Getting to the Point: philosophy

Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Sunday, September 20, 2015

At War With Oceania, Again

Without truth language would be a general fog of words above the silence; without truth it would collapse into an indistinct murmuring. It is truth that makes language clear and firm. The line separating the true from the false is the support that holds language back from falling. Truth is the scaffolding that gives language an independent foothold over against silence.

Language becomes a world of its own, as we have said already; and language now has not only a world behind it—the world of silence, but a world near at hand—the world of truth.

The word of truth must keep in rapport with silence, however, for without it truth would be too harsh and too hard. It would then seem as though there were only one single truth, since the austerity of the individual truth would suggest a denial of the inter-relatedness of all truth. The essential point about truth is that it all hangs together in an all-embracing context.

Max Picard, The World of Silence

Reflection – I’ve had this quote staring at me on my computer for quite awhile now. Of course, this used to be my normal way of blogging – provide a quote, discuss the quote, and I still like to do that on occasion.

This section of Picard’s book, which I have excerpted from time to time on the blog, is very much in his typical style—not so much a tight logical argument as a sort of meditative series of assertions around a subject—language, truth, and silence—to draw the reader into contemplation of these things. It is an unusual way of writing, but very effective.

A week or so ago I wrote a post wondering what the meaning of the word ‘gender’ was, in light of the breakdown of normative, anatomy-based male-female gender polarity. I don’t especially care to revisit that subject—one of the simple facts of my life is that, while I barely have time to maintain this blog, I really don’t have time to engage in long debates on-line around controversial and complex matters.

But this question of language and its relationship to truth is the deeper question yet, it seems to me, in this and in many other tough questions of our day. And this is why we cannot skip those hard philosophical matters in service of some apparent good done to others.

When language is no longer flowing from truth, when there is no longer a concern for the rigorous application of reason to the words we use to make sure that we are talking sense, then language not only ‘collapses’ as Picard says, but in the wreckage of its collapse the remaining shards of language only serve one purpose, and that is the acquisition and maintaining of power.

George Orwell had it all figured out: 'we have always been at war with Oceania'. So did Plato, in his controversies with the sophists. When words are no longer at the service of attaining truth, then they are only good for attaining power. It really is one thing or the other. Moral relativists who are uncomfortable with claims of absolute truth and our capacity to know the same have to confront that a world in which we cannot know the truth is a world where whoever has the loudest voice (and perhaps the money and guns to back it up) imposes their ‘truth’, or at least their agenda on the rest of us.

Power and its misuse as tyranny has always been with us. The mythical caveman with his club was not so much winning a debate with his inarticulate grunts, but rather taking a more direct approach with things.

I would argue that the whole project of civilization is the counterbalancing of power politics and dominance by the disciplined and ordered pursuit of truth. The speaking of ‘truth to power’ is not something invented in 1968, but is the key act which prevents our world from descending to the brutality of tyranny.

And that is why assaults on free speech on the one hand, and assaults on assaults on reason and disciplined debate on the other (the various schools of critical theory and deconstructionism that explicitly assert language to be naught but a tool of power and privilege) are a return to barbarism, and must be vigorously resisted.

That is what Pope Benedict meant when he talked about the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, and his words have become no less relevant in the ten years since he introduced that phrase.

I will get back to the second part of Picard’s quote tomorrow (sorry, Monday Psalter fans!), about silence as the counterbalance of truth-language. But for now, the main point I am making is that words matter, and it matters that our words make sense, and if we abandon the serious duties of truth and coherence we are opening a Pandora’s box of jackbooted nonsense—truth coming from the barrel of a gun and two plus two equals five because I say so and I have the power now, sucker. That kind of thing is what we have to fight against, and it is indeed more and more the way of our post-modern discourse.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

A Dried Up Hamburger

I usually write a ‘This Week in Madonna House’ wrap-up on Saturday. At this point in the summer, it gets hard to do this, as the weeks start to look pretty much like one another, and I could virtually get away with copying and pasting last week’s post. Work and hospitality, hospitality and work, rinse and repeat… such is life in high summer at MH.

Meanwhile, something cropped up on my Facebook page lately that I was unable to respond to in the narrow confines of an FB comment thread. Namely, this:

Now it first must be said that this quote is wholly fabricated – Pope Francis has never said these words. And that if someone is trying to make a larger point about being a good person without God, it’s probably not a good idea to start off by TELLING A LIE. Just a thought.

But what about the actual quote? Is there some validity to these words, anyhow? Leaving aside the parts of the quote that are so vague that they are impossible to respond to (the traditional notion of God… part, for example – what does that mean?), let’s focus in on the question of ‘can you be a good person and not believe in God.’ What is the Catholic answer to that.

The Catholic answer to that is that, no, it is not really possible to be a good person and not have a relationship to God. I would go further and say that it is impossible to be a good person, really, and not go to church (the ‘money’ thing is a total red herring here, since the Church does not absolutely command people to financially support it).

OK, shocking! Intolerant! Hateful! Right? I thought you were a nice guy, Fr. Denis! All that jazz. Well, I hope I’m a nice guy (more or less, on a good day), but it’s a question here of thinking clearly through things. What does it mean to be ‘good’? That is the question. When we say something is good, we mean that the thing is everything that thing should be. Goodness is possessing all the desirable qualities a thing should possess. A good hamburger is juicy, flavorful, just the right size, and so forth. A good dog is happy, loyal, affectionate, and obedient.

And a good human being is a human being who is everything a human being should be. And we are made by God, for God. We are made and our entire human vocation consists in having a relationship to the One who made us, who loves us, and who wants to fill us with Himself eternally in a free gift of love, the response to which gift of love is the obedience of faith—believing in Him and so doing what He asks of us.

And we believe that He has revealed what He wants of us in Jesus Christ. And that Jesus Christ has saved us and as an essential part of that work of salvation has established us as a ‘people’, a community that comes together to receive the grace of God in the sacraments and to embody the love of God by working to form a community of love among ourselves.

So we cannot be ‘a good person’ without possessing those necessary qualities—relationship with God, obedience to His plan, membership in the community of believers. Not because everyone who lacks those qualities is a depraved fiend lacking in any good quality (that is an utter non-sequitur) but simply because to lack those qualities is to be a hamburger full of flavour but dried up and crumbly. It is to lack what we need to be what we are supposed to be, the kind of ‘thing’ that we are.

Now where this FB meme does have a point (and I suspect it’s the point the author was going for) is that simply professing faith in God and simply showing up in church weekly does not suffice to make one a good person. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Part of the reason I knew immediately that Pope Francis never said these words is because they are a banal observation—everyone knows that lots of ‘religious’ people are total jerks. We who go to church regularly are actually the most aware of this, since we are rubbing shoulders with said jerks constantly! Furthermore, on any given day, we may be those very jerks.

And of course there are many atheists or unchurched theists who are kind, generous, truthful, and a host of other virtues, and thank God for that. But that too, while necessary, is not sufficient for 'goodness', because we are made by God, for God, and without God and our obedience to His plan for humanity (the Church) we are not being what we are made to be, and so we are not really good. And that is the Catholic answer to that particular cultural meme.

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Careful The Tale You Tell

Why is the Church so obsessed with abortion? Why does the Church talk incessantly about homosexuality? What is this creepy Catholic obsession with sex, sex, sex all the time? Why can’t the Church be concerned about real issues—poverty, for example—instead of always being all about the pelvic issues? Why, huh, why?

This is more and more the typical attitude of many towards the Church, or towards organized religion in general. And we are solemnly informed that it is for this reason primarily that the millennials are being alienated from organized religion and from Catholicism in particular. It is the fault of the Church and its laser-focussed obsession with sexual purity.

Except… that’s not true. Not remotely. Not at all. This article over at National Review does a great job showing this definitively. The Church, including all the various Christian denominations, gives billions of dollars every year to the alleviation of poverty throughout the world; the budgets for groups combatting the various ‘culture war’ issues is miniscule in comparison.

Meanwhile, I would echo the author of the article’s experience. I have been a Catholic my entire life, and I honestly think I could count on one hand the homilies I’ve heard that have even mentioned abortion, homosexuality, or any other point of sexual morality. I would add that the single source where we can see exactly what ‘the Vatican’ is saying is the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which reports pretty much every speech, every document, every word that comes out of Rome. While I haven’t done a scientific study of the matter, I would have to say that issues of sexual morality wouldn’t crack the top ten, or even the top twenty subjects the Church talks about all the time. My impression is that world peace and world economic justice are actually the two most urgent social issues Rome talks about, and has talked about for decades now.

All of this, while interesting in itself highlights something I have been aware of for some time. And that is the danger ‘the narrative’ poses to ‘the truth’. ‘Everyone knows’ that such and such is the case. But it turns out that it’s not the case. And yet even upon that being pointed out, everyone goes on knowing it, somehow. The Narrative trumps the facts, every time somehow.

We see this all over the place—the question of the Church’s obsession with sex is just one example which happens to matter quite a bit to me. (I do find it fairly odd and—what’s the word—oh yeah, ironic, that a culture saturated in erotic imagery and awash in x-rated material has the effrontery to accuse anyone else of being obsessed with sex).

But the question of narratives is an important one, one which we all need to be vigilant about. For Christians, we have to resist the narrative that the secular culture and those who are of that culture are utterly depraved and vile—the tendency to demonize the ‘other’.

The Sondheim musical Into the Woods, recently made into a so-so movie, has a lyric that goes “Careful the tale you tell; that is the spell.” Stories have a capacity to shape reality for us, a magical ability to both reveal and conceal. Stories, in fact, yield prejudice, and prejudice has a great power to render us blind and deaf to whatever contradicts it. ‘Liberals and stupid and evil… conservatives are stupid and evil… Muslims are all terrorists… Christians are all judgmental hypocrites… atheists are all arrogant jerks… black people are such and such, Mexicans are this and that, Jews are all xyz, Asians are all blah blah blah, white people are all that way’ and so on and so forth. Careful the tale you tell—all of reality shapes itself around that tale.

Meanwhile, life and the world and humanity are so much richer, so much more varied and complex, at once better and worse than the narratives allow for. Simplistic stories with heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators are all well and good for Hollywood or beach fiction, but serve us poorly in actually navigating the world as it is.

Personally, I try to limit the tale I tell to the One Story that I believe is absolutely true, because it is told by God and not men. And that of course is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Paschal Mystery in which everything God is embraces everything man is, in which God so utterly enters the human reality that He dies and goes to Hell, and in which the human reality is so penetrated by Divine life and love that the man Jesus rises from the dead and raises up all men and women who are joined to Him in faith. God becomes everything we are so that we can become, in Him, everything He is.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Everything else is just fairy tales told by an idiot, to be taken with large grains of salt at all times. The saying today is ‘check your privilege’, but I would like to start a new saying: ‘check your narrative’, and be vigilant always, welcome continually the facts that contradict the stories you tell yourself and others. Stories are for children (in light of the Gospel this is no problem, as we are all God’s children). We are adults and should live our life as adults, narrative-free if at all possible.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Kill The Brain, Kill The Zombie

Once upon a time, in a village in Eastern Europe, there arose an unusual problem. A curious disease afflicted many of the townspeople. It was mostly fatal (though not always), and its onset was signalled by the victim’s lapsing into a deathlike coma… As a result, the townspeople feared that several of their relatives had already been buried alive and that a similar fate might await them. How to overcome that uncertainty was their dilemma.

One group of people thought that the coffins be well stocked with water and food and that a small air vent be drilled into them, just in case one of the dead happened to be alive. This was expensive to do but seemed more than worth the trouble. A second group, however, came up with a less expensive and more efficient idea. Each coffin would have a twelve-inch stake affixed to the inside of the coffin lid, exactly at the level of the heart. Then, when the coffin was closed, all uncertainty would cease…

What is important to note is that different solutions were generated by different questions. The first solution was an answer to the question ‘How can we make sure that we do not bury people who are sill alive?’ The second was an answer to the question, ‘How can we make sure that everyone we bury is dead?’

Neil Postman, Technopoly

Reflection – I am reading this quite wonderful book right now, on the inherent tendency of technology to not simply augment and assist but to dominate and control our lives. The above passage is from a chapter that treats language itself as a sort of technology, and shows how the ability to control the language allows the controllers—the linguistic technocrats—to control both what questions gets asked, how they are framed, and hence what the outcome will be.

This passage, and the rather amusing parable of the villagers’ two approaches to a knotty problem, sheds much light on our contemporary society and its discourse around difficult social issues. How are the questions of our times framed? Who is doing the framing? Can we step back from the actual raw experience that generates difficult social debates and look at how the outcomes of these debates are formed not only by the experiences themselves but by the choices made by those in power—the entertainment-media complex in particular—as to how to frame the terms of those discussions?

For example, is abortion about the right of a woman to self-determination and autonomy, or is it about the protection of a vulnerable human life? So much of the utter inability of the ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ sides of this terrible issue to engage in meaningful conversation comes from the fact that they are in fact asking different questions and framing the issue in completely different ways.

Is ‘same-sex marriage’ about extending marriage rights and benefits to an hitherto excluded group or is it about changing the very definition of what marriage is? Completely different conversations emerge from how that question is framed. Physician assisted suicide—is it about how to relive suffering in a compassionate way, or is it about how to protect a vulnerable population (which eventually will include most of us) from being pressured to die?

Those who know me or have read this blog know where I take my stand on these issues, of course. I am Catholic, a loyal son of the Church, and I believe the Church’s teachings on these matters is from God, simply. But the question I raise here is not primarily about the issues themselves, but about the difficulty caused by how they are framed, and the lack of critical thinking that people bring to bear on this business of question-framing and parameter-setting.

Of course this leads to terrible problems in the very capacity of our society to discuss the issues themselves. People who are against abortion are framed as wanting to control women, people who are against ‘same sex marriage’ hate gay people, people who are opposed to physician assisted suicide lack compassion and want the sick and dying to suffer. All of those conclusions come, not from the issues themselves, not from the raw experience of the things themselves, but from the dominant narrative and how it has framed each of these issues.

I can hardly address all of these issues qua issues in a single blog post. Here, I simply wish to observe (without going into a full-bore ‘Wake up, sheeple!’ style rant) that we are being manipulated by the technocrats who control the language of our time, and that the framing of difficult and contentious issues is more often than not used, not so as to provide a careful and judicious exploration of the truth and falsehood of these matters, but to control the discussion, demonize and marginalize those on the ‘wrong side’ of the discussion, and cook the books to provide the outcome those technocrats have determined to be the right one.

And… is this really how a free, dignified, democratic and rational society should go about these things? Or is the twelve-inch stake being thrust, not so much in the mostly dead villager, but in the heart of our civil discourse and free society? Kill the brain, kill the zombie, you know--remove our ability to think clearly, and the undead remnants of Western Civilization will stop flailing around so annoyingly.

I'm just framing a question here, folks, just asking the question…