Monthly Archives: March 2012

Humily != Low Self-esteem

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John C. Wright comments on an article by somebody else about leading a spiritual formation class. The original poster has three times taught this class. Each time he has discussed besetting sins, and asked the class to list the sins they think most Christians face today. And the men in the class have listed internet porn, pride, lust, and anger; and all the women can come up for themselves is lack of self-esteem. Much discussion ensues.

It’s an interesting thing, but it’s not what I want to write about. (You can go look at it yourself.) What I want to write about is Wright’s response. He says this:

My comment: lack of self-esteem, sometimes called humility, is a feature and not a bug. Let a woman esteem herself for her virtue and chastity in her youth, for her maternal love and self-sacrifice after marriage, for her wisdom in her old age, but let her not esteem herself for the sake of self esteem, lest it swell into pride, which is a sin.

I think Wright is simply wrong here when he equates humility with lack of self-esteem. Humility isn’t thinking poorly of yourself. Rather, humility is a compound of two things: radical honesty, and self-forgetfulness. The truly humble person has come to terms with who he is relative to God. He sees himself clearly, both the good and the bad, and knows how much he must rely on God in all he does. But more than that, he thinks about God and about others more than he thinks about himself.*

But if the humble person knows he’s nothing in comparison with God’s majesty, love, and grace, he doesn’t sell himself short, either. He sees himself accurately. And while he knows that all his talents and skills are God-given, nevertheless he rejoices in the use of them.

Insofar as “lack of self-esteem” is a nagging, underlying feeling, a recurring worry that “I’m no good”, that “I have no value,” it may well be called a sin. Or, rather, giving into it may well be called a sin (feelings are not sins). God loves us, and He values us, even in our brokenness and poverty, and we are men and women made in His image and for whom he died. It’s a sin against truth, for if we are infinitely less than God, still we are his handiwork.

Humility is essential, say the saints; it’s a hallmark of true holiness. And it’s poorly understood, these days. But it’s something that you can rest in, not something that makes you feel bad.

I do agree with this part of Wright’s comment: “let her not esteem herself for the sake of self esteem”. There’s been a lot of hogwash talked about self-esteem, especially in the schools, over the last couple of decades; much has been done to build up the self-esteem of our children. But you don’t build up self-esteem by trying build-up self-esteem. It doesn’t work. At best you can build up a general feeling of self-love and entitlement with no basis in truth or accomplishment; which is to say, pride and greed. Real self-esteem needs to be based on real accomplishment, which requires work, and on a real sense of one’s own capacity. Telling everyone that they are equally capable is a pernicious lie.

* I am not describing myself here, more’s the pity.

From Dr. Boli’s History of the World

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Gosh, I love Dr. Boli. Here he talks about how governments arrange to stay in power:

The creation of public works on a massive scale was one of the expedients that occurred to early governments. Usually some problem could be found whose solution required organizing people into enormous groups of laborers, thus justifying the existence of the government that kept them organized. For example, there was the problem of disposing of dead kings. This problem alone could consume most of the resources of even a fairly advanced civilization. Since kings were divine, they could not simply be tossed in the garbage when they died; and since they were useless, they could not be recycled either. It was necessary to send the departed king off to his apotheosis with sufficient dignity that the other gods would not spend the rest of eternity mocking him. With any luck, the king might pass his entire reign supervising the construction of his own tomb, and then die just as it was completed, leaving his successor to begin an entirely new tomb, and keeping the government in business indefinitely.

Just What Is A Soul, Anyway?

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Ed Feser has a great post up about what it means to be human, and what it means to have a soul or be a soul. It’s precisely what I’ve been driving at with my discussions of natures and so forth, only Feser does it much better than I do.

I was especially interested by the last paragraph, which is to some extent tangential to the rest of the post:

I noted in a recent post that those beholden to scientism tend to reify abstractions — to abstract the mathematical structure of a concrete physical system and treat it as if it were the entirety of the system, or to abstract the neurobiological processes underlying human action and treat them as if they were the whole source of human action.

And this is true. Physics is the study of the physical world as measured. But when you’ve measured every aspect of, say, a steel girder, you don’t have a steel girder. You have enough information for a detailed CAD model of the girder (along with other physical variables), but not the girder itself. The subject of physics is the real world, but physics itself is an abstraction of reality, not reality itself.

7 Diversionary Tactics

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Taylor Marshall outlines seven “arguments” you might run into that aren’t arguments at all, but are really just attempts to change the subject and derail the discussion. You’ve probably run into all of these at one or another, and you certainly know the name of at least one, the famous ad hominem. See if you know the others.

Tai-Pan

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Tai-Pan is the next book in James Clavell’s “Asian Saga”; it concerns the founding of Hong Kong at the time of the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China. More particularly, it concerns Dirk Struan, the Tai-Pan, or “Supreme Leader”, or perhaps simply the “Big Shot”, of a firm of China traders called the “Noble House” because of its great wealth; indeed, Dirk Struan is not only Tai-Pan of the Noble House, but is known to one and all as The Tai-Pan, supreme among all of the traders.

Struan has big ideas; he has big enemies; he has big schemes, and so do they; he makes big fortunes and takes big losses, and he brings his Noble House through it all. That’s the plot in a nutshell.

What’s interesting about this book is the same thing that was interesting about Shogun and King Rat—the portrayal of a faraway and exotic land, with its exotic people. Like the Anjin-San and Peter Marlowe, Dirk Struan is a survivor, and does what he must to survive. Like them, he more or less goes native, changing his ways to those of the Chinese, the better to understand them, to work with them, and to make money from them. He has much more freedom than the Anjin-San or Marlowe, and his transformation is not as full as theirs, but he is every bit as trapped in his new land. And just as the Anjin-San is manipulated by Toranaga, so Struan, while thinking himself in charge, is manipulated in ways he cannot even begin to recognize by his Chinese hosts.

The book is loosely based on real history and real persons, with the names filed off and new names put on, just as Shogun is; Struan & Co is based on the firm of Jardine-Matheson, which exists to this day. One or the more interesting figures is the Chinese convert of a Lutheran missionary; he appears only once, and is mentioned only two or three times after that, but from the description he is the man who founded a rebellion called the “Tai-Ping Heavenly Kingdom” that gave the Qing emperor a run for his money.

If Tai-Pan is neither as memorable as Shogun, nor as harrowing as King Rat, it remains a fascinating book, and I enjoyed it. Cautions for sex (because, of course, Chinese sexual mores differ from European).

Sense Nonsense

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I saw a pointer from Julie the other day about a book called Sense Nonsense: Fundamental Propositions Not Too Good to Be True, Just Too Hard to Accept, by Francisco J. Garcia-Julve. It sounded interesting, so I picked up a copy. It’s mostly a collection of statements intended to make you think about things. Many of them are intended to be (or at least to appear) somewhat paradoxical. And some of them are more interesting than others.

For example, I think this one is kind of light-weight.

As a rule, people care most about what matters least and care least about what matters most.

An interesting statement, and quite possibly true for the general run of people. Read one way, it’s an invitation to look for things in my life that I care about a lot that don’t really matter; read another way, it’s an invitation to look down on all those folks who don’t care about the things I think are important. But is it profound?

On the other hand, I quite like this one:

Going into prayer should not mean starting to talk with God but starting to only talk with God; neither should starting work mean stopping prayer, but just changing the subject of prayer.

Now, if only I could live like that I’d be all set.

I’ve not read the whole book yet—it’s not the sort of book you just read through from cover to cover—so I don’t know whether I like it or not.

Father Brown

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I spent the last week or so re-reading all of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. For those who aren’t familiar, Father Brown is a small, round, mild, dull-looking priest—whose dull face hides keen powers of observation and a deep understanding of human nature, much of drawn from his many years of service in the confessional. (No, he doesn’t talk about his penitent’s confessions.)

The stories are good fun, if a little goofy, and most of them have a point; and it’s fun to revisit them once in a while.

Discovery

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I’m doing most of my reading on my iPad these days using the Kindle app. Given the volume of space in my house that’s taken up with books, it’s nice to know that when I bring a new book into the house, I’m not adding to the clutter.

I also have the Kindle app on my desktop machine, but have almost never used it. Today I started it up because my iPad is charging, and discovered two things that surprised me.

  • You can select and copy passages from the book to other apps, e.g., you can pull quotes to your blog without any typing. Woohoo!
  • You can report errors in the book text, as I suggested six months or so ago. Interestingly, I made that suggestion on 19 October 2011; the version of the Kindle app I’m using on my Mac is dated 23 October 2010. Apparently I was behind the curve.

It doesn’t appear that you can do either of these things on the iPad; but on the other hand, anything I highlight on the iPad I should be able to see on my desktop. So this is very interesting, and potentially quite useful.

Pictures of the Rally

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Here are some pictures of the rally. I have pictures of each of the speakers, but I generally didn’t catch their names (or recognize them, for that matter), so I’ll skip those. Instead, my goal was to try to capture the size of the crowd.

Here’s the crowd from the back, early in the rally. That’s L.A.’s City Hall in the background.

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Here’s another view from a point behind the speaker.

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A little later on I was listening to the speakers, and happened to turn around and see that some more people had gathered. This was taken from toward the front of the crowd.

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Finally, here’s one I took whilst trying to be artsy; but at the time I didn’t notice all of the other people with cameras in hand.

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If you ask your browser to show the images in their own window, they will be bigger.

Rally for Religious Freedom Redux

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So I went to the Rally for Religious Freedom at the Federal Building in Downtown L.A. this noon; I’ll have pictures later. I’m not particularly good at estimating the size of crowds, but I’d say that there were between two to three-hundred people there.

I’d never heard of any of the speakers, but they were all good; they didn’t rabble-rouse, and they didn’t demonize the opposition. The strongest note was a call to prayer. The speakers included a Catholic priest from Downey, a bishop from the “Charismatic Episcopal Church”, which despite my twenty years as an Anglican I don’t believe I’d ever heard of before, a priest from the Antiochean Orthodox Church, a Lutheran minister, a couple of Evangelical ministers, and a number of lay-people. The event was sponsored by the group “Survivors of Abortion”.

There was only one heckler, an angry man who walked past and told the clergy present in rather foul language that they should stay out of politics. He was just passing through, though, and the crowd did not respond in kind.

There was no media presence at all, so far as I could tell.