The scary thing is not that Obama is president, but that we live in a country that voted for Obama.

How could it be that a man whose politics are to the left of everyone in the country and whose list of achievements fits on the back of his business card is not only elected, but considered to be the best thing since the i-pod? For my money, it's because we are a TV nation. The television trains viewers not to think seriously about anything, and so leads naturally to modern advertising, wherein a smiling and beautiful woman sitting in a car means that you must buy one (the car, that is). Similarly, a smiling and handsome man with a sonorous voice and an attractive theme about change and hope means you must elect him--serious content would actually be detrimental, distracting, like making arguments in your seventeen seconds of air time.

Just smile and look beautiful. The viewers have been trained not to think.

Think of it this way. If you were a social science researcher and you wanted to find out how Americans have been trained to make decisions by their communication technologies, would it not be your dream to conduct a nation-wide test with participants in every town? Well, the dream has become a reality, and the results are depressing, if predictable: Americans make decisions based on loose poetic associations of images and sound bytes.

The good news is that irrationality bites any hand, whether it holds a bone or not. McCain did well on the campaign trail until America formed the following "syllogism": an economic crisis happened after George Bush had been president for nearly eight years; the president in office is responsible for whatever may happen to the economy; therefore, Republicans have to go. Well, the Democrats gained seats in both the house and the senate, and their boy Ray will sit in the oval office. Every single problem that rears its ugly head in the next four years will land fairly and squarely in the Democratic lap, and Ray may find his nation of well-trained unthinkers turning "red" with anger.

Dum spiro, spero.

A hopeful view of hope

2008-10-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

With the election only days away, every blogger, now matter how unqualified, must record his or her thoughts on the candidates. Since an Obama victory seems likely, I would like to offer an optimistic take on what will happen if the candidate of change and hope takes the oval office.

My guess is that he will not lead effectively, because he has no record of leading effectively. In the past, he has been controlled by the far left edge of the Democratic agenda, and that will probably remain true. So he will boldly and prophetically enact any number of hair-raisingly bad laws and policies, aided and indeed directed by his democratic congress. The age of entitlement will begin.

As liberal as Americans are, we are not as a group ready for socialism quite yet, so too much too fast may cause the frog to jump out of the water. Voters will be horrified by the extremism of the far left, and we will get a "swing effect" at the next election, to the benefit--God willing--of someone more insightful than John McCain. This swing effect will be augmented by the fact that the Democrats will controll the entire federal government for four years, and so every problem that arises within the four years will be perceived by voters as the Democrats' fault, whether or not the accusation is fair.

But will damage done by four years of Obama outweight the good of Democratic implosion? That depends almost entirely on the republican candidate four years from now: if we get a dynamic and principled leader, then he will use the momentum of the swing to undo the wreckage and even improve the nation; if we get a politician-at-heart figurehead whose virtue is a lack of vice, then we will be one step further down the road to serfdom.

Prophecy and fulfilment

2008-10-25T11:36:00.001-07:00

Look at this and then at that. Five minutes into the future, indeed.

If a car were assembled by chance....

2008-10-25T10:33:00.001-07:00

Bunthorne posted some interesting thoughts about natural teleology. I posted a long response on his blog, but then realized that I had essentially written my own blog post about natural ordering towards an end. It surrounds the question of whether a car assembled by chance would have a natural ordering towards an end.

I would say not. If a car came to be by random processes, what it would have is an order, but not an order to an end; or perhaps I should say that it would have an order towards a motion, but not an order towards an end, if that makes any sense at all.

I have two reasons for saying this.

First, only a mind can intend the good, and so only a mind can make an ordering towards an end. This is the foundation of Thomas’s 5th way. If no mind made the car, it would have a foundation for order towards an end–namely order–but it would not have actual ordering towards an end.

Second, a car is not a single substance and so does not have a good. The motion towards which the car has an order is not a good for the car, and so someone else whose good it is has to enter into the equation before the car’s motion can be considered an end.

Folks like Searle thing of a plant as like a car, that is, as a multitude of substances rather than as a single substance. Because of this, they do not think of the plant as having a good. Because of this, they do not think of the plant’s order towards a motion as ordering towards a good. Because of this, they do not perceive that a mind must stand behind the plant. Because of this, they fail to perceive the existence of God.

(Perhaps that last paragraph was overly ambitious, but it was rhetorically pleasing, so I did it.)

The reason people think of plants as multiple substances is because of a trick of the imagination. Everything we think of a part–part of a plant, part of a human, part of anything else–we imagine it, and our imaginations necessarily present that part to us as though it were a whole. Then we think of the parts of the parts as though they were wholes, and the cycle never ends. There is no ultimate substance for the imagination.

I forgot the name....

2008-10-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

OK, the figure in that last post was supposed to reside in the line "Nothing says nothing like nothing", i.e., in the use of the word "nothing" in more than one sense, but I forgot the name for the figure. That's what I get for taking so long to post again!

Much ado about nothing

2008-10-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

Turning again to the American Heritage Dictionary, we learn that a noun is "The part of speech that is used to name a person, place, thing, quality, or action and can function as the subject or object of a verb, the object of a preposition, or an appositive."

This definition seems complete at first glance; everything fits under one of the categories "person, place, thing, quality, or action", and nothing falls outside of them. This is good. The problem is that nothing does fall outside of those categories, and the same dictionary classifies "nothing" as a noun! The whole point of a word like "nothing" is to name "no thing", to name no person, place, quality or action.

One final riddle for the dictionary people. Nothing says nothing like "no-thing". But if a word says nothing at all, how can it even be a word?

Cutting it short

2008-10-07T22:22:00.000-07:00

To get directly to the point: the figure for last post was diacope, Greek for "cutting through", meaning repetition with only a word or two between: "nonsense, sheer, utter nonsense...."

My guest and I drained a bottle of wine over good conversation tonight. On the one hand, the wine was "The 7 Deadly Zins"; on the other hand, my guest was a priest, so it all balanced out. Between the wine and the priest, time has slipped away for writing even the briefest, the most useless and the briefest of posts.

Useless verbage

2008-10-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

As I attempt to resurrect this blog and its project, I realize that I need to focus on what is (a) useless and (b) short. Otherwise I will not post at this season in my life, which is fall heading into winter but still recovering from summer with a touch of spring fever.

Today's utterly useless fact: according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a verb is "the part of speech that expresses existence, action, or occurrence in most languages."

This is nonsense, sheer, brazen nonsense. "Existence", "action", and "occurence" are all nouns! Clearly, words that express existence, action, or occurence are not thereby verbs.

Can you mix regulation with anti-regulation, captain?

2008-10-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

It's a great time to know nothing about economics. Everyone who knows something about economics seems to lose sleep, sell all their stocks, and write long, grouchy blog posts about who is to blame.

What puzzles me most, in the abyss of my ignorance, are the accusations that John McCain is anti-regulatory and therefore represents what caused the current catastrophe. Setting aside the facts of the case, I wish one of my more intelligent readers could tell me what the accusation means. As far I can tell, the central lack of regulation behind the crisis (leaving aside the Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac issues as well as American's general lack of self-regulation) was that rating agencies were allowed to sign off on junk. I recently read an article explaining how the rating agencies would actually take fees in return for tips on how to artificially inflate the rating of a bad investment! (But I can't find the link now.)

Outlawing that kind of thing is surely a kind of regulation we could all agree on, right? That lying is always bad, that is, and especially so in financial transactions?

My question: What kind of regulation is John McCain against that makes him so bad? Research into his voting record doesn't seem to turn up an answer.

Not so bad, the dentist

2008-07-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

We all know how dentists amuse themselves. They stuff our mouths full of metal rods and whirring things and then play twenty questions: "How ya' been? Your kids playing ball this year?" We gape and say "Ah hah. Hah uh hah uh wah wah." Very funny.

But dental humor will have to take a silver medal in this competition. The funniest sounds come from the chiropractor's office.

My chiropractor has me lay face down on the table so that I'm talking into a crack; everything I say sounds like it comes through a toilet paper tube. Then he runs a vibrating massage machine over my back and asks me how my kids are enjoying Wyoming. "THeEeYy lLiIkKeE IiTt aAaAa lLlOoOTtT", I say. Sounds like I'm talking through a fan. Somehow he keeps a straight face, but of course he has already tipped off the receptionist: "Jenny Mae, slip over by the door while I work this next guy over; don't let him know you're there, but you gotta hear this! Sounds like he's talking through a fan!"

The machine off, we proceed to the manipulation. "Did ja do anything fun this weekend?", he asks, and just as I draw in my breath to answer he CRUSHES the spinal column between my shoulder blades. "I daioughargh!", I comment. "Is the heat getting to you?", he wonders--CRUSH, CRUSH, CRUSH.

Rarely have I felt so silly. Not so bad, the dentist!

Beating around the phrase-bush

2008-07-25T19:47:00.000-07:00

My book of figures showed itself this afternoon. As I cast about for today's turn of phrase, my eye fell on periphrasis:

We are all too familiar with this particular mode. We live in a world in which the killing of a spy is the elimination with extreme prejudice of an intelligence-gathering operative. And in this world we secretly think that if all periphrasis could be eliminated, bereaucracy would wither away, along with its academic handmaidens, the social sciences. We needed to be reminded, therefore, that legitimate uses of periphrasis do exist (such as substituting "academic handmaidens of bureaucracy" for "social sciences" in order to contribute to their elimination with extreme prejudice).

No sooner did I pick up my own employer's Bureaucracy Handbook than my eye fell on a delicious example of the above. As soon as I had my eye popped back into place, I read the following aloud to anyone who would listen:

"Faculty" refers to those who engage in teaching during the school year and activities directly related thereunto.

If "engage in teaching" means anything more than "teach", it implies that the teaching motor is always humming. Sometimes we just let it hum while we do other things, but sometimes we drop it into gear and engage that source of power. I knew a fellow once who walked into a classroom and carelessly dropped his teaching directly into fourth gear; he nearly plastered himself across the whiteboard. Be careful when you engage your teaching: that thing's not a toy!

Maybe the Duck can tell me the name for a one-word periphrasis, where you use a much bigger word than is needed. The plague in this category is "utilize". I have never heard a case where it could not be replaced with "use"; people just want to utilize bigger words to sound importantatious.

In theory, of course, "utilize" could mean "make useful", as "sterilize" means "make sterile". That is the dictionary definition, but in the common and usual circumstances of every day locution the item or term in question is periphrastisized for maximal utilization of vocabulary and linguistic resources.

Fun with the news

2008-07-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

The book of rhetorical figures used for my ongoing "figures of speech" project is still hiding in a box. Multiple search sessions have not unearthed it, so for the moment that project is on hold--deep apologies.

However, we can always appreciate the figures around us. In an otherwise unfortunate news piece, an anonymous journalist had a little fun with words, breaking the rule that good journalism requires bad prose:

Bale, who was in the UK to promote the new Batman film and attend its London premiere, is on bail until September pending further inquiries.

That makes me happy.

It also makes me think of the Duck.

I may be an Ignoramus, but please don't treat me like one.

2008-07-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

My cable internet connection went on the blink, so I called the company. To my distress, a computer answered the telephone and starting asking questions and giving orders. My situation adequately described by a series of "Yes" and "No" entries, the computer asked: "Do you want to wait to speak to a representative or do you want to fix the problem?"

Well, when you put it that way....

My acquiescence registered via voice recognition software, the computer explained: "Fixing the problem will require four steps. Do you have something to write down the steps?"

I scrambled to open a Word doc and mouthed my affirmative.

"Alright. You will have a chance to hear each step again after I explain it. First, locate the power supply to your cable modem and unplug it. Then plug it back in." The computer paused to let me write this out, and then queried, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

No, I got it--unplug and replug the modem.

"The second step is, locate the power supply to your wireless router and unplug it. Then plug it back in." Again the computer paused to let this sink in, and queried again, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

No, I can handle that--unplug the router and plug it back in.

"The third step is, shut down your computer." A third time the computer paused so my slower CPU chip could catch up, and asked cheerfully, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

Aarg! No!

"The fourth step is, turn your computer back on." Again a pause, and I twitched as the computer inquired yet a fourth time, "Do you want me to repeat that?"

Never in all my days. First it insinuates quite plainly that human representatives are useless, and then it spoon feeds me "Turn everything off and restart it" in four steps, insulting my comprehension at every opportunity! They say that when computers get artificial intelligence and take over the world, we'll be lucky if they decide to keep us as pets--but right now I belong to the master race, ignoramus or no, and I'd appreciate it if cocky answering machines on steroids would keep that in "mind".

The Moose is behind all this, I just know it. He got us thinking of computers as humans so that we would get used to thinking of humans as computers. Once we compare ourselves as computers to the computers that are actually computers, we can't compete; we can't calculate as fast or conclude with such freedom from error or store such vast quantities of data. This proves (whispers the Moose through every automated genie or wizard) that we are inferior. Therefore we should step back and let our technologies rule the world in our stead.

Welcome to Technopoly.

Why can't we all just get along....

2008-07-14T19:58:00.000-07:00

One of Ray's early efforts, the hippy movement, was rotten in many ways--a juvenile piece he threw together, not really his mature stuff--but I like a lot about it. I like the back to nature craze, the joyful attitude, and the desire to build a society based on love and unselfishness.

More on the downsides in an upcoming post, but for the moment I just want to point out the major flaw in any plan for building a society based on love and unselfishness: lots of people are hateful and selfish. Read history.

But now the Moose has let loose his masterstroke: Barack Obama, the man who means to deliver on that society the hippy movement could only talk about. And in fact he does have a strange effect on people.

Take for example John Talbott. While his prophetic works in economics earn the praise of the toughest critic, he has also written a book called Obamanomics. Here's the blurb:

Obama's greatest strength is his ability to bring the country together. For too long divisions among races, religions, political views, cultures, genders, and sexual preferences have prevented Americans from coming together to solve the most important problems of our generation. Global warming, lobbying reform, poverty, health care, wars, terrorism, education, housing and banking reform, and energy and water shortages-these are complex global problems that Talbott argues cannot be left to the free market business world or governments to solve.
Once emphasis is placed on citizen involvement, real solutions become apparent to our most pressing problems. A completely laissez-faire world of unregulated markets and uncontrolled globalization can be returned to a properly regulated free market that responds to the voice of a democratic people. And the American values of goodness, justice, and fairness to all Americans reflected in this young man of Africa and Kansas can once again be incorporated into our economic and financial system.

Notice that poverty, illness, and war will be cured by this new economics. Note also that this new system will work because we will all get along and be unselfish. Note finally the reason we will be so transformed: Obama's "ability to bring the country together." In other words, Obamanomics works because each American accepts Barack Obama into his heart as his personal president and leader.

Temper, temper!

2008-05-24T04:48:00.000-07:00

[Note to reader: this post was written hastily, so there is no intended figure today. Sorry!]

I recently had a brief dispute--brief meaning 4.7 seconds--about the classic theory of the four temperaments. Just in case I need to reference this theory in the future in persona Ignorami, I want to lay out my thoughts.

The best treatment I know of the subject is Art and Laraine Bennet's The Temperament God Gave You. Until I read that book I thought I understood how to discern the temperaments but in fact had only a fuzzy grasp of things. For example, my own dominant temperament, the melancholic, can mimic the anger or aggressiveness of the choleric at times; my subdominant phlegmatic side can play together with the melancholic to look almost like a sanguine.

Someone once suggested to me that the irascible and concupiscible powers explain the four temperaments. A strong irascible power makes one choleric, while a weak irascible power makes one phlegmatic; a strong concupiscible power makes one melancholic, while a weak concupiscible power makes one sanguine. Here is where the dispute arose a couple of days ago, so let me clarify.

Picture the irascible and concupiscible powers mapped on a grid, with the vertical line representing the irascible and the horizontal line representing the concupiscible. To be choleric you have to be towards the top of the vertical line, while to be phlegmatic you have to be near the bottom of the vertical line. To be melancholic you have to be at the far right side of the horizontal line, while to be sanguine you have to be at the far left side of the horizontal line. To find your overall personality mix, you find your point on the horizontal, your point on the vertical, and then do the standard graph maneuver of locating the point next to both of these on the grid. The result will have both slope, indicating which side is dominant, and length, indicating the overal strength of temperament.

Note that the temperaments are plotted on a continuum. You could be right at the center of the line and therefore neither choleric nor phlegmatic strictly speaking. In that case, you might have some features of one and some of the other, but the overall result would not be particularly strong in either direction. The same goes for the melancholic/sanguine continuum. You could not be strongly choleric and strongly phlegmatic, or strongly melancholic and strongly sanguine.

However, you could be strongly melancholic and phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic, or sanguine and choleric--one strong mix for each quadrant of the graph. In this case you can have both temperaments strictly speaking, although in practice one will tend to be dominant over the other, if only slightly.

Lastly, we have to recall that temperament is not destiny. The saints are often very difficult to place on the temperament continuum because they have overcome the vices of their temperament and acquired the virtues of the other temperaments. One cannot be natively disposed both a strong choleric and a strong phlegmatic reaction, but by living well one can acquire the reactions of a choleric in one circumstance and of a phlegmatic in another circumstance, depending on what is appropriate. Acquired virtue makes hash of my temperament grid.

Oh gee, sis!

2008-05-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

A quick post just to have something up, here. The figure for the last two posts was Auxesis, Arranging words or clauses in a sequence of increasing force:

First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon.

I am quite at a loss for a mnemonic image on this one. Any immediate thoughts?

The Scandalous Success of Atheistic Intellectual Projects

2008-05-20T19:06:00.000-07:00

Any number of post-enlightenment intellectual projects have started in error and achieved tremendous success: modern biblical studies began as an attack on Scripture and ended by contributing mightily to our understanding of Scripture; the theory of evolution seemed to its original audience to remove God from the equation, and yet has explained all manner of conundrums of zoology; modern science in general began with the rejection of formal and final causality and gained an almost unimaginable power over the material world.

A quick and general account of this phenomenon is that man is an imperfect knower. Sometimes what is in itself an error actually counterbalances one of our flaws and leads to truth, like a man who aims away from the target because his gun doesn't shoot straight.

One example of this has been on my mind lately. Only after philosophers denied the "Cat First" principle did technology achieve its modern miracles. First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon. Why would mechanical mastery depend on philosophical loss?

Basically, it is because all men at all times and in all places are tempted to substitute imagining for reasoning.

When men could not see the tiny, tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they imagined the tissues of the cat as continuous; when they tried to imagine how the cat's tissues achieved their various functions, the result was rather blurrily attributed to the "powers" due to the "nature" of the cat and its tissues. In other words, imagination favored thinking of cats as one thing.

But once men discovered the tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they could imagine the mechanical processes leading to the various operations of the cat. More importantly, they inevitably imagined the cat as made up of billions of little wholes, because substantial unity is in fact extrasensory and so unimaginable. So then imagination favored thinking of cats as many things.

In an odd way, then, the belief that a cat is one thing prevented men from achieving a mechanical mastery of the world by encouraging an imaginative error, just as mechanical mastery of the world now prevents men from seeing a cat as one thing by encouraging another imaginative error.

This is the way of the Moose: imagine, don't think. He loves pictures and hates words. But our universal tendency to go with the more sensible and vivid--with the imaginable--makes it difficult indeed to ignore Ray Moose.

Hot blog with mustard

2008-05-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

The process of moving is eating my blog. First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

Perhaps this blog is of no account in the face of Ray Moose's mega-corp hippy big-brother free-thinking organization, but I still feel bad about missing a week at a time.

Star lichen

2008-05-15T05:35:00.000-07:00

What a week! Between work and packing I’ve barely been able to post, and even when I get to the computer I never have time to put on my special Ignoramus mask and cape.

And the figure I was stuck with is as boring as they come: asterismos, adding an unnecessary word to emphasize or draw attention to what follows:

…and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists".

So unobtrusive is this figure—and I begin to wonder whether it is a figure at all—that I simply couldn’t make it the most striking sentence in a long post. The only way to catch it would have been to focus on the short post with just a few lines.

Boring or not, useful or not, I must memorize the figure, so: Picture a gentle hill on which has been placed a completely unnecessary stone staircase; in fact, it was only put there to emphasize the fact that there is a hill. So unnecessary is this staircase on such a gentle hill that no one ever uses it, so it is so covered with moss that you can’t see the stone at all. In fact, on closer examination, it turns out that “a stair IS moss.”

Lucky me

2008-05-11T20:15:00.001-07:00

While the Moose has confined all matters religious and moral to gushy emotionalism, he has somehow managed to persuade the world that we need a scientific study to tell us that we have noses on our faces. When the Moose Media try to be objective about things that really matter, the result is a poll:

Survey indicates Bible hard to understand

...A survey commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Federation found that even those who reported reading the Bible said it was not easy to understand.

Well now that's a relief. I make my living teaching Scripture, and if it were a breeze then my children would have no bread on the table. Having spent several years trying to explain Scripture to college freshman, I'm glad to know at last that the Bible is not easy to understand. My students will be glad to hear that, too.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists":

Diotallevi described as fundamentalist those who chose the response: "The Bible is the actual word of God, which must be taken literally, word for word."

Would the Catholic position be that Scripture is the potential word of God? Virtually the word of God? Metaphorically the word of God? Not really the word of God?

But a Catholic who had read 1Thess 2:13, or even his Catechism, and wanted to respond that Scripture is actually the word of God, would probably not want to say it "must be taken literally" as a blanket statement. Surely everyone knows there are metaphors in Scripture!

On the other hand, what does it mean to take a text "word for word"? Is the alternative to skip some words? Surely a Catholic would not endorse snipping up the Scriptures.

Wrap these stumpers into one sudden polster's puzzle, undoubtedly sprung in an Italian accent over the telephone during dinner, and what you get is literally this: con-fusion.

The Shrine of the Moose

2008-05-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit worried about the Mass we attend. We were told it would be an extraordinary experience, and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

The subliminal effect on my children could be devastating.

But what to do? Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick. Subliminal effects are bad, but conscious and over effects are worse.

A brief respite from words

2008-05-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

I sinned = debt on

2008-05-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

As usual, the Duck nailed it: Asyndeton, the ommision of a conjunction, was the featured figure of the past few posts. And the way he can rattle off other figures I didn't even know I was using is frightening.... But in reply to Fr. Barry, I did mean "deadly" in the sense you took it.

For the mnemonic image, picture a donkey selling the word "AND" to a pawn shop. That should link "Ass in debt" on to the omission of a conjunction in your memory.

Starship Capitalism

2008-05-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

My father-in-law still has a ticket, given him some thirty years ago I think, to the moon. While the technology did not exist for private space travel when the ticket was sold, nonetheless it guarantees that whenever such technology becomes available the holder of the ticket will get a ride.

Well, Dad, it's almost time to claim your seat. Private space flight is real, and the galaxy's first spaceline, Virgin Galactic, is building ships and selling tickets. The company's founder is deadly serious.

Why does anyone want to go to outer space? I can think of three reasons.

First, everyone loves a good adventure. We all like to read about voyages to the end of the world, to the center of the earth, past the cave of the Cyclops, through the valley of Shangri La. Now a company with offices and brochures offers a guaranteed romantic trip for a preset price, and anyway if anything goes wrong you can sue them, so there we have it: adventure for the average man!

Second, it resonates with the evolutionary mythology of our day. At least since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, popular imagination has connected space travel with evolving on, becoming the superman, achieving wisdom. While science and popular science are equally steadfast in denying that nature acts for an end--that plants grow leaves for the purpose of imbibing the sun, that spiders spin webs for the purpose of catching flies--popular science at least has endowed the cosmos as a whole with a purposeful striving towards its destiny. The same purpose impossible in the parts is the point of the whole: the whole universe has been groaning in travail until now, awaiting the revealing of the Ubermensch--and beyond. While the scientific proponents of an evolutionary world view may honestly intend to exclude all purpose, by making it a world view they make it a popular mythology, and by making it a mythology they cast it in the role of giving purpose and direction to life. Space travel offers hope to modern man.

Third, generalizing a little from that last point, we all want to find the ultimate realities of life. Since modern man is trained to think of all things, including himself, as a machine, he finds no depth in the world immediately around him. No use probing further in, so all he can do is probe further out: he travels around the world, explores the forests, climbs the mountains; when that is old he goes around the world faster, makes satellite maps of the forests, computer generates the mountains; when that is old, he either retreats into the imaginary world of television or probes further out to the real domain of outer space. Not coincidentally, his imaginary world of television feeds him a regular diet of imaginary space travel.

But to be honest, I don't think the average man today would go to space if television signals didn't reach that far. To hope for space travel in the future may give hope to life, but actually to have been there might be a desolating experience. The earth seen through the pressurized windows would look like the photographs we have already seen; weightlessness would be neat for a while, but would hardly feel like evolving to the next level; in general, space is an environment reduced rather than enlarged, unfit for man not because it is beyond him but because it is beneath him, unable to support life because of its poverty rather than because of its greatness.

When the first manned space flight broke through the atmosphere in 1961, the Russian communist astronaut looked around briefly and radioed triumphantly to the home base that he had not seen God. Atheism demonstrated--and a telling symbol of what awaits the average man in outer space.

The most thrilling adventures are in the rich world around us. When we have traveled the world, mapped the world, computer generated the world, made a video game of the world, there remains yet the return to real natures. Grant that a cat is a cat, not a machine, and untold vistas of discovery await us.

"Further up and further in!"

Frigidum!

2008-04-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, I learned that I will teach Latin this fall. I read Latin easily enough, but they want me to teach Latin in Latin to students who respond in Latin: I have to speak, write, think Latin! My wife and I have undertaken an immersion process together, and I have begun leaving Latin comments on my friend's Latin blog.

So I was happy to find this.

A change of rules and one clarification

2008-04-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

"Find the figure" has been fun, but I need to change the pattern somewhat. To give myself more scope for rapid posting and more time to practice each figure, I am going to start posting several times using the same figure. Once I set out the definition and mnemonic image for the figure I have been using, the subsequent posts will start the next figure.

I think multiple posts will also help readers (oh, that hopeful plural!) spot the figure, but brings up a needed clarification.

When I originally proposed the game, my idea was that readers would look for the line that stood out, that seemed most fresh, most zingy. If that line turned out to be the figure of the day, they win for finding it and I win for successfully pulling off the figure. In other words, you don't have to name the figure: you can just say, "This line seems like it."

OK, now to get some actual posts up!

This figure is so poignant, it just--

2008-04-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

The figure for the last post was Aposiopesis, breaking off as though unable or unwilling to continue:

When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

For the mnemonic image, picture yourself holding a giant sledge hammer dashing the end of a large-print sentence to smithereens. Directly in front of you, a giant apple with a face stares at the flying pieces in astonishment. The verb "dashing" reminds you that this figure often uses a dash at the end, but the key phrase is: "Apple see yo' pieces."

I'm trying to give up coffee, OK? It's the best I can do.

Living in the dump

2008-04-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

My friend JB and I got to talking about environmentalism the other day. He knows a lot of the Green people are nuts, although of course he doesn't know about Ray Moose and the prehistory of the sixties, so he is generally down on "save the Earth" movements. He doesn't like the fact that the Vatican went carbon-neutral, for example, even though he sees nothing wrong with being carbon neutral. In his view, it symbolically aligns the Catholic Church with an anti-Catholic crowd.

Now he has a point. In fact, JB may have caught onto one of Moose's schemes: just like the Nazi's needed an emergency to get folks to hand power over to Hitler, so today global warming is the Big Crisis demanding that something be done so fast and so effectively that we need to hand over all our power to the government. Sound crazy?

Yeah. Crazy like a Moose.

But then JB brought up an argument against recycling. Of all the resources in the world, he said, surely we have a lot of sand and a lot of trees. So why are we recycling glass and paper? The recycling process loses money, as you can see from the fact that no private agencies undertake to do it: it's always government run. And we are nowhere close to running out of room for dumps and landfills. We recycle, he argued, to make ourselves feel better.

Now let me focus the conversation. I don't know whether his premises are all true: Does glass actually degrade when buried? Do we have that many trees? He could not verify the premises either; he just read the argument somewhere and liked it. At the moment, I am not worried about whether the premises are true, but about whether the argument follows.

JB is an economist, and he has acquired what I call a quantitative mind. He tends to focus on amounts, credits and deficits, formulas, limits, mechanical possibilities. Mathematical thinking has become not just second nature for him but a way of seeing the world. But I have what I would call a qualitative mind, so I tend to focus on form, nature, beauty, goodness or badness. This makes communication difficult.

At the time, I didn't say much of anything. But my reaction to his argument was that I would be willing to pay more for glass and paper to prevent another landfill from happening. The landfill itself is inherently displeasing to me. You start with a prairie or a wood, then you plow down the trees and grass, then you dig up not just the topsoil but all the layers below, then you fill it with trash, refuse, broken bottles, disposable diapers, plastic bags. When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

The thought depresses me. This is not an argument, I know, but could it be a perception of something true? A sure sign of a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood of crime and desperation, is trash in the yards. A sure sign of depression is when a person stops cleaning his house and just lets it go. There is something inherently disordered about just trashing because it's easier and cheaper.

I think that is why the Vatican went green, and why Popes have spoken in favor of environmental stewardship. It's not because pollution is causing an immediate crisis; maybe it is, but that is not the ultimate point. It's not because the Vatican wants to curry the favor of the left; maybe the left likes what the Vatican says about environmentalism, but that is not even the proximate point. The point is that healthy human beings clean up after themselves. When we are right with God and right the world, we atone for sin and pick up trash.

We can ignore Ray Moose. This is not his issue.

I can't tell you how bad I have been....

2008-04-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

I am afraid I owe my honest readership an apology. Oh, what a bad boy I have been! For two days I puzzled over how to use Aporia, which is talking about not being able to talk about something. Then suddenly I realized that my problem was its own answer.

Now it puzzles me that an online source defines Aporia otherwise. More thought needed on that one.

Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simple enough. An enormous limestone letter A, riddled with pores, stands erect as a man tries unsuccessfully to scale it. Part of his problem is that a huge pitcher is pouring water over the top. So the figure that expresses your unsuccessful effort to express your thought is the porous A, or "A porous", or the "A pouring"--any of these should bring Aporia to mind.

It came to me like a flash under a bushel

2008-04-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

After some days of no blogging impulse, an idea came to me suddenly in the shower. It is a splendid idea, creative and subtle, the kind of idea a blogger blogs for.

But it is too good.

It is so good that I can't even begin to describe it, much less to type it. The idea is so perfect and radiant that I find myself unable even to hum about it.

I wish I could express my disappointment at my inability to blog down this inspiration. I can't apologize enough.

But I'll take your guesses in the combox....

A Figure of Splendor

2008-04-24T12:01:00.001-07:00

As the semester winds down (or up--take your pick), the blog suffers. But I do want to point out quickly that the featured figure in my last post was Antiptosis, the substitution of a prepositional phrase for an adjective. For example, I wrote "presence of massiveness" instead of "massive presence", and "admiring words of sincerity" instead of "sincere words of admiration", and "America of the mainstream" instead of "mainstream America".

The example of this figure that always sticks in my mind is "tower of strength" for "strong tower." So picture your sister standing on tip toe and holding a rather formidable looking tower in her hands. "On tip toe sis" will forever bring this figure to mind.

If you don't have a sister, you could imagine a nun or perhaps the sister of a friend.

OK, I'm in a hurry of greatness here--more later.

"Awesome speech...."

2008-04-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

It has been funny to watch the media of secularity deal with Benedict XVI's presence of massiveness. Garrison Keeler spoofed the Pope, a blogger posted goofy inanities under the Pope's name, and the headlines proclaimed "Us readies rock star welcome for Benedict XVI." In a culture where news is entertainment and entertainment is the biggest news, no one knows what to do with the man whose message is the gravity of truth.

But it could have been worse. Had this visit been delayed, the president greeting (or refusing to greet) the Pope could have been Obama or Clinton. Bush's unprecedented move to greet Benedict at the airport and his admiring words of sincerity were the highlight of when America of the mainstream encountered the vicar of Christ. "Awesome speech", the President said in his American way, and I think he meant it.

The thought of Hilary Clinton camera smiling toward the pope reminds me of the time Bill Clinton did meet John Paul II at the stadium in St. Louis. Bill was good enough to bring the great Msgr. George Tribou to meet John Paul II personally. (Tribou was principal at the high school I attended.) When the moment came, Bill motioned Msgr. Tribou forward and said, "Your holiness, this is Msgr. Tribou--he never votes for me."

Whatever else you might say about Bill Clinton, he knew how to compliment a priest in front of the Pope.

A hand where the head should be

2008-04-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

The line that I hoped would stand out in the last post was this:

He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over.

It is an example of Anthimeria, the use of one part of speech in place of another. In this case, "did" is a verb used in place of a noun, while "noised" is a noun used as a verb. It was hard to find a striking instance of this because, as I soon realized, we do this all the time in English. A persevering worker "soldiers on", we "text" our friends on the cell phone, and we bed down in our beds, are housed in our houses, and on and on and on.

Once again, the line between figure and plain English is hard to find. It's a "figure" when it's "unusual", but usual English is highly figured....

But the mnemonic image is simple. Picture a woman named Maria, but picture with one body part where another should be--a hand switched with the head, for example. (If you don't know anyone named Maria, attend the nearest Catholic Mass and you'll meet two or three.) If the Maria in question happens to be your father's sister or mother's sister, you're in luck: "Auntie Maria". If not, then picture her covered with ants and you have "Anty Maria".

Plant your bombs to bomb the plants

2008-04-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

Nature lover that I am, I receive no less than two nature magazines. These excellent and thought-provoking journals, My Big Backyard and Ranger Rick, not only provide my children with endless fodder for paper snippings but also introduce them to such backyard friends as the humpback whale and the harp seal.

Today's mail brought letters from both magazines urging us to renew. Most pointedly, they argued,

"Renewing promptly saves you further notices and conserves paper."

The threat that, should I fail to renew, I will be harassed by further notices and thereby guilty of killing trees gains its full irony when you consider that they would have me subscribe to a paper magazine. Seems to me I saw a moose on one of those magazines recently.

But the incident reminded me that I have intended to mention a bizarre spin-off of Ray Moose's early radical years, ecoterrorism: terrorism to save the environment. There is even a non-organization to support this movement, the Earth Liberation Front, whose thesis is that we must fight to free planet earth from her human invaders. While they have no power structure or leader, they provide a cover name for Moose-alikes:

Any individuals who committed arson or any other illegal acts under the ELF name are individuals who choose to do so under the banner of ELF and do so only driven by their personal conscience.

(If you choose to visit their site, I should warn you that they also peddle viagra. Get the connection? I don't, either.)

Long ago, when Ray Moose first saw that the sober notion that we do not live in a trash bin could be transmogrified into the engine of a rock'n'roll, drug-promoting, counter-culture hippy movement, he tried the rebel alliance look. He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over. It didn't take, and neither did his slogan, "ELF-help", so now he plays the other side by enforcing environmentalism through Big Brother government.

Thus Ray forged the last link in a chain well described by a priest here at the university: we have gone from "Yes to Christ and no to Church" to "Yes to man and no to God" to "Yes to the whales and trees and no to man."

A post as dead as a post

2008-04-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

That last post was a puzzler, and I apologize. For some reason I felt compelled to blog on the distinction between substance and accident, even though it hasn't appeared in the news for quite some time. And I have a feeling that I will have more than one occasion to reference the "cat first" principle.

The figure was an obscure one: Antanaclasis, the repetition of a word in the same grammatical form but with a different meaning.

The title of this post is a good example. Jesus' saying, "Let the dead bury their dead", is a good example. Ben Franklin used Antanaclasis well when he said, "Your argument is sound...all sound." But my attempt at Antanaclasis in the last post may not have been all that good:

On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance.
...
On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

I'll have to make another go at it later, on the side. Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simply a line of identical ants marching over a closet door: "Ant-on-a-closet." This does not quite distinguish Antanaclasis from Polyptoton, but as a figure of a figure it comes close enough.

The Atoms or the Moose

2008-04-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

It would take a great mind many years to untangle the tangle Ray Moose has unleashed. Mine is not a great mind and I do not have many years, so I'll keep to simpler points. I don't know where the root is, but maybe I can expose a main branch of Ray's system.

Consider my cat as an example. If I glance up and see him, without reflection I think: “A cat!” He seems to be one animal with various parts, including legs, tail, and teeth, that serve his purposes.

But if I look at him more analytically, and especially if I recall my high school biology courses, I recall that he is composed of many systems: muscular system, skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system, and so on and so forth. These systems themselves are composed of a multitude of cells, and the cells in turn are composed of some unimaginable number of atoms, which in turn are composed of something smaller whose name I forget, which in turn is composed of something even smaller whose name maybe nobody knows—but let’s just stop at the level of atoms. My cat is composed of some unimaginable and incomprehensible number of atoms.

The key question is: Which comes first, the atoms or the cat?

In high school, we were taught to think that the atoms come first. On this model, a cat is like a car, a complex system of parts that work so well together as to achieve an appearance of unity. What really exists are nuts and bolts and belts and so on; “car” names the cumulative effect of these parts in relation to each other. Similarly, what really exists are atoms; “cat” names the cumulative effect of the atoms. The atoms are first, and cause the cat. On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance. This is the first and original atom bomb: the one that blew up my cat.

But suppose we turn it around, and say that the cat comes first and the atoms second. On this model, what really exists is one thing, namely a cat, and the atoms are effects arising from that one thing. In this case, the atoms are the sensible radiation or working out of one thing, like the visible glow that testifies to an electric charge in the air. However comprehensible as mechanisms, the various systems in the cat are nothing other than the cat itself working itself out in the mechanical arena. On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

How can we decide which is true? A change in theory would make no difference in the arrangement of atoms, so we can’t leave it to scientific studies or super-duper microscopes or any other version of seeing, touching, feeling, hearing, or smelling. Ray Moose relentlessly (and unknowingly) advocates that the atoms are first. But how can we decide?

Of all the animals in the world, we have an “insider perspective” on one only: ourselves. Hold up your hands; clap them together. Look with your eyes, and realize that you are looking with two eyes rather than one. You experience yourself as one thing, no matter how many parts you may have; if anyone pokes your hand or your eye, you will say, “You poked me!”

It may seem unscientific or even mystical, but it’s an immediate experience that trumps any later argument: I am first, and my atoms are second.

Does this seem arcane? This one question—which is first, the atoms or the cat?—decides whether moral evil exists, whether we live in our houses, whether we know anything at all. The Moose has no idea.

Resting on his laurels....

2008-04-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

My apologies for that very long post last time. So long was it that finding "the" figure would have been practically impossible.

But for the sake of the record, the figure I meant to practice was anastrophe, reversal of the ordinary sequence of parts. For example, the sentence "Slowly moved my fingers over the keys" puts the verb before the subject, and the closing line about man the "dweller universal" puts the noun before its adjective.

For some reason this figure is just not natural to me. I need to practice it more. My wife read over the previous post once and spotted the new figure instantly because she has read my prose for more than ten years now and has never seen it before!

Fortunately, a mnemonic image is easy: picture an Olympic champion standing on top of a giant trophy, and think, "On his trophy." Not only does it sound like "anastrophe", but the reversal of order between the champion and the trophy reminds one of the meaning of the name. And, as the title of this post suggests, the picture is a familiar one.

The content of the post raised more questions than it answered, but in the end it was directed against Le Corbusier, of whom I know little more than that he was either an employee or indeed a pseudonym of Ray Moose. Under this name, or through this man, the Moose pursued modern art (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Sir Cube Lore") as a basis for bizarre furniture (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Rebel Curios"), and in general deceived mankind (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Lie Obscurer") into swallowing an architecture not created for mankind but for the glory of Le Corbusier (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Be our relics").

I was reminded of all this recently when I ran across a website proclaiming "Easy Room Makeovers". I spotted right away that "Easy Room" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Ray Moose"--and who wants a "Ray Moose Makeover"?

Living in our houses

2008-04-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I visited a friend who owns a Steinway baby grand. He told me about the history of the Steinway brand, the unlikely success of its orphaned and impoverished founder, and how the Steinway is manufactured--literally, made by hand--today, but I could hardly pay attention. Slowly moved my fingers over the keys, and aching in my arms and back stirred old, old muscle memories: how I would lean into the instrument and in it sing, my voices weaving in and out of each other, finding in an old familiar rag the intensity. Some said I had a gift for it.

Then we moved away to graduate school and there was no piano around, and everyone studied late and woke early, and years went by and I did not play and did not play. I remember when I came home for vacation, sat at my parents' upright piano to play the old favorites, and discovered that they were gone. The muscles tensed but nothing moved, like the stump where arm used to be. The piano was for me a limb lost.

As my friend finished his story about Steinway, my ears perked up at his closing remark: "It's quite an amazing machine." A Steinway baby grand piano, a machine?

Leaving aside necessary distinctions between tool and machine, I was arrested at the thought that I had brought a mechanism into myself and made it of my own body an extension; I did not manipulate the keys so that the piano sang, but I sang in the piano. How queer that I could live, so to speak, in an assembly of wood and metal.

All the way home from that visit, I was keenly aware of how I drive my car. As I guided it in between the proper lines and around cars and corners, I realized that the car becomes an extension of my personal space. When someone crowds too close to the car, I feel it as crowding too close to me; similarly, I feel how close I am to the center line much as I would feel how close I am to the wall as I walk in a hallway. I not only control the car as it moves, but in the car I move.

Then I became aware that, as I drive, I look several hundred feet ahead and project myself, so to speak, into that space, imagining what I will do there, driving each segment in my imagination before I drive it on the road. I looked around at the fields on either side of the highway, at the road ahead and behind, and thought to myself:

I live in the space around me.

Let me try to say that more clearly. When I see the road ahead, I do not change or touch the road; the road has nothing real in it by which it is related to me. But because I see the road, I am changed and touched by the road; there is something real in me by which I am related to the road, and by knowledge I am present to the road. This happens because I sense and know the road. A rock does not dwell in the space around it as I do: if I were a machine, and if my eyes were video cameras, then I would be no different from the rock; but because I am an animal, and my eyes organs of sensation, I am a true inhabitant of all the area around me. As Saint Augustine says, Anima ubi videt, ibi sentit; et ubi sentit, ibi vivit; et ubi vivit, ibi est: "Where the soul sees, there it senses; where it senses, there it lives; and where it lives, there it is."

The Vitruvian Duck recently commented, in typically penetrating fashion, that a house relates to its owners as the body relates to the soul. On that drive home from my friend's house, it finally came home to me what that means: we really do live in our houses, and not just within the volume of our bodies. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that "Something is said to be by 'presence' in all the things that fall under its gaze, as all the things in a house are said to be 'present' to someone, who nonetheless does not exist by his substance in every part of the house" (ST 1.8.3 corp).

The vast size of the cosmos is often trotted out as evidence that man is insignificant. "See how small a territory is ours, one of the smaller planets circling one of the smaller stars in one of the smaller galaxies! So much for man as the center of the universe."

But this misses the point exactly: Because we are men and not machines, animals and not rocks, we truly live in the cosmos. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that, in a manner of speaking, when the soul sees the heavens, it lives and exists in the heavens (ST 1.8.4, ad 6). Man is the dweller universal.

Blog slog

2008-04-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry to be so quiet recently, but I have been a bit under the weather. With any luck, the blog will be up and running again over the weekend.

Also, I have been slow to post because I just can't think of a good mnemonic image for the last figure of speech: Anapodoton, pronounced "anna-poh-DOH-ton", the omission of an element gramatically (but not always logically) implied by the sentence.

I only wrote two lines in my last post: "I don't" and "Do you?" Both were attempts at anapodoton, but once again the Vitriuvian Duck has been more attentive than I: he caught that the lines I imported from a news story were themselves shot through with figuration. I see more clearly now than ever that figures of speech cannot be tidily separated out from regular speech as though the figures constitute "poetry" and regular speech "prose". All speech is shaped, and to the extent that it is shaped well it takes on one of the recognized "figures."

So now I want to post about other things, but I may have to pass for the moment on a mnemonic picture. ("On a pod dot on"? What the heck would a "doton" be?)

Infinite Regress

2008-04-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

Today's nugget from Moose News:

"The groom and cousin were arrested for allegedly resisting arrest."

Let's run that again:

"The groom and cousin were arrested for allegedly resisting arrest."

Do you?

I don't.

Meet my friend. Meet Anna Fora.

2008-04-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

As the Vitruvian Duck caught, last post's figure of speech was the Anaphora: beginning a series of sentences or clauses with the same words. Once again, while I tried to use the figure more than once, it seemed to take over of its own accord and shape one paragraph through and through:

A home is first of all for human life. A home is a practical place of everyday living and an emotional place of comfort. A home is eventually the repository of a human history, a sacrament of memory. A home deserves sweat and late nights for its design.

A home is not about the architect--not unless the architect is designing his own home.

But the Duck pointed out something further in his comment:

That second paragraph: "A home is not about..." is an anaphora to the first paragraph (when viewed as a part of a greater whole). But as viewed as whole unto itself, it's not...It was the fact that 'home' was used at the beginning AND the end of the clause that was bugging me.

This is a good example of how an author writes and does not write. I was certainly trying to shape my prose, and I certainly felt that I had achieved a nice effect, but until the Duck pointed it out I had not even noticed that I began and ended that last line with the same word, or how the second paragraph acts as an anaphora to the first. Those effects are there and are certainly "intended" in some sense, but in what sense? I make my living by interpreting ancient texts, and so the Duck's point fascinates me: I cannot honestly say that beginning and ending that sentence with the same word was actually "on my mind," but I have to accept his observation as an accurate interpretation of how I achieved the effect. The author's "intention"--what the author would say about his own text--may not always be the gold standard.

But I am too tired to unscrew the inscrutable. Tonight anyway.

Anaphora was a fun figure to play with. It was like each sentence was a path that began the same way but might or might not go to the same place; it might actually go in the opposite direction by the end. Mnemonically, I picture in my mind four paths of letters, each beginning with a large letter "A"; each "A" is on a fur rug, and the path stretches back behind it into a dense, mysterious wood. If "four A" does not phonetically cue me, "On a fur A" should recall the needed term.

The Houseownerbot

2008-04-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my real estate agent sent me a floor plan of the house I am buying long distance. It is nearly double the size of what I rent now, features a big yard that doubles as a ski slope in the winter, and sports a nifty office room set up to look like a log cabin on the inside. All in all, I am excited about it.

But I did notice in the diagram that the bedrooms, which take up the entire southern side of the building, have no windows facing south. The main living area, comprising the upstairs living room, dining room, and kitchen, is split down the middle by the staircase and its protective walls; besides chopping up what could have been a charming family space, it cuts off most of the light from the living room. Why would anyone do that?

The history of architecture is not really my forte, but two possibilities come to mind. First, the designer may have thought it looked neat to have a staircase in the middle of his blue print, and so in his mind it was actually an artistic flair; he was expressing himself as an artist. Second, the designer may have found that, due to constraints of structure and manufacture--for example, that it is a modular home--it took a minimum of thought and effort to put the stairs in the middle. Either way, it is about the architect, whether it be his self-expression or his ease.

The owner of the house is not exactly forgotten, but he has become an abstraction. He is not Joe or Jane or even Man, but something still more abstract: a functionary, a device created to occupy houses, a mere occasion for the architect's endeavor--a houseownerbot, if you will.

I object. A home is first of all for human life. A home is a practical place of everyday living and an emotional place of comfort. A home is eventually the repository of a human history, a sacrament of memory. A home deserves sweat and late nights for its design.

A home is not about the architect--not unless the architect is designing his own home.

The sanest approach to home--and towns and offices, for that matter--is the Pattern Language. Although parts of the book are available online, I just ordered my own copy at last. I just recently discovered the works of Sarah Susanka, inspired by the same ideas, but I haven't had time to read much yet. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said; and the unexamined living space is not worth living in.

So, I wonder how I can turn that staircase into an asset? The Pattern for stairs assumes that the main living area is at the bottom of the stairs, so I have not seen any ideas for how to handle a staircase leading down from a main area.

Find that Figure

2008-04-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

Just to remind you all (an exceedingly hopeful way to describe the readership of this blog): your task, should you choose to accept it, is to locate in each day's post the sentence containing that day's figure of speech. After an appropriate delay, I will post the answer along with a definition of the figure and the picture I use to remember it.

When the figure was Accumulatio, the task proved almost impossible because I use that figure all the time anyway. Who was to guess that it was anything unusual in these pages? So last time I made a special effort to use the figure again and again, to make it more conspicuous.

The figure? "Anadiplosis", pronounced "AHN-ah-dip-PLOH-sis": ending one sentence or clause and beginning the next sentence or clause with the same thing.

I used the figure a number of times, but one paragraph in particular was almost wholly shaped by it:

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

This was a hard one to find a picture for, but here goes. I spy in my mind's eye two hills with a valley in between them. There is a house on top of each hill, and two houses side by side in the valley. Each of the houses on the hill tops has an enormous blue ribbon on it, but neither house in the valley has a ribbon. Why does on a hill win? Because "On a dip loses."

Oh, that hurt. Wow. But it's a good hurt.

Notice in this picture that the sequence ribbon-dip is followed by dip-ribbon, so that the end of the first is the same as the beginning of the second. Not tidy, but it's the best I can do!

For clarity, let me note that this post does not contain the figure of today. The "figure of today" post will come this evening. I hope.

Improving my figure

2008-04-01T17:34:00.000-07:00

My brain is so tired that grammar is a strain, much less rhetoric. To make matters worse, I spent the entire day away from my computer and the Internet, so I do not know what Ray has been up to out there.

But I have set myself an exercise regiment, so I had to find some way to write a blog entry.

I revved up the computer in the evening and turned on the Internet to find some foolishness. Foolishness is most of what I found, in fact. Why Brad Pitt must be in the headlines every day this year escapes me, but the rest of the "news" was so predictable as to defy its name: Obama is trying win over Clinton supporters (you don't say), while Clinton is portraying herself as better than Obama (the gall!); Jay Leno has said something offensive (so turn off the TV already), and the speaker of the house thinks that we should go ahead and have the presidential primaries (yawn).

The one headline that caught my attention: "Home defibrillators do not increase survival." I was shocked at the mere thought of a defibrillator in my home; my home is a monkey farm, and some of the monkeys who can operate machinery would not know if I were fibrillated or not. But on second thought, this bit was already "olds" before it was "news": essentially, it said, what could have been news did not in fact happen. You might have thought you needed a defibrillator--the thought had never occurred to me--but relax, because you don't.

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

Perhaps the most sensible definition of "news" would be information that might cause me to change my plans for the near or distant future. The rest is titillation.

Accumulatio

2008-03-31T18:04:00.001-07:00

Since no one managed (or bothered) to guess yesterday's figure, it was "Accumulatio": saying the same thing in other words, repetition with variation, redundant meaning in novel clothing....

You get the idea.

My picture of Accumulatio is a small pile of dollar bills next to a larger pile of quarters next to an even larger pile of pennies; each pile is the same amount of money, but in different currency. Behind the three piles stands a magician in the traditional cone hat to remind me that another name for Accumulatio is Congeries (like "conjuries").

I forgot to mention that I hope to provide an imaginary picture for each of the figures of speech as we go along. That way I can use the loci mnemonic to remember all the figure and their names.

Persecution

2008-03-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

Ever since I began my crusade against the insidious Ray Moose, I have had no peace. His spies call my telephone, pretending to offer me a credit card, and say that they "just need to verify your address."

Sure. As though I'd tell them where I live.

I traveled far away to give a lecture in a town where no one should have known me, and mounted on the wall in the lecture hall was--I am not making this up--a Moose head!

It watched me the whole time. And listened.

Just tonight I had a close call in the sanctuary of my own home. My wife prepared a special dessert to cap off a week of celebrating Easter, a sumptuous something to bring joy to the heart and sugar to the blood. I anticipated the moment all day, until she told me what it was:

Chocolate Moose.

I was stunned; I was speechless; my mouth sagged open; I was breathless, I said not a word. In my own home!

Fortunately my wife hastened to show me her recipe book, and I saw my mistake. I am a typical American and ignorant of foreign words. The name of the dish is clearly chocolate mouse, however the French pronounce it.

"Figures" of Speech

2008-03-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

As you may (or may not) have noticed, the Ignoramus Blog is back, for a time at least. As random as the forthcoming posts may seem, I am on a mission.

One of my favorite stimuli to writing is Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase. The thought has long possessed me of working through all 60 figures of speech Quinn lists as a kind of exercise, a rhetorical workout.

This idea gained strength recently when I realized how deeply Ray Moose hates words. That's right: he hates them. As much as he can turn them to his advantage, as much as words can make lies as well as truth, the word itself is abominable to the Moose man. He would much rather we look at pictures.

Animals live in a world of sound, smell, and picture, steeped in the sensory. That's all to the good, but that's all there is to it. Humans, without leaving behind the sounds, the smells, and the pictures, go on to interpret their sensations by putting them into words. While a picture may be "worth a thousand words" in terms of conveying details, a picture with no word to give context isn't worth a damn. A wordless animal does not get anything from pictures.

We often hear this put as a limitation or even a defect: There is no such thing as a neutral description; no author is strictly speaking objective; every text has its bias. But suchlike laments read language backward: it is the glory of man that he rises above the sensory to interpret the sheer physical datum by his words.

In a sentence, then: words are from thought, while pictures are from the eyeball.

Ray would rather we did not think. He would like us all at the level of animals, sheep to be specific, steeped in sensation and oblivious to ideas. Ideas are the most powerful force in the cosmos, and Ray would just as soon have all the power in his own hands. So he bombards us with sensations--mega sounds, artificial flavors, manufactured smells, special effects--and most especially with pictures, since for us sight is the strongest and most arresting of the senses.

Ray's greatest victory has been our transition from a print-based culture to a TV-based culture. Whereas Americans once found all their knowledge in books and newspapers and pamphlets, now everything, absolutely everything, is conveyed by way of the TV. And the TV trains the brain to let go thought and submit to the endlessly stimulating pictures. At the end of the day you just can't eradicate words from human culture, since even TVs require words to govern their making, but you have to give Ray credit for having succeeded beyond what anyone would ever have thought possible. If you want to ignore Ray Moose, start by turning off the TV.

So my self imposed rhetorical bootcamp is inherently anti-Moose. I intend to work through the glossary at the back of Quinn's book, using each figure of speech according to its definition.

I begin with the first entry, "Abusio," also known as "Catachresis." This is the substitution of one word for another seemingly in order to use a word contrary to its meaning. For example, in my last post I referred to "slothful speed." Sloth is associated with slowness, so my point about the speed--that it was made possible by a lazy inattention to detail--was made more strikingly by a seemingly inappropriate word choice. Similarly, I believe Shakespeare refers somewhere to "blind mouths."

In my imagination, Abusio is a doleful four-year-old child, covered with bruises and welts to show how harshly the poor word has been treated; his clothes are oversized, indicating that he has been put in place of some other word that perhaps was more natural for this situation; he holds in his hands a copy of the Catechism, to remind me that his other name is "Catachresis."

Such an extreme figure for our first exercise! But Abusio highlights the true nature of the rhetorical figure: it is appropriately inappropriate. Once you have submitted to a language and its conventions, once you have learned where the boundaries are, then you can master it, and transgress for effect.

Your challenge: Can you spot the rhetorical figure of the day in each day's post? Let me know in the combox if you spot it.

Polluting the News

2008-03-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

Most of the time I'm OK with the fact that Ray Moose runs the mass media. Then, once in a while, silliness exceeds all bounds of excess and I compulsively...blog.

It started innocently enough. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, a Vatican official, gave an interview with L'Osservatore Romano in which he was asked what "new" sins we have to deal with today. He commented on the effects of globalization, and remarked that the capital sins have found new ways to manifest themselves; for example, gluttony comes out as pollution.

But with slothful speed, "capital" sins became "deadly" sins, which then morphed into "mortal" sins, and the headline read: "Pollution and drugs are on a list of new mortal sins produced by the Vatican." Now is that a list produced by the Vatican of new mortal sins, or is it a list of "new mortal sins produced by the Vatican"?

As the situation deteriorated, reporters tried their hand at theology by introducing a distinction between "mortal" and "deadly", as in the the following "news" article:

There are now seven “mortal” sins added by the Vatican to be placed alongside the traditional seven deadly sins: envy, pride, gluttony, lust, hate, greed, sloth, and envy. These new sins are deemed to be more apparent in today’s world.

By the time it trickled through to treehugger.com, a bold-printed headline blared "The Vatican Declares Pollution One of the Most Deadly Modern Sins," and the article sanguinely remarked that

“Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments" might soon be incorporated in the Ten Commandments.

Depressing, I know. But perhaps there is a homiletic chance in all the hullabaloo. The idea that greed and gluttony now show themselves in corporate waste dumping is certainly right; pollution is a sin. But in a talk given in 1989, John Paul II turned the whole idea on its head. Sin, he argued, is a pollution:

I am sure that, like almost all young people of today, you are worried about air and sea pollution, and that the problem of ecology upsets you. You are shocked by the misuse made of the earth's products and the progressive destruction of the environment. And you are right. One must take a coordinated and responsible action before our planet suffers irreversible damage.
But, dear young people, there exists also a pollution of ideas and morals which can lead to the destruction of man. The pollution is sin, from which lies are born.

Imagine the slogan potential: "Go Soul Green." "Stop Global Sinning." "An Inconvenient Truth." "Save the Earth."

Some of these slogans have already been taken, it occurs to me, but surely they apply more to the cause than to the effect. After all, that was Monsignor Girotti's point.

Library fines get serious.

2007-05-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Mark Johnson at Marquette University just topped my record. I've been bad in the past. I've let a dozen books from the children's section go a month over due because they were all mixed in with the landslide that was my living room bookcase, and the bill was big.

But I didn't pay $390,190.72.

What gets me is that the Marquette Law Library tacked on a $15 processing fee for good measure. That's chutzpa.

Today's lost beauty:

Dunt: "A hard blow."

The Silence of the Ignoramus

2007-05-13T18:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have fallen behind on the blogging, but I am sick. It is hard to think interesting thoughts when I am sick.

Today's Lost Beauty:

Clyte: "This useful word is employed in Scotland to express the confusion of an orator who, for want of a word or an idea, suddenly stops in his speech; and sits down. 'I could na find words to finish my speech,' said a Glasgow Bailie, so I clyted.'"

The Wiley Pirate and the DMV

2007-05-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

In case you have not looked at the title of my blog, I am an ignoramus. For example, I have never read that mandatory children’s classic, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

But ignorance is not bliss, so I have begun to educate myself. My standard approach to learning is reading to my children: if I want to know about Wyoming, I check out all the Wyoming books in the kids’ section at the library and we have a family Wyoming readathon; if I want to know more about snakes, the same goes. My method has worked particularly well in this case, since what I want to know more about is itself a children’s book.

Even if you have not read Treasure Island—and if you have not, then why are you reading blogs instead of the classics you are missing?—even if you have not read the book, I say, you have felt its influence. Why does X always mark the spot? Because of Treasure Island. Why do pirates have parrots? Because of Treasure Island. And why, to get to the point, do the most villainous pirates have only one leg or only one hand?

Because of Long John Silver, the iconic good bad man of Stevenson’s tale. And yes, that is where the fast food chain got its name.

With my newfound cultural savvitude, I detected the LJS reference in today’s newspaper immediately: “Armless driver faces prison after police pursuit”. The driver in question is a one-legged man with no arms whose penchant for high-speed driving has landed him in prison twice before; his first arrest came when he kicked a police officer after an accident.

That’s right: the one-legged man kicked an officer.

Wiley, our hero’s highly appropriate last name, is a living parody of Long John Silver. Back in the day, if you wanted to flout the law but had a personal disability such as a severed leg or missing eyeball, you just got yourself a parrot and a boat and off you went to terrorize the Caribbean. Now if you want to go pirating, your best bet is ripping CDs; should you do something that actually feels exciting or dangerous, the DMV will not renew your license.

Today's Lost Beauty:

Scathy: "mischievous; applied to a wild, excited, or frantic person."

A one-line post of my own.

2007-05-11T18:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, I am officially irked.

2007-05-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across an interesting blog corpse today, The Vocabulary Reclamation Project. It looks like the author was engaged in some serious anti-Moose polemic, even daring to quote that thundering line from C.S. Lewis, "What men have forgotten how to say, they will soon forget to think."

I wonder what happened to the VRP. I wonder if the Moose caught wind of it.

Were the blog active, I would recommend Lost Beauties of the English Language, by Charles Mackay. Admittedly, it is a book of obsolete words, but they are words that should not have been lost and, I think, could many of them be reintroduced.

Today's Lost Beauty:

"Ninny-watch: The expectation of a fool; a vain, over-sanguine hope."

Liturgy for folks like me

2007-05-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

Most parishioners associate "rubrics" with a Rube Goldberg machine, and most parishes have dropped Gregorian Chant in favor of The Adore Ray Moose Hymnal, but the disedified masses have found a voice in the Curt Jester's liturgical jab .

And I'm adding this gratuitous sentence so that I will not be guilty of the infamous one-line blog post.

The Ignorfreakinramus is back.

2007-05-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

As you can see, the Ignoramus Blog has revived with the approach of summer vacation. Although I have not seen Ray Moose himself on campus in quite some time, his influence is manifest in the papers students turn in, and at this time of year they turn in quite a lot of them.

It can be overwhelming: comma splices, split infinitives, dangling modifiers—the whole range. Ray’s strategy for undermining our country begins with an attack on our literacy.

But so far no student has used the one Ray Moose linguistic innovation that I actually like: freakin’.

Such a fascinating word! Sometimes it is quite banal, serving only to emphasize the speaker’s strong emotion about the word it modifies: “Dude, he was wearing a freakin’ bandana!” Please. At other times it seems to signify that the object described is what it is in an unusually intense way: “He was driving a freakin’ hot rod!”, that is, his vehicle embodied the idea of “hot rod” to an unusual degree.

But the word’s meaning is not what makes “freakin’” interesting. What sets it apart is its grammatical placement: American slang usage prefers that “freakin’” be inserted within the word or phrase it modifies. We’re all familiar with “co” and “pre” and so on, which attach at the beginning off words like “coworker” and “presale”; we know about “ful” and “ment”, which attach at the end of words like “helpful” and “wonderment”; but one can only marvel at “Dude, he’s a megalofreakinmaniac!”, or “That is absofreakinlutely hysterical!” The possibilities are endless: “technofreakinlogical”, “superfreakinstitious”, “Vatican freakin’ II”.

I have to give the Moose credit where credit is due. He has invented a new grammatical form unparalleled in any language I know. And as a bonus, Ray Moose has provided us with the longest non-technical word in the English language:

“Antidisestablishmenfreakintarianism.”

Estrogen, estrogen everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

2007-05-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

According to an article in the Scientific American, fish in some American rivers have enough estrogen in them to cause breast cancer cells to grow in laboratory dishes. No one knows exactly what estrogen causing chemicals the fish have imbibed, the article says,

But their effects on the fish themselves were clear: the gender of nine of the fish could not be determined. "Increased estrogenic active substances in the water are changing males so that they are indistinguishable from females," Volz says. "There are eggs in male gonads as well as males are secreting a yolk sac protein. Males aren't supposed to be making egg stuff."

Despite the fact that there is a pharmacy on every streetcorner in my county, I have never seen a fish shop at a pharmacy. And although I have browsed the fish section at Walmart and talked with my friends who own fish, I have never seen an estrogen supplement marketed for goldfish or guppies. Where are these fish getting megadoses of estrogen?

The article explains:

All of the hormone replacement products that women use go down the drain, along with birth control pills, antibacterial soaps, and many of the plastics we use, like Bisphenol A, have such effects.

Translation: women consume hormones to prevent conception or to ease the effects of menopause, these hormones are excreted into the toilet, the toilet is flushed into the sewer, and the sewer treatment system does not get rid of the hormones before the sewer water is dumped into the rivers to cause an identity crisis for young male fish.

The article goes on to express concern about the effect this may be having on populations who depend on rivers for their drinking water. Who knows but that it may cause breast cancer in women or--well, bad effects in men? That is indeed a cause for concern!

But the Scientific American avoids the big question. The estrogen zapping our fish is what manages to get past our sewage treatment system; the estrogen hitting our sewage treatment system is the extra stuff not absorbed by the bodies of American women. If this leftover of a leftover is transmogrifying our fish, what is all that estrogen doing to American women?

Medical ignoramus that I am, I don't know the answer. But I do know why the Scientific American avoids suggesting the possibility of a hint of a guess at the answer.

Today's American culture is built on the foundation of the birth control pill. Our economy presupposes a large population of working women, houses are designed for families with two kids or fewer, cars are designed for small families, movies are about single people or married people with two kids (one boy and one girl), and the American dream is to retire young, that is, when the second child has reached maturity, and move to Florida and play golf. To suggest that birth control has bad effects on women involves more than fighting a large and lucrative industry with lots of lobbying power. To speak against contraception means fighting to redefine the way America lives and dreams.

The task is intimidating, even when you have the research sitting on your desk.

Christmas Meme

2006-12-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

I've been memed by Sapientiae Amator. OK, here goes:

1. Hot Chocolate or apple cider?

Hot chocolate, I suppose, but I also really enjoy orange chocolate, that delightful drink wherein orange juice is substituted for the milk (and sugar is left out). Reminds me of the “chocolate orange” one can buy at Trader Joe’s.

2. Turkey or Ham?

Ham. I’m from Arkansas, where the state mascot is a pig, and I suppose that has corrupted me. I like most greasy foods.

3. Do you get a fake or a real Christmas tree?

We had a small fake one for a while, but we don’t have one at the moment. I’m thinking about waiting until the day after Christmas to buy another fake. Eventually my hope is to have a real but potted tree that I can move in and out of the house.

4. Decorations on the outside of your house?

No, but my neighbor has an enormous plastic bubble with a giant Santa’s sleigh that moves round and round. I figure he has enough in his yard for the two of us.

5. Do you prefer a white Christmas?

I grew up with cold but brown Christmas’s and did not experience the “White Christmas” until adult years. In the end, I suppose I prefer the snowy weather because it encourages everyone to stay inside and pursue leisurely conversation over a hot cup of something.

6. Do you enjoy singing Christmas carols?

Yes. I’m working at teaching my children to sing, but the progress is slow.

7. Favorite Christmas carol?

Well, define “carol”. Is there a difference between “carol” and “hymn” when it comes to Christmas music? Taking “carol” to be folksy but not exclusive of religious subjects, I suppose my favorite is “O Holy Night”. If we can include non-folksy stuff and if Advent music counts, then my favorite by far is Rorate Coeli.

8. How do you feel about Christmas movies?

I like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol”. All the others I have seen are entirely devoid of the religious element that makes Christmas tick—and even those two are on the border in some ways. In general, my family does not watch movies more than once or twice a year.

9. Favorite Christmas movie?

One of the two mentioned above.

10. Stockings before or after presents?

Before, or whenever. I don’t see the point of them otherwise. Manifestly the idea of having gifts hidden in stockings is so that children can discover them, not so that they can be fitted into some kind of pre-arranged schedule.

11. Do you open a present or presents on Christmas Eve, or wait until Christmas day?

Always Christmas Day. And the next day. And the next. Hopefully we can reach the point of having gifts for all twelve days.

12. Go to someone else's house?

This is our first year entirely at home—ask me later what I thought of it!

13. Do you read the Nativity Story? If so when?

We read it in various forms again and again throughout the Advent season. It’s a kind of catechesis for our children.

14. Do you go to Mass on Christmas Eve, at midnight, or Christmas morning?

It varies depending on the ages of the children.

15. What is your favorite holiday smell?

I don’t have a strong sense of smell, so I suspect that this particular avenue of holiday appreciation is less intense for me than for other people. That said, everything with (a) nutmeg, (b) cinnamon, or (c) fresh evergreen is a winner.

Taking Jesus' Promises Literally

2006-12-06T06:56:00.000-08:00

This just in from the question box:

“The reason I believe the Catholic church is the true one because it's most biblical, and it seems to follow the New Testament (excluding Revelations) most literally. However, if we take John 6 literally to the point of cannibalism, then what about Jn 14:12, and other promises made in the gospels that we will do greater things than Jesus, heal the sick, the blind, deaf, and lame, cast out demons, and other things? If the apostles did all these things in Acts, then why don't they happen today?”

Let's take it piece by piece.

“The reason I believe the Catholic church is the true one is because it’s most biblical....” Let’s stop there for a moment. The idea that you everybody should read the Bible and then decide which Church is the true one doesn’t really cash out when you think about it. What was everybody supposed to do before the printing press came along and made it possible for everyone have their own copy of the Bible? For 1500 years after Christ ascended into heaven, even a major cathedral would not likely have all the books of the Bible, because they were big, hand-made, expensive things; your average Joe in the pew would not have owned even a single book of the Bible, even if he were lucky enough to be able to read! The system Jesus had in mind for how we find his church could not have been that we were supposed to read the Bible and then decide—that just would not have been practical. As a matter of fact, it goes the other way around: the way Joe Pew would know whether X, Y or Z “gospel” is in fact a book of the Bible would be to ask at Church! You find the books of the Bible by looking to your Church instead of finding the Church by looking to your Bible.

“...and it seems to follow the New Testament (excluding Revelation) most literally.” To make sure we’re clear about what this means, let’s define some terms. Our words signify certain things by convention: for example, the word “ox” signifies a beast of the field, and that is the literal meaning of the word. When St. Paul says “You shall not muzzle the ox when it is treading out the grain” (1Cor 9:9), the literal meaning of “ox” is a beast of the field. But when you think about that ox, you realize that Paul is using the ox as a symbol of something else, namely an apostle preaching, and that is the figurative meaning of “ox”. So here’s the definition: the literal meaning of Scripture is whatever the words signify by convention, while the figurative (non-literal) meaning is what you get when the thing signified by the words is itself taken as a sign of something else. Here’s another example: Jesus says in John 15:1, “I am the true vine.” The literal meaning of that phrase would be that Jesus is a creeping plant with big leaves that bears grapes, because that’s what you get when you just take the conventional meanings of the words. But then you realize that Jesus understands that creeping plant with big leaves as a sign of something else, namely as a source of life for the branches. Then you see that what he means is that Jesus is a source of life for us the way a vine is the source of life for its branches. That is the figurative meaning, because that’s what you get when you take the thing signified by the words (“vine”) and understand that thing itself as a sign of something else.

Now, it is true that certain kinds of Protestants take literal interpretation as the best, and pride themselves on interpreting Scripture more literally than anyone else, as though it’s this big contest and whoever can manage to interpret Scripture most literally wins. This gives us Catholics an edge when we talk with them because in fact the passages we interpret differently we usually do interpret literally. But it should be clear if you think about it for a moment that interpreting Scripture literally is not really the goal. For example, surely we shouldn’t take “I am the true vine” literally! It just isn’t true that we should take Scripture literally everywhere.

So what is the goal? Well, here’s the way I understand it: the reason some Christians are proud of interpreting Scripture literally is that they know they aren’t using some kind of figurative interpretation as an escape hatch when the going gets rough. They are willing to take whatever Scripture tells them and just swallow it, no matter how bitter it may taste. If you take everything in Scripture figuratively instead of literally, then you can pretty much interpret Scripture to mean WHATEVER YOU WANT. These Protestants are proud, and rightly so, that they are obedient to Scripture instead of making Scripture say what they want to hear. So I think what they are really driving at is that you should take Scripture literally unless Scripture itself seems to indicate that you should interpret it figuratively. In other words, the goal is to take literal passages literally and figurative passages figuratively, but always in obedience to Scripture.

OK, so how do you decide when a passage should be taken figuratively? I think there are three factors: 1) convention, 2) context, and 3) possibility. Sometimes a particular phrase has a figurative meaning that everyone understands because it is conventional, like “I tried to get that job, but I STRUCK OUT.” Nobody will think that you lashed out at your interviewer in physical violence, because everyone in America knows that “I struck out” is a figurative expression taken from baseball, and we all know the meaning of it. Sometimes you have to judge based on context: for example, somebody not quite so familiar with the phrase “I struck out” would still be able to guess what you mean by it just because you brought it up in connection with your unsuccessful attempt to get a job. Finally, sometimes your first clue that something should not be taken literally is that the literal meaning is something impossible, like when Jesus says “I am the true vine.” He simply is NOT a creeping plant with big leaves, so he MUST mean something else!

Here’s an example from real life. My brother and I met with our families at the big aquarium in Chicago for a day of fun. After some six hours or so of moving from display to display, eating lunch, watching the dolphin show, etc., my brother turned to me and said, “Well, I’m a pumpkin.” Here’s what happened in my mind in less than two flicks of a bat’s eyelash: first, that statement failed the possibility test immediately and thoroughly. My brother is NOT a pumpkin, so I was sure that he did not mean that statement to be taken literally. I racked my memory for something about pumpkins that would fit the context, and bingo! Cinderella’s coach turned into a pumpkin when it was time to go! My brother’s word “pumpkin” signified a large orange vegetable, but that large orange vegetable was itself a sign of something that needs to go home. He meant that he needed to go home. So you see the factors of possibility and context at play there. Over time I have heard other people use the same phrase, and eventually I realized that it is a common phrase for people to use in that situation: had I been more hip, I would have understood my brother’s figurative statement immediately just by knowing its conventional meaning—that’s the convention factor coming in.

The tricky part is the possibility factor. What you think is possible is not always what someone else thinks is possible. We all agree that my brother cannot be a pumpkin, but what if he had turned to me and said, “I’m an alcoholic”? Maybe I think that’s not possible, but maybe I’m just fooling myself because I don’t want to face the truth. If I don’t want to face up to the possibility that my brother is an alcoholic, then I could use a figurative interpretation of his statement as an escape hatch. On the other hand, if he isn’t an alcoholic, then a literal interpretation would be a big insult to him. It takes prudence and sensitivity to context to navigate the situation, but the goal is clearly to interpret the statement the way that he meant it—the goal is not just to take it literally no matter what. [By the way, my brother has no problems with alcohol. I just took that as an example of something somebody could say.]

OK, let’s look at the particular passage you were asking about, John 14:12-13: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” That last statement about “Whatever you ask in my name” is obviously limited in some ways: for example, you could not ask that only your own prayers and nobody else’s be answered—God would not do THAT for you, because that would contradict the promise itself! And obviously God will not give you anything that you want for wicked purposes, because then the Father would not be “glorified in the Son.” So there are limits. The two key questions about this promise are 1) what are the limits and 2) why does Jesus make a statement that sounds unlimited (“Whatever”) when in fact there are limits? I’m not too worried about the answer to question #1, because the passage itself does not spell out clearly what the limits are. Opinions could be different. But I think I can answer question #2: Jesus uses a word like “whatever” because there is NO LIMIT on the SIZE of what God will give. You don’t need to worry about budget limits or lack of resources or power. It’s like when the company president hands you the company credit card and says, “OK, get the job done and buy whatever you need—you want it, you got it.” He obviously doesn’t mean that you can buy anything your heart desires, and so there are actually limits, but no purchase is too great for getting this job done.

In particular, Jesus specifies that the size of the miracles he worked during his own earthly ministry do not set a cap on what you can ask for. You don’t need to think to yourself, “Well gee, Jesus never moved a mountain, so I probably shouldn’t even think of praying for that.” Nope—sky’s the limit. Ask away.

If you look at the definitions I gave above, I think you would say that I am interpreting Jesus’ statement literally. I am just running with the conventional meaning of the words and taking what I get, but it seems to me that what he is literally saying is something limited in one respect and unlimited in another.

Here’s where the last part of your question comes in: “If the apostles did all these things in Acts, then why don't they happen today?” I should note from the outset that Jesus does not go into this kind of detail—how long, where, on what occasions, etc.—so at this point I am not interpreting his words anymore. I am speculating about his plans based on what has happened. First off, I would say that the Church needed more miracles right at first to get off the ground, but once the Church was going she needed fewer supernatural confirmations to convince people. She could point to things like the miracle of her own growth—from 120 disciples in the upper room at Pentecost to most of the known world within a couple of generations and without a single sword drawn. Once people were not in danger of being killed for becoming Christian, it was easier to persuade people to do it. For any number of reasons, miracles were more necessary early on than they were later. Secondly, I would say that miracles DO happen today, but they are almost impossible to verify if you aren’t personally on the scene. The Church requires a certain number of certified miracles before she will canonize a new saint, and she is canonizing them faster than ever now, so SOMETHING is going on out there. But it is generally very difficult to be certain about these things second-hand. You can examine evidence for miracles and decide for yourself about specific ones—I have a handful that convince me.

All blogged down....

2006-09-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

Classes have begun! All my courses are new this year, so every class preparation is a new preparation. I spend an entire day to prepare for two classes, and often more.

The bad news is, I have not been able to blog much lately.

The good news is, I have not seen Ray Moose or his ilk around campus. To tell the truth, there has not been much to blog about: I spend all my time reading good books and talking to intelligent faculty and students.

OK, I did read something by Nestorius recently. But he was not ignorant--he just couldn't distinguish between the individual and the instantiated nature, that's all.

Ray Moose and the breakdown of the family

2006-08-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

This is a bit old, but the Hound of Ulster brought my attention to one of the saddest pieces of ignorance I have seen in a long time. Here's the LINK.

The seeds of this debacle were sown back in the Moose-man's heyday, when he used to claim that "Ray" was short for his native-American name, "Rainbow Moose"--not that he was really native-American. It was an identity he adopted to accomplish certain goals. I think I may have mentioned before the hippy cult he led at the time.

Anyway, the results of Ray's experiments were less than happiness and flowers, although few caught up in the 60's Moose Movement would admit that today.

Pounding it home with the grammar hammer

2006-08-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

I cannot guarantee that today’s subject really has to do with Ray Moose. It’s not his style, really. But this particular bit of grammatical ignorance has bugged me more and more as time goes by, not least because it has taken absolutely everyone in. To my knowledge, I am the only person on the planet who understands this issue.

Take this sentence: “Hopefully we’ll see you at Christmas.” According to a consensus of all school marms and grammatical gurus, that sentence is incorrect. Because “hopefully” is an adverb, it should modify and adjective or a verb; there’s no adjective here, so it has to modify the verb; but the sentence does not really mean that we will see you at Christmas in a hopeful manner. Quod absurdum est. Therefore the sentence is ungrammatical.

That, at least, is what everyone says but me. Here is the truth of the matter: in that example, “hopefully” modifies neither adjective nor verb but the very saying of the sentence. It means that “we’ll see you at Christmas” is said in a hopeful manner.

My, you should have heard the howls of laughter that greeted me the first time I propounded this simple insight. A den of grammatical jackals, it was!

There can be no question that English speakers could use a word that way if we wanted it to. The issue is whether we have a convention of using adverbs that way. Were there not some strange blockage in the brain caused by fluoride in the water that prevents people from applying logic to grammar, I think the example of “hopefully” above would prove the case all by itself: there is this convention because that is the obvious meaning of the sentence. Given the present situation (and thank goodness my house is on a well), the only remedy is to multiply such examples until doubt becomes not simply unreasonable but unpardonable.

Here goes example number one: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Raise your hand if you think the sentence means, “I don’t give a damn in a frank manner.” Anyone? Any takers? No?

OK, then consider the possibility that the sentence means that “I don’t give a damn” is spoken in a frank manner. And remember that this construction is exactly parallel to the example of “hopefully” given above.

The Kirby Vacuum guy

2006-08-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

A Moose operative appeared at my door this week, disguised as a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman. Maybe it was a random visit, but maybe my blog has begun to touch a nerve. Anyway, I had never seen one of the “super-vacs” at work before, so my curiosity led me unwittingly to admit the agent into my house.

What followed was outRaygous. He buzzed his machine over my couch cushions and showed me the resulting crud on a special display filter in the Kirby vac. “Would you sit on this?”, he asked, brandishing the filthy filter. No, of course not, I said. He pointed dramatically to the couch: “Sitting on that is the same thing!”

I pointed out to him that if it were really the same thing, then all that crud would come off onto my pants whenever I sat down or onto the floor whenever I shifted the cushions, and then the crud wouldn’t have been there for his machine to pick up.

He was undeterred. Whipping out yet another of the 141 attachments that come with the Kirby, he vacuumed off my ceiling fan and showed me the crud on his special display filter. “Do you ever run that fan?”, he asked. Yes, of course I do, I said. He waved a finger ominously in the air: “Every time you turn the fan on, all that dust goes into the air and into your lungs!”

Of course, if all that dust went into the air every time I turn the fan on, then how would all that dust be there for his vacuum to pick up? But you can’t expect too much from one of Ray Moose’s men.

The one “demonstration” that really floored me was what he did on the carpets. He ran the Kirby vacuum cleaner over our recently-vacuumed floor for just two seconds and showed me a quarter-inch pile of crud on his display filter; he repeated this several times on different parts of the carpet. I’ve read about this kind of thing, but had never seen it done: the Kirby vacuum guy will come to your house, run your expensive vacuum over the floor, and then show you how the Kirby can still pull up crud that your machine missed. In fact, a vacuum salesman for some other brand did precisely that at my sister-in-law’s house and left her very upset about how badly she was cleaning her carpets.

Very convincing. What a super-vac! Almost he persuaded me to part with a great deal of money to buy the wondrous machine….

But after he left, I got curious. He had left a few of his display filters sitting around, so I jammed one into my own cheapie vacuum cleaner and ran it for a couple of seconds over the carpet that he had shampooed with his Kirby. I looked at the filter and—by golly, a quarter-inch pile of crud! I tried it again on the exact same place on the carpet and—same results!

In fact, you can take any vacuum cleaner and perform the same “demonstration”. Let your friend vacuum her floor with her machine, then take yours and show her that your machine can pick up all this crud that hers left behind! Just don’t tell her that hers can also pick up crud that yours leaves behind. As long as she doesn’t think to try the experiment in reverse, you might can sell her your fifty-dollar cheapie-vac for the “bargain” price of $500.

You see, carpets are just so gross that they always have piles of crud under them. Even if your friend has a wonder-vac, it will leave piles of crud in the carpet because that’s the way carpets are. The real explanation of the Kirby demonstration is not that Kirbys are so great, but that carpets are so bad.

I wonder if the Kirby man himself knows that his display is bogus.

Probably not. After all, he’s a disciple of Ray Moose. I almost hope he comes back….

The Bible According to Ray, part 3

2006-07-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

I must apologize for taking so long about this, but I have hesitated before a difficulty. The next words in Ray’s theorem, “but not in matters of science or history”, are ambiguous: they can mean either (a) something stupid or (b) something bad. Should I be charitable and present only the stupid meaning? Or should I be thorough and raise the specter of the evil?

After due consideration, I think it would be confusing to my reader if I did not comment on every possible meaning, and confusion is always in favor of the Moose.

The Bad Meaning. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. If you take “in matters of science and history” as referring to passages in Scripture that talk about science and history—that’s taking the words “materially” for those of you who speak Aristotle—then we can put this little syllogism together:

Scripture is inerrant in matters of faith (and morals);
Scripture is not inerrant in matters of science and history;
Therefore, no matters of science or history are matters of faith.

In other words, let’s say that all the matters of faith are in this room. This is the room of things where Scripture is inerrant. All the matters of science and history are outside the room, out there where Scripture is not inerrant. Faith never has to do with science or history.

So, for example, Jesus’ resurrection is not a “historical” event, and that the world has not been around for an infinite length of time is not in any way related to “science”.

To put it more generally, Scripture is inerrant about the “squishy” subjects like our interior convictions or how we should behave, but not inerrant about the “hard” subjects like history or science. If it is subject to objective verification, then it is not one of the things that Scripture has authority about.

Some folks do think this way. Some are intimidated by the idea that modern discoveries in history or science could disprove the Catholic faith, and find it more comfortable to separate the faith out into its own little, inaccessible box. Others think that all religions arise from an interior human impulse and have no objective truth about them. Either way, it’s handy to bifurcate the brain into the “religious” side and the “factual” side.

Hard to argue with the bad folks. Once a man has performed this intellectual lobotomy on himself, there is not much to say beyond “please” and “thank you”.

The Stupid Meaning. If you take the words “in matters of science and history” as referring not to particular passages but to the reason why Scripture is or isn’t inerrant—taking the words “formally” for you Aristotle buffs—then there is no need to dial 134. [That’s the number for the Inquisition, by the way, 134—only call if there is a true emergency.]

In other words, it may well be that Scripture speaks authoritatively about something historical, but the reason Scripture has authority in that case is because the historical event in question is related to faith. Scripture does not speak authoritatively about historical events considered as historical events, but only insofar as they are matters of faith.

Confused? Perfect.

The bottom line is that we are right back at the absurdity I talked about in Part I. If you want to know whether we should believe what Scripture says about historical event X, then you need to have a list of all the things we are supposed to believe; you check the list, and if historical event X is on that list then you should believe Scripture. In other words, you have to know whether you should believe it in order to find out whether you should believe it.

As vicious as this circle may be, the folks who believe it are not usually vicious. They’re more like the wimpy guy in a bad neighborhood who keeps a pit bull in the yard because he’s scared of criminals. Otherwise nice people buy into this nasty circle not because they are nasty but because they are scared.

Big, bad scientists or even meaner historians could come along at any second and disprove something Scripture says! No need to worry: if somebody proves that X is not historical, we can just delete that from our list of “matters of faith” and then we’re not committed to saying that Scripture is right about it. After all, no scientist or historian can say what should be on our list of things to believe. What would they appeal to?

Scripture?

Other folks are scared in a better way, but still scared. They see that there are some BIG problems with saying that Scripture is completely inerrant, and they are afraid that if they say Scripture is inerrant then people will be scandalized by the problems and go away. They don’t want to be unfaithful to the Church or a scandal to the faithful, so they get as close as they can to affirming the inerrancy of Scripture without either compromising their intellectual integrity or causing scandal to others.

I have a lotta lotta sympathy for this last group. They are genuinely good people. This is just the Ignoramus Blog and no place for hashing out the subtle difficulties they see in Scripture, but I hope this series of posts has at least shown that they should not buy into Ray Moose’s disastrous theorem.

The Moose solution is to take all authority away from Scripture. To say that Scripture is authoritative in a given place, we have to have our list of “matters of faith”, but Scripture itself cannot tell us what to put on that list. It has no real authority, ultimately. And that is not what this last, good group of scholars wants.

Please, gang—I know I haven’t offered a fix for all your problems, but I beg you, for the sake of everything you are really trying to achieve:

IGNORE RAY MOOSE!

The Bible According to Ray, part 2

2006-07-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

After a great deal of thought, I finally conceded that Ray might be onto something when he says that Scripture is inerrant in faith AND morals.

At first I wanted to say that the distinction is absurd. We saw in the last post that every area Scripture is inerrant is ipso facto talking about a matter of faith, so how can Ray separate out another area of biblical inerrancy? If we take “morals” to mean “what we must believe about morality”, which is a subheading of “what we must believe”, which is the same thing as the area called “faith”, then Ray’s distinction is just nonsense.

But then I saw a way out. It could be that “faith” refers to what we must believe, while “morals” refers to what we must do. Hang with me, here. It could be that “morals” does not refer to Scripture saying “the moral thing to do is X” but to Scripture saying “Do X.” The first case would be something we must believe, while the second case would be something we must do, and Scripture could have authority with regard to both.

Of course, we do tend to associate the word “inerrant” with propositions that are either true or false. If someone said something erroneous, our first thought is that he said something false; if someone is said to be inerrant, our first thought is that he says things that are true. And if “Scripture is inerrant” refers only to statements that are true or false, then that kinda slams the door on my “way out”.

Two things incline me to believe that my “way out” is the right way to go. First, the idea of “error” is broad enough to include bad advice. If someone says “the moral thing to do is X” when the moral thing to do is not-X, we can say that he “erred” in the broader sense of going in the wrong direction. He “steered me wrong”, as the saying goes.

Second, Ray Moose just isn’t smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time. It would take a genius. He’s bound to be right once in a while. And as we’ll see in the upcoming posts, I just can’t find anywhere else where he even might be right on this issue, so I figure this must be it!

The Bible According to Ray

2006-07-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

The most popular position on the authority of Scripture is that Scripture has no authority at all. It is a human document like other human documents, and like other human documents it is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

The second-most popular position on the authority of Scripture is that Scripture is one-hundred-percent authoritative. Everything that Scripture says must be believed: it is a matter of faith.

Both of these positions are self-consistent, rational positions that a thoughtful person can hold. They can’t both be true, but they are both logical.

However, the third-most popular position about the authority of Scripture emerges from the offices of Ray Moose and is disseminated through his accomplices, both the knowing ones and the unknowing. This third position enjoys neither the proud rationality of the first nor the thoroughgoing consistency of the second, but muddles along in typical Moose fashion. Here it is:

Scripture is inerrant in matters of faith and moral, but not in science or history.

Now that doesn’t sound so unreasonable, you say—it actually has a rather moderate ring to it.

That, my friend, is the hallmark of Ray’s work. He always manages to sound moderate so that his opponents will always sound extreme. Only when you unpack the meaning of his words do you realize that he has sacrificed real intelligibility for apparent moderation.

So let’s look at this Moosian theory piece by piece, starting with the phrase, “Scripture is inerrant.” When we say that Scripture is “inerrant”, we do not mean that we have checked all through it and found no mistakes; in that sense, lots of people write “inerrant” texts, and lots of school-children turn back “inerrant” quizzes. No, what we mean is that Scripture has authority so that we have to believe what it says. The second-most popular position mentioned above is that Scripture is entirely inerrant, meaning that it is all authoritative: we have to believe by faith everything that Scripture says.

The Moosian theory tries to limit Scripture’s clout by saying that it has authority when it speaks about some things but not when it speaks about others. This is all very well: my geography teacher has a kind of authority when he speaks about geography but not when he speaks about mathematics. Perhaps Scripture has authority when it speaks about politics but not when it speaks about astronomy.

But let’s look closely at the first phrase Ray uses to limit Scripture’s authority: “Scripture is inerrant in matters of faith....” In this context, “matter” means the subject matter, i.e., what the text is about. So “matters of faith” means subjects that have to do with what we believe by faith.

Now we can put together the meaning of “Scripture is inerrant” with the meaning of “in matters of faith.” Here it goes:

What Scripture says must be believed by faith when it talks about subjects that have to do with what we believe by faith.

WARNING: DO NOT READ THE PRECEDING SENTENCE TOO MANY TIMES, OR YOU WILL GET DIZZY AND FALL DOWN. IT IS A CIRCLE—A VICIOUS ONE.

To find out whether a biblical statement is one of the things we must believe you have to find out whether it is talking about the things we must believe; to find out whether it is talking about the things we must believe you have to know all the things we must believe and check to see if this biblical statement is talking about those things; to know all the things we must believe you have to know whether this biblical statement is one of the things we must believe!

The Moosian theory on Scripture is like the man who says, “You can always know whether I am telling the truth, and here’s how: I always tell the truth when I’m talking about one of the subjects about which I tell the truth.” How helpful is that?

Confused? Let’s look at it from another angle. Suppose there is a statement in Scripture that we have to believe by faith. The very fact that we have to believe this statement by faith tells you that it’s talking about a subject that has to do with what we believe by faith. So any statement in Scripture that we have to believe by faith is a statement relating to matters of faith. If Ray tells us that Scripture has authority in matters of faith, he hasn’t told us a darn thing.

Coming up next: Ray Moose makes a VALID distinction!

Moose Preserves

2006-07-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

A lunchtime mystery: the label on this red glop says, “Strawberry Preserves”, but the small print claims, “No preservatives added.”

Come again?

OK, Ray, here’s the scoop. Sugar is a preservative. Your little game is exposed, right here on the Ignoramus Blog.

SPANK!

KIDNAPPED - Conclusion

2006-07-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

By now, I fervently hope that my reader is convinced that Ray Moose is in fact behind the mind-bogglingly silly article on Aquinas’s “five ways”. After all, a magazine’s reputation is at stake: the “James Kidd” who penned that piece would make a fine associate editor for This Crock Magazine, but is an embarrassment for the good name of Catholic Answers.

But more than that, a man’s life is at stake. What has been done with the real James Kidd?

Who can say? Karl Keating, if you are reading this—for heaven’s sake, DO something!

KIDDNAPPED, part 4

2006-07-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

There. The worst is done. We have reviewed all the silliest moments in Ray’s ridiculous satire on Thomas Aquinas, and have exposed them to—well, not to the brilliant light of truth exactly, but to the 40-watt bulb of common knowledge. The unpleasant work is over.

In this post, I want to highlight what is actually a legitimate question from Ray Moose:

But the problem is with Thomas’s next statement: "We call this being God." As we will see with the rest of the five ways, this is an enormous logical leap. While it is correct that the A-B-C string of movers proves that there must be a First Mover, how do we know that it is identical to the First Mover of X-Y-Z? Couldn’t there be as many First Movers as there are lines of movers? How do we know that there is only one Unmoved Mover? And even if there is only one, how do we know that it still exists or that it is to be identified as God? The answers to these questions are not found in the first way itself.

I remember this question coming up the first time I read Aquinas. The solution depends on having some experience with the way Aquinas proceeds. He states his question in very precise terms, and then answers only the question he has stated, leaving any further points one might want to know about for a later article. So the question to ask is, What question does St. Thomas actually answer in the Summa Theologica, Question 1, Article 3?

A clue can be found in his little summa for real beginners, the Compendium of Theology. In the third chapter of that little book, he gives the same argument from motion that we know as the “first way”. It is not until chapter fifteen that he shows that “God” is not a species predicated of many individuals.

In other words, the “first way”—or any of the five ways—shows that “God” exists in the same way that archeological digs can show that “man” existed long ago. The archeological dig does not show us which man exists, or that only one man existed, but that “man”—the species “man”—existed. Similarly, the five ways demonstrate that “God” exists, but for all we know “God” could be the name of a species: there could be any number of individual “Gods” within the species “God”.

One of my professors at the ITI used to emphasize this point by refusing to capitalize “god” in his translation of the five ways. The question St. Thomas asks in the Summa, Question 1, Article 3 is “Does god exist?”; only later do we find out that God alone is god, and there can be no other.

In point of fact, this is true of every argument for God’s existence. Whether it be the ontological argument or the cosmological argument, the appeal to reason or the appeal to beauty, the argument from morality or the argument from history—all of them conclude initially to the existence of the divine. But atheism is never just the rejection of the God of Jacob, but the rejection of any divine element in the cosmos. If there is even a small deity, even a god of the meadow, atheism fails.

Perhaps for cultural reasons, people who lose their faith in the God of Jacob rarely lapse into polytheism: they “convert” to atheism. Conversely, people who forsake atheism rarely take to worshipping a local deity: most leap over the logical hurdles to embrace the God of Christianity.

So for apologetical purposes, the fact that arguments for God’s existence conclude only to the existence of “god” is not a problem. It is not a problem with Descartes’ argument (which has problems of its own), and it is not a problem with Aquinas’s arguments.

OK, credit where credit is due: good question Ray—even though I know you didn’t mean to provoke an inquiry into truth!

KIDDNAPPED: an excursus to parts 2 and 3

2006-07-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

As we have seen, the Moose claims that Aquinas's five ways would not work as demonstrations because they all begin from sense experience. More than that, he claims that Aquinas himself shared the skepticism of modern philosophy with regard to sense experience, and so did not even intend the five ways to be taken as demonstrations. Ignorant though I am, and unable to reckon with the deep things of philosophy, even I can see through that claim for the anachronistic--um, anachronism that it is.

In this post I want to develop an aside to this line of thought. It occurs to me that Ray's skepticism about the senses is not only historically wrong as applied to Aquinas, but more or less irrelevant.

Suppose we assume that Ray Moose is right, and that Descartes's evil deceiver could be tricking us into believing that we are sensing things when in fact we are not. For the purposes of argument, let's assume that the evil deceiver is tricking us, all the time. Everything that I think is real life is in fact a dream or mirage conjured up by this deceiver. What happens if we re-boot the five ways on this operating system?

The 1st Way. Strange though it may sound, my dreams do have some reality about them: they are real dreams, at least. And the images in my dreams do move. An image of a bird that is presented as over there is then presented as over here, and certain actions in my dream are presented as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, my dream has certain potentialities that are gradually realized as actualities: the dream is potentially this way, and then later is actually this way.

Well, folks, that is motion in the Aristotelian sense of the word. And the existence of motion in this sense is all the premise that Aquinas needs to get the first way off the ground!

The 2nd Way. On the supposition of the evil deciever--let's just call him the ED--the ED causes certain things to happen in my mind, and then these things in my mind cause certain reactions in me. By golly, we have a chain of efficient causes! And that's all the premise Aquinas needs to get the second way going.

The 3rd Way. My dreams are very ephemeral things. Sometimes I have an image of one thing, sometimes of another, and there is no necessity that any one image will continue to have even that shadowy sort of being that mental images have. The images in my mind are contingent beings.

How about that? I know that contingent beings exist, and that is the starting point for the third way! We're really on a roll here, despite ED's best efforts.

The 4th Way. My dreams have only the being that mental beings have, which is very slight indeed. I, on the other hand, am self-evidently a substance--that which "stands under" (substare) accidents like mental beings. So I have more goodness and nobility than do my dreams.

On the other hand, ED is obviously a higher and more powerful creature than I am, because he is able to create an entire virtual world for me to enjoy (or suffer) and can even place that world into my mind. I can't know anything at all outside my mind! So despite his proclivity for deceiving disembodied minds like me, Ed's nature is really nobler than mine, and thus has more goodness as a nature.

Bingo! We have a gradation of goodness and nobility, the very premise we needed to rev up the fourth way.

The 5th Way. The fifth way is the one that Ed's tricks really do comprimise. Aquinas's argument demands that we have real knowledge of real things that really act for real ends. But by an odd coincidence, we don't need the fifth way because we have already assumed its conclusion as true! Because we assumed that Ed is working me over, we already know that the things I "perceive" in the "world" are directed by an intelligent agent who caused them. It may sound odd to conclude that Ed is that which "all call God", but I think Aquinas would actually be comfortable with that conclusion at this stage of the game.

What do I mean by "this stage of the game"? More on that in the next post.

And the conclusion is.... Ray Moose and his buddy Ed can throw the works at us, and Thomas Aquinas's five ways are affected not at all. Every one of them concludes--unless you count the fifth way, in which case Ed supplies the truth of the conclusion for us.

In other words, Ray Moose's objection about starting from sense perception is not only historically ignorant, but just--well, irrelevant.

And the best thing to do with the irrelevant is: IGNORE IT. Maybe it will go away.

KIDDNAPPED, part 3

2006-07-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

In my last post I talked about the silliest moment in Ray’s whole piece, but it is so closely tied to the second silliest moment that I really should talk about that too. At the end of the article, having argued that Aquinas did not intend his five ways to be demonstrations, Ray concludes:

Fine, you may say, but surely Thomas has an actual proof of God somewhere. Surely he didn’t leave us defenseless against the atheists and agnostics of the world. Surely he had something to say to the nonbelievers of his own day.
Well, yes and no. Thomas did not write any short treatise on the existence of God that one could whip out of one’s pocket when confronted by an atheist. Despite his voluminous writing, none of it is meant to stand alone. Nonetheless, we can piece together and paraphrase some of his other arguments in various writings to come up with a solid, irrefutable proof that not only does God exist, but he cannot not exist. That is, saying that God does not exist is a contradiction in terms. But that’s the subject of another article.

According to Ray Moose, when we “piece together and paraphrase” things Thomas says here and there, we come up with a solid proof that “not only does God exist, but he cannot not exist” because “saying that God does not exist is a contradiction in terms.” This argument, he maintains, is one that does not start from our experience of the world outside our minds, but from abstract concepts.

This kind of argument for God’s existence is called the “ontological argument”, while the argument that begins from what we sense in the world is called the “cosmological argument”. As you can see by clicking the link I just gave, Thomas Aquinas is listed among those who oppose the ontological argument.

It is odd that Ray does not mention this, because Aquinas deals with the kind of ontological argument Ray suggests just before he gives his own demonstrations for God’s existence, in Question 1, Article 1. In fact, he considers several arguments that do not begin from sense experience but from abstract ideas and conclude that “saying that God does not exist is a contradiction in terms.” The most famous of Aquinas’s predecessors to make this argument was St. Anselm of Laon, but others had come up with similar approaches. If I had to guess, I would say that Ray Moose is thinking of the argument for God’s existence given by Descartes in the Meditations, but the principle Aquinas uses to respond to St. Anselm would apply just as well to Descartes.

So we can’t scrap together the argument Ray wants from Thomas Aquinas’s writings; in fact, he is famous for opposing that kind of argument; in fact, he opposes it in the same Question of the Summa that Ray discusses in his article. It’s just—well, ignorant!

KIDDNAPPED, part 2

2006-07-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

How even to begin? How to approach such an admirable depth of ignorance, such a blinding Ray of intellectual darkness? But I have promised my readers, so in this post I will present the silliest moment in the Moose’s recent article:

Finally, the five ways—not proofs—take as a starting point the validity of our sense perception, which is enough to disqualify them as proofs per se. We believe the information we obtain by means of our five senses is accurate, despite occasional mistakes (mirages, dreams, etc.). But while we usually have no good reason to doubt the accuracy of our senses, at the end of the day we accept the information on faith. There is no way to prove beyond all possible doubt that our senses are true; there’s always the logical possibility that Descartes’s "evil deceiver" is making you think you’re reading this article right now when in fact you are not. The only true proofs we do have—for instance, that vertical angles are congruent—are mathematical ones that hold true even if our senses are giving us false information. Thus, any argument that assumes the validity of sense perception (including the five ways) is conditional upon the accuracy of our senses.
Thus, it seems that Aquinas did not intend the five ways to be logical, mathematical demonstrations but arguments for something that we already accept.

Moose ick to my ears. It is very, VERY tempting to get into the whole can-we-trust-our-senses debate, but I won’t do it. The question here is not whether we can trust our senses, but whether Thomas Aquinas believed that we could trust our senses. Nonetheless, I can’t help putting these two statements in parallel:

“There is no way to prove beyond all possible doubt that our senses are true; there’s always the logical possibility that Descartes’s 'evil deceiver' is making you think you’re reading this article right now when in fact you are not.”—Ray Moose “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”—Romans 1:20

OK, let’s review some history. Way back in the day, Plato taught that our knowledge of the world comes from ideas that are infused into us before we are born. His student Aristotle disagreed, and argued instead that all of our knowledge comes to us through our senses; before a man has sensed anything his mind is a “blank slate”, Aristotle said, a tabula rasa.

Now, ya can’t get very far in studying St. Thomas Aquinas without knowing that he is all over Aristotle—wrote commentaries on all his major works. So, for example, we find that Thomas will quote Aristotle on the whole tabula rasa thing. In fact, Thomas bought into Aristotle’s whole account of how we come to know things, including the notion that ALL of our knowledge comes to us through our SENSES: it’s right there in the Summa Theologica, and you can read about it in English HERE or in Latin HERE.

So to say that Aquinas couldn’t have meant the five ways as demonstrations because they start from sense knowledge is—well, ignorant! It’s typical Ray Moose, folks; the best thing to do is IGNORE HIM.

KIDDNAPPED

2006-07-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Catholic Answers are not ignorant. In fact, they specialize in a kind of direct, clear, facts-checked style of writing that is the bane of ignorance. I was hardly surprised, therefore, to find that Catholic Answers has come under attack by Ray Moose. What took me off guard was the bold insidiousness of the attack.

A recent issue of Catholic Answer's This Rock Magazine features an article supposedly by the associate editor, James Kidd. Kidd supposedly maintains that Thomas Aquinas did not intend his famous "five ways" as demonstrations of God's existence but as five arguments about or perspectives upon God's existence, and procedes to find fault with the arguments on various grounds such as that we might just all be dreaming instead living in the real world.

I hear my reader’s voice: "You've got to be Kidding." But I am not.

James Kidd clearly did not write this. James Kidd is a very pleasant and intelligent man whom I never met once in a sushi bar in San Diego, a man whose firm conviction that sushi bars really exist in San Diego makes it impossible that he would pen the above-mentioned article. Are you sitting down? Cause this may come as a shock.

James has been kidnapped by Ray Moose. The whole article is a forgery.

The claim is outlandish, I know, but I can back it up by showing just how ignorant the article is, and therefore how impossible it would be for James Kidd to have written the thing. This will be the burden, not only of this post, but of several posts to come. For the present, I will focus on one particularly silly claim, namely that we can see that St. Thomas did not intend the five ways to be taken as true demonstrations because

Thomas never refers to the five arguments as "proofs" in the modern sense of the term. In the preceding article (ST 1:2:2), he asks "whether it can be demonstrated that God exists" (Utrum Deum esse sit demonstrabile). The word demonstrabile has a precise meaning in Latin as a logical, geometrical proof. Thomas then proceeds to argue that the existence of God can be established by this kind of proof. But in article 3, Thomas suddenly abandons the language of hard proof in favor of a softer term: "Deum esse quinque viis probari potest," usually translated "The existence of God can be proved in five ways." But, unlike the narrow meaning of demonstrabile, the word probari has a wider meaning that does not necessitate a rigorous, irrefutable proof. A more accurate translation would be "The existence of God can be argued for in five ways."

Ray Moose—I refuse to call the author “James Kidd”—rarely states a flat falsehood; he prefers to say what is only partially true, and then capitalize on the part that isn’t. This is a case in point. Probare is a “wider” term than demonstrare, but it is not a “softer” term. There is no opposition here between “hard proof” and “soft argument”; in fact, every demonstrare is a probare, even if not every probare is a demonstrare. This is why an objector in Question 46, Article 2 of the Summa can say that demonstrative probari potest quod Deus sit causa effective mundi, “It can be demonstratively proven that God is the effective cause of the world.” You can probare something demonstrative.

OK, back to the question about God’s existence. Unknown to Ray, St. Thomas takes up several of the same arguments for God’s existence in another book, the Summa contra gentiles. In the last part of book 1, chapter 9, St. Thomas outlines what he will do in the following chapters, and there he indicates what will be his first task:

Inter ea vero quae de Deo secundum seipsum consideranda sunt, pramittendum est, quasi totius operis necessarium fundamentum, consideration qua demonstrator Deum esse.
“Among those things which are to be considered concerning God in Himself, one must set out first, as a sort of necessary foundation of the whole work, the consideration by which it is demonstrated that God exists.”

Keep in mind that this is his introduction to the SAME ARGUMENTS as those he uses in the Summa, and he says that by this consideration it is “demonstrated” (demonstratur) that God exists.

Then we find the same movement of thought as in the Summa: first he takes up the position that proving God’s existence is not necessary, either because it is self-evident (ch 10) or because we can only know it by faith (ch 12); then he procedes to his arguments for God’s existence (ch 13). We also find the same move in terminology:

Ostenso igitur quod non est vanum niti ad demonstrandum Deum esse, procedamus ad ponendum rationes quibus tam philosophi quam doctores Catholici Deum esse probaverunt.

“Having shown therefore that it is not useless to try to demonstrate that God exists, let us procede to set out the reasonings by which both the philosophers and the Catholic doctors have proven that God exists.”

Whoah! Did you see how he changed from demonstrare to probare?! Does this mean that, somewhere between the last line of chapter 9 and the first line of chapter 13 he has changed his mind and doesn’t really thing that his arguments will demonstrate God’s existence?

Turns out, the answer is “No.” After reviewing two versions of the argument from motion in gruesome detail, he notes two possible objections. With regard to the second, he says,

Secundum est, quod supponitur in praedictis demonstrationibus primum motum, scilicet corpus caeleste, esse motum ex se.

“The second [objection] is that it is supposed in the demonstrations just given that the first thing moved, namely the heavely body, is moved by itself.”

In referring to the arguments from motion, he still uses the word demonstratio, “demonstration.” In other words, he thinks that—as the objector from Question 46, Article 2 put it—he has demonstratively proven that God exists, with no opposition between the words demonstrate and prove.

You see then how silly and ignorant Ray’s argument is! But this only scratches the surface; in my next post, I will touch on the most ignorant argument of all….

Ignoramus Begins

2006-06-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

I am a very ignorant man.

Not too many years ago, I knew a great deal. I knew more than any politician, more than most philosophers, and a great deal more than many Catholic bishops. More to the point, I knew more than you.

All that changed when I went to the Institute for Trained Imbecility (ITI), followed by Mental Upheaval (MU). With each passing month I knew less and less. Where before I could read a book and discourse learnedly about the author’s errors, now I could do little more than tremble and gape.

Ignorance had overtaken me.

So deep is my ignorance and so dark is my mind that I was almost convinced I must be the most ignorant man on the earth. The question tormented me, and at length I went to the oracle at Delphi to ask, “Who is the most ignorant man on earth?” The prophetess inhaled the ecstatic vapors of the cave, swooned and cried out in her trance, and fell down in a slumber.

It was something of a letdown. Not to be defeated, my friend and I kicked her in the side and threw water on her face until she woke enough from her drugged stupor to mumble the words, “Ray Moose.”

Eureka! One man on the planet more ignorant than I, and his name is Ray Moose!

Months of feverish activity followed as I tried to find this mysterious, this elusive, this most stupid of men. At first I thought I had identified him as the local newspaper editor; then I was sure that he was a congressman from Massachusetts; after that, my investigation led me to the door of a famous actor in Los Angeles. Only slowly did the truth dawn on my benighted brain: Ray Moose is everywhere. He is the single most influential man in the United States. He owns newspaper chains, television stations, universities; his lackeys are in congress, on the city council, in Hollywood; he writes novels, publishes web pages, maintains an active blog.

He is also fond of hiking in Alaska, but that is neither here nor there.

This blog is dedicated to repelling the ever-growing power of this mysterious man whom nobody knows but everyone quotes. Perhaps if we refute him, he will go away. Perhaps if we throw the cold water of reason on his hot-tempered conclusions, people will ignore him.

If I can see through him, I who am the second most ignorant man on the planet, surely others can. So I beg you:

IGNORE RAY MOOSE!