Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

Are You A Meat Machine?

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It’s a common statement among certain atheists, and certain kinds of philosophers, that we are all meat-machines: that everything we do is based on the atoms of our bodies moving according to deterministic laws. Hence we have no free will; and even human consciousness is an illusion.

That’s right. I, who have freely chosen to write this blog post and am aware of doing so, my sense of self is an illusion thrown off in some way by the activities of my fleshly brain. You, who have freely chosen to read this blog post, and who seem to think that you’re aware of doing so, your self-awareness is an illusion as well.

It’s really hard to argue with folks who can believe anything so obviously self-refuting, and I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I was exaggerating. Alas, I’m not; but Mike Flynn has a detailed explanation of both why the anti-free-will types are wrong and what free will really is. And he does so with such clarity and élan that you really should go take a look.

(One of the reasons I’ve not been blogging as much is because this is the kind of thing I’ve been spending my time studying—and I’m not at all sure I’m equal to the task of making it interesting. Mike Flynn, however, most definitely is.)

Mary and Eve

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Mary is often said to be the new Eve. The mother of all humanity, Eve chose the lesser over the greater, and sin and death came into the world. The Mother of God and of all Christians, Mary chose the greater over the lesser and life came into the world in the person of her son. Through one came damnation; through one came salvation. Why was there such a great difference? Both were filled with the grace of God; neither were subject to Original Sin. How is that one chose ill and the other chose well?

It occurred to me today that Eve’s sin was not sin as we experience it today. Thanks to Original Sin, our desires and appetites are disordered: we see the greater thing, but we desire, we hunger for, the lesser thing, and all too often we choose it, despite knowing full well that we shouldn’t. My wife’s Chocolate-Peanut butter-Butterscotch Rice Krispie treats are to die for–and that’s just what I’ll do if I keep eating them. I know better, but I want just another one, and all too often I eat it. And then another, and another….

But Eve was not subject to this kind of disordered appetite. Free from concupiscence, she was much better able than we are to choose what her reason told her was good. Unlike us, she had no desire to choose the lesser over the greater. So why did she fall?

And the answer is simple: she was misled. The serpent, father of lies, persuaded her that the lesser was the greater: that the fruit was both good for food, and would bring knowledge (both good things in and of themselves). It was with the full assent of her intellect, I imagine, that she chose to eat the fruit she had been commanded not to eat. The serpent had taught her, and now she knew “better”.

It was a lie; and in her innocence Eve had no experience of lies or of liars. It has been said that the knowledge of good and evil that the serpent promised was truly only the knowledge of evil, which is to say the knowledge of the serpent’s guile and its lies–and knowledge of her own failure. (Tradition records that Eve repented, and was not taken in again; the Eastern Orthodox churches revere her as a saint to this day.)

Eve was not stupid; she was not evil; but she was naive, and she believed a lie. Often, no doubt, we do the same. But not always–and hey, is that another Krispie Treat over there?

The Church tells us that Mary was born without Original Sin, that by the grace of Christ she was preserved from all stain of sin from the moment of her conception in her mother’s womb. Like Eve, then, her appetites were not at war with her intellect. Given that she knew the greater, she was not drawn by her desires to choose the lesser. And here we come to the big difference between Eve and Mary. Mary was young, and unstained; but she was not naive. Two-thousand years of Hebrew history came to a point in her. She knew the history of her forebears, and the consequences that came to Adam and Eve and to the tribes of Israel from choosing the lesser over the greater. She knew what sin was, not from inside, granted, but from outside. She knew what was due to God as her creator, and the natural consequences that came from spurning Him.

God put thousands of years of care into leading one branch of Adam and Eve’s descendants to the point where one human being, one young daughter of Eve, could be given the gift of holiness and would know enough to trust in Him and not squander it. All of human history comes down to that moment: when through Gabriel, God told Mary that she would bear a son; and choosing the greater part over the lesser part, she replied “Fiat voluntas tua: let it be done to me according to thy will.”

Our Lady, Mother of Virtue, pray for us.

Text vs. Video

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Eolake Stobblehouse has a post on text versus video and wonders why he finds text so much more compelling than video when video is so much more immediate. He does, but he’s not sure why. Me, I think I know why, and I posted the following as a comment to his post:

Reading is conceptual; watching video is sensual.

In classical philosophy, the mind is divided into the sense and the intellect. The one deals with sensory input, perceptions, and the images that result from them, and also the images we assemble for ourselves. The latter deals with abstract concepts, which are tied to images but are distinct from them. (You can’t think about triangles as a concept without imagining a triangle, but no specific triangle you can imagine perfectly captures what we mean by the concept of triangularity.)

Reading deals with concepts. Often it moves from concepts to images, but not always. Movies and TV are primarily sensual. They suggest concepts, but do not require them. And so in the order of meaning the written word can be much more focussed, more precise, more crystalline than any movie could possibly be.

In short, in movies the images are precise and the meaning is fuzzy; in writing the concepts are precise and the images are fuzzy. Take your pick.

Tactics vs. Mechanics

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John C. Wright has posted a fascinating discussion of how human society works. He points out that we tend to think of human society like a machine. If we want to have a society that runs smoothly, we analyze the problem as an engineer would and try to come up with a carefully engineered solution. And just as our science and technology continues, year by year, to improve, we expect our society to progress, to improve, to get better, as we work the bugs out.

The trouble is, it ain’t so, no how, because we aren’t dealing with impersonal laws of nature; we’re dealing with people. And when people realize that someone is trying to engineer their behavior, they tend to throw a spanner in the works.

Here’s a simple example from present day society. Ten or twenty years ago, someone observed that people tend not to make eye contact in elevators. Everyone gets in the elevator, and they all face the doors and don’t look at each other. Having read this, I kept my eyes open and observed that it was largely true, at least in the elevators I was in. But that was then. Now it’s become a commonplace that everyone behaves this way; and what do I see? Nowadays, people tend to stand with their backs to the walls of the elevator, facing in toward the center. Only those away from the walls face the door.

When people are told how they tend to behave, that makes them self-conscious and they start to behave differently.

A similar pattern occurs in war. It’s famously been said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; that’s why they are called the enemy. In any war, the tactics you adopt depend on what you think your enemy is likely to do. There’s no one proper tactic or set of tactics that will serve in all times and places. The engineering model simply doesn’t apply.

And that’s Wright’s point. The problem of having good government and a just society is much more like fighting a war—against venality, corruption, and tyranny, or what Wright terms the Leviathan problem—than it is like engineering a machine. It’s a thought well-worth contemplating.

On Knowing Thyself

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From my quote journal:

And, of course, it is difficult, almost intolerable, for us to live with the awareness of ourselves as other than wholly good, successful, happy, strong, and so on. That is why we find it so hard to live with ourselves in truth. We should prefer to live with someone we could admire more wholeheartedly. So we try to present ourselves in some way that we can admire. And so we deceive ourselves.

— Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes

On Having It All Together

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From my quote journal:

Christian maturity is not just a matter of pulling ourselves together and being very impressive characters who have got it all right, who know exactly what it means to be a Christian and who have the will-power and the staying power actually to live up to it.

— Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes

On Being the Right Shape

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Human love is soft, gauzy, shrouded in emotion. It shrinks from what is necessary. God’s love is hard, crystalline, and yet exactly right. It is like a case designed to hold and protect a delicate, oddly shaped piece of machinery. Human love is never quite the right shape—indeed, is sometimes grossly the wrong shape. To protect the device it must be padded, must shroud the hard edges and sharp points with foam and bubble wrap. But God’s love is always the right shape, precisely the right shape. The device fits exactly, every joint and extrusion supported perfectly by God’s hard and unyielding and crystalline love. Human love constrains and pinches, because only by pressure can its softness be made to fit. But God’s love allows us to be exactly what we are supposed to be.

Nothing New Under The Sun

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I’ve been studying Aristotle’s Physics with the aid of St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary, and today I began on Chapter 8 of Book II. Aristotle has asserted that nature acts for an end—that acorns are for the sake of oak trees, that teeth are for the sake of chewing, and so forth. Many modern scientists deny this kind of final causality on evolutionary grounds. Teeth aren’t really for the purpose of chewing; it just happened, evolutionarily, that creatures with teeth chewed better than those without. It just worked out that way. (I over-simplify, of course.)

In Chapter 8, Aristotle describes the argument of those who deny that nature acts for an end. Here’s what he has to say; it’s unusually straightforward. First, he points out that the rain doesn’t fall to make the corn grow:

…the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity…. What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this—in order that the crop might be spoiled—but that result followed.

Got that? He’s described the evaporation and condensation cycle. Rain falls because that’s simply what water does. That’s what he means by “necessity”: water simply works that way. The Greeks didn’t have the same notion of physical laws that we do, but that’s what he’s talking about.

Well, if that’s true of water, then why not of, say, teeth?

Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g., that our teeth should come up of necessity—the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down down the food—since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result…such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his “man-faced ox-progeny” did.

In other words, why shouldn’t teeth grow simply because that’s the way matter works (organized, as we now know, in terms of DNA molecules), the successful arrangements being retained and the unsuccessful perishing.

Aristotle just summarized the basic notion of natural selection, and used it as an argument against final causality, much as the so-called “New Athiests” do. He disagrees, of course; he’s raised the argument to strike it down. I’m quite curiously to see how he does it.

The Big Idea

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I’m currently reading The Court of the Air, a fantasy novel by Stephen Hunt, and have run into the following striking passage. Two of the characters have come across the bodies of refugees who died trying to escape from a brutal regime. The younger asks how this can happen. The elder says this:

“Why?” said Harry. “For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea—could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your class, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same—wouldn’t it be good if everyone was the same as me—if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.

“But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at the door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can see only wickedness in it—you and them—the them become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it’s always open season on them….

“Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind to small to hold more than a single truth.”

My emphasis.

There’s a lot of truth in what Harry says; the 20th Century was replete with examples, not to mention the French Revolution, which is more or less the pattern for the fictional country being discussed. But I’m especially struck by that last sentence. According to Harry, insistence on One Truth always leads to the same thing: repression, violence, and so forth. We must have open minds large enough to hold multiple truths.

The difficulty is that this notion is simply incoherent. Truth is. What is, is true. What is not, is not true. Two compatible truths are, in a sense, one truth; two incompatible truths cannot both be true. They can, however, both be false—and that’s what Harry’s ultimately arguing: we can’t know the truth. It sounds brave and bold enough, to say that our minds must be open wide enough to hold multiple truths, but it’s simply intellectual despair.

And then, is it necessary that an insistence on One Truth will always lead to repression, violence, and so forth? The Catholic Church claims to have the One Truth; but the Church doesn’t say, “if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.” In fact, the Church says, “If everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, the world would be in a real mess—because I’m a sinner.” The Church does say that if everyone lived in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Church…we’d have a paradise on earth? In fact, no. If everyone lived in perfect accordance with the teaching of the Church, then everyone would be saints. No doubt the trials of life would be much easier to cope with under those circumstances, but trials would remain.

And even then, even if we were all saints, we wouldn’t all look and act the same. We would all be drawn into unity with Christ…but Christ is the infinite eternal God incarnate, God of perfection inexhaustible. Each saint reflects God’s perfection in his own peculiar way. There are as many ways to be a saint as there are saints.

So what about “shaving off the imperfections”? The Church does teach that we all need to be working at shaving off our own imperfections, or rather, allowing God’s grace to do that. But that’s something each person must do for himself, with God’s help: you can’t do it for or to someone else. And given what the Church teaches about sin, it’s inevitable that at times men of the Church will commit precisely the sin that Harry describes. We did it during the Inquisition; we did it during the Wars of Religion in the 1600’s in Europe. But if what the Church teaches is true, these happenings should be the exceptions rather than the rule; and examining history we see that they are.

The real Truth doesn’t need “knives and racks and axe-men and camps”.