The wisdom of property

Many traditional conservative critiques of capitalist and business ideology emphasize that these encourage an amputated view of man, reducing him only to his desires and choices.

This reductionist ethos tends to cut off the individual from his family, his history, his country and even his God.

The same ethos has direct bearing on cultural conflicts surrounding sex and bioethics, where lifestyle individualism merges with consumerist demand to deny and to transgress the limits of bodily nature.

Yet the link to Liberal philosophy's view of property is rarely highlighted.

In this spirit, Villanova Prof. Mark Shiffman provides an excellent and concise critique of Lockean anthropology in his discussion of The Human Meaning of Property at Front Porch Republic.

According to Locke, our right to property derives from our investment of our labor to improve something that did not belong to another already (Second Treatise, chapter 5). This right includes property in our own person – our body and our mental faculties. Locke’s formulation of our relationship to ourselves in terms of labor-derived property hints at the view of the human person that underlies it, which is the reduction of the person ultimately to the will. For if it is our labor that makes our bodies our property, and the same goes for our minds, then what is the “self” that initiates and is responsible for this labor, if not the will that makes us stretch our limbs and direct our attention to what is around and inside us?

....The will places value on things, initiates the labor that improves their value, and shapes the way we think of them in terms of the right to exercise itself in their disposal. Locke’s examples, like Madison’s, emphasize agrarian property, but do so solely in terms of the prospect of infinitely increasing yields... The will imposes its limitless terms on the world, rather than recognizing natural limits to its satisfaction – except the limits that have to be observed and enforced by government to accommodate the existence of other wills seeking their own satisfactions. These latter limits, seen from the point of view of the person protected by them, are what we call “rights.” They are thus negative or prohibitive in character, grounded on the valuation imposed on the world by the individual will, and formulated so as to coordinate all the individual and conflicting wills that fall under one system of government and laws.

This “right” that precedes and legitimates government is natural in the sense that the passions of all human beings lead them to lay claim to it. If we take the will of the individual and extract what is universal in it (or sufficiently universal for practical purposes), this will provide us with the basis for elaborating a reliable system of rights, or a set of exemptions from interference that everyone can sign on to. Madison quite correctly asserts a reciprocal equivalence between property and rights. Unfortunately for his republican cause, this equivalence opens the door to the marketization of every aspect of life.

This habit of making the will foundational to man and to government ends up placing all choices beyond criticism, provided they do not conflict with other choices. Reason, one of man's mental faculties, is the "property," and thus the instrument, of the unquestioned will.

Such voluntarism calls into question the humanity of those who do not present obvious evidence for having wills, such as the brain-damaged and the unborn.

It also distorts the meaning of nature, seeing it not as good in itself, but only insofar as it is transformed into an expression of human will and the imperialist self.

Proposing a less willful view of property, Shiffman follows Richard Weaver:

The responsibility for property that is intimately connected to our life as a person (and this is the meaning of proprietas: what is one’s own and characteristic of oneself) calls upon virtues that render us more complete human beings. Foremost among these virtues is practical judgment, informed by long-term views of our life as a whole and our relationship to our community. Thus only property that satisfies this criterion falls under “metaphysical right,” i.e. must be recognized as rightly belonging to our very being and its fulfillment as what it most truly is.

While I would scrutinize the place of practical judgment as a foremost virtue, his essay brings to the fore the distinction between property as an instrument to satisfying human desires and property as an instrument to advancing human goods. Even the "instrument" takes on different connotations depending on its object: is property best used "to the extent desired" or used "to the extent it is beneficial"?

For advancing the wisdom of property, Shiffman's essay may be used to benefit.

Why Multiculturalism Emphasizes Race

The later chapters of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club provide a suggestive history of the origins of multiculturalism. Rather than some creation of the late 20th century, the emphasis and indeed celebration of cultural distinctions began far earlier.

Influenced by the strict categories of so-called racial science, some American elites as far back as the 1910s emphasized the cultural differences of immigrants as a defense against the flattening effects of mass culture.

Menand quotes Randolph Bourne's July 1916 Atlantic Monthly essay "Trans-National America":

"Already we have far too much of this insipidity--masses of people who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor nationals of another culture... Letting slip whatever native culture they had, they have substituted for it only the most rudimentary American--the American culture of the cheap newspaper, the "movies," popular song, the ubiquitous automobile.

Bourne's reference to "whatever native culture" immigrants possess is quite consumerist. It foreshadows present lovers of diversity who act as if diversity only means exotic food, clothing, and music.

Bourne also provides a very contemporary-sounding condemnation of the "imposition of values":

"If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases... the immigrant has found freedom, and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its treatment of the invading hordes. But if freedom means democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free, and the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority peoples.

Multi-culturalism is simply old racial science plus egalitarianism. Thus, it often retains the view that race is essential and all else is accretion. In the words of Horace M. Kallen, "men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent; they cannot change their grandfathers. Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, would have to cease to be."

The belief that ethnicity is more enduring than marriage, philosophy, or religion seems to have endured to the present day. It is a correlate of a materialistic society that holds the human genome to be more real than the individual, even more real than God.

This supposition is why a certain poor excuse for an Irishman, who runs some sissy-named organization called the Shamrock Club, can object to Holy Week trumping St. Patrick's Day festivities. He was able to say, "Actually, you’re born Irish first, and then you’re baptized Catholic."
Horace Kallen would approve, though St. Patrick certainly wouldn't.

The Hopefulness of Grief

Dermot Quinn, speaking in the ISI lecture "Religion, and the Conservative Mind," considers how Russell Kirk could maintain hope while doubting the limitless capacities of mankind:

Human depravity bulks large in the Conservative Mind. The book exhibits a very Tory insistence on the reality of evil, the folly of schemes of social and personal perfectiblity, the inevitability of disappointment in a corrupt world.

Kirk thought of himself as a Christian Stoic. His best writing reflects a conviction that the most perduring of the permanent things is sorrow We would not be human without "the inescapable emotion of grief." Yet this is not as gloomy as it sounds.

Kirk used this grief to justify a politics not of dissent and despair, but of hope. After all, to recognize the fall from grace is to recognize grace itself as salvifically necessary. Awareness of human weakness is the beginning of wisdom.

Am I right in believing that contemporary hopemongers rarely show grief? At most, they muster compassion, which is not the same thing.

See also: Patrick Deneen's Hope against Hope

Examining the "Catholic Ghetto"

One hears all the time that American Catholics were stuck in an introverted ghetto until they grew up and joined the larger culture. It's a common self-aggrandizing story told by more than a few baby boomers.

Note how this essay explodes that liberation story with the gunpowder of multi-culturalism.

The history of the ghetto image in Catholic usage tells much about the changes of mood in Catholic life during the past quarter century. When apologists for Catholic behavior and critics of the encircling WASP cultures wanted to reinforce and legitimate Catholic group-bonding, they accented the ways in which ghetto life was imposed on minorities. This Ellis did only briefly, when he said that the “aloof and unfriendly” American intellectual climate had discouraged Catholics, led them to slacken their efforts, and prompted this “minority to withdraw into itself and to assume the attitude of defenders of a besieged fortress.”

At other times during the domestic aggiornamento that followed the Second Vatican Council, however, a self-deprecating, indeed sometimes almost masochistic view of the tradition prevailed. Then the ghetto was seen not as imposed from without but self-imposed from within. Angry James Colaianni typically wrote that “Ghettoism suffocates. It is just another jail man builds for himself to keep from becoming free.” Some such critics were romantic about the surrounding glories of the secular city, naive in their neglect of the role of intimate community in human life, and scornful of ancestors whose ways they could never understand or emulate.

[...]

My thesis is that while Catholicism often did nurture ghetto existence, it was by no means unique in its relative isolation from a putative Protestant-secular world which I shall henceforth call "The Culture." Surrounding the Catholic version were so many other religious, national, and ideological ghettos that they cast the Catholic ghetto in a less distinctive light. Their presence forces us to reconsider whether the The Culture was not in many ways a larger and more expansive ghetto itself.

[...]

Historians of intergroup relations who have concentrated on the anti-Semitism of some Populists or Henry Adams, or on the anti-Catholicism of the nativist American Protective Association at the turn of the century, do have virulent and potent topics on their hands. But they often miss the dynamics of ghetto existence. One sees more vitriol and hears more vituperation, for example, in conflicts between Catholic Americanists and anti-Americanists, Ukrainian Uniates and Ukrainian Orthodox, Czech Catholics and Czech freethinkers, Catholic traditionalists and Catholic modernists, within their ghettos, than between any and all of them, say, the American Protective Association. Sociologist Georg Simmel seems to have been right, at least in the American historical instance; “People who have many common features often do one another worse or ‘worser’ wrong then complete strangers do.”
Martin E. Marty, Locations: At Home in the Ghettos

I was surprised to discover the noted scholar of American religion Martin Marty was the essay's author. It was his 1981 presidential address to the American Catholic Historical Association.

William James' Religion

Tolstoy’s conversion account appealed to James on many levels, not least because churches and clergy played no role in it. Though James sometimes self-identified with Protestant Christianity, that label was accurate only in the narrowest cultural sense. Theologically, he was as heterodox as he was unsystematic—he theorized, for example, that there might be multiple deities. But if he was at most a marginal Christian, James was enthusiastically a Protestant. In Varieties, he pointedly reduced religion to its minimalist essence. “As I now ask you arbitrarily to take it,” he wrote, religion “shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” This was unmediated Protestantism in its purest, most unfettered form.
Theo Anderson, One Hundred Years of Pragmatism

One can't help but wonder how much the Jamesian approach to religion has influenced First Amendment jurisprudence. Out of respect for Protestantism(respect I didn't even know I had), I must protest Anderson's characterization of Protestantism in terms of its most individualistic liberal form. It's not always that bad.

Nevertheless, Anderson's essay is an excellent complement to my current read, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, a history of the American pragmatists with a talent for depicting the zeitgeist of late nineteenth-century New England.

Note that Anderson also intimates in James the beginnings of so-called therapeutic deism:

James’s writings contain glimmerings of the spirituality industry that would burgeon in the later 20th century. He posited other realms of consciousness and higher energies as agents of human “empowerment,” themes that have become ubiquitous among self-help authors. James likely would have deplored much of this genre, yet it is in some ways a logical outgrowth of his emphasis on the pragmatic consequences of faith. The ecumenism of the ­self-­help genre is also quintessentially Jamesian: Spirituality is presented as an unmediated relationship between the individual and the divine. Institutions only get in the ­way.

Steve Sailer on Divisions of Intellect and Class

A big problem for modern class warriors like Pat Buchanan on the right or Jim Hightower on the left is that over the years the number of blue collar workers with the verbal talent needed to articulate their class interests has plummeted. Where'd the smart ones go? To college and then into white-collar jobs. In the past, unions and other working class institutions had leaders and spokesmen who were both highly intelligent and authentically representative of the rank and file.
How to help the left half of the bell curve

This same kind of brain drain is evident in regional migrations. The smart kids move to the big cities and local leadership becomes ever more stultified.

Sailer's essay scores some other points. When human equality of capacity is presumed as a matter of fact, the moral imperative to use one's special talents for the good of the less fortunate becomes obscured. Everybody's equal, so people who aren't successful must have some culpable personal failing that kept them from success.

Individualism in Sociology

Weber is important, because he reversed the approach to life that, from time immemorial, gave precedence (and power) to creeds. In Weber’s theory of religion, all forms of social authority can be traced back to the ecstatic, inner resources of personality. The charismatic renews culture in and through his magnetic personality. He is the Nietzschean superman who shatters ordinary limits and remakes our ideals. Creeds are simply dead reminders of powerful personalities.
-R.R. Reno

On The Non-Existence of Religions

Questions of method, important as they are, need not be raised at all until the researcher can first determine and circumscribe the object of his studies in a convincing way. And here it seems worth mentioning-just for precision’s sake-that religion does not actually exist. Rather there are a great number of traditions of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call religions but that could scarcely differ from one another more. It might seem sufficient, for the purposes of research, simply to identify general resemblances among these traditions, but even that is notoriously hard to do, since the effort to ascertain what sort of things one is looking at involves an enormous amount of interpretation and no clear criteria for evaluating any of it. One cannot establish where the boundaries lie between religious systems and magic, or folk science, or myth, or social ceremony.

There is not even any compelling reason to assume a genetic continuity or kinship between, say, shamanistic beliefs and developed rituals of sacrifice, or between tribal cults and traditions like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, or to assume that these various developed traditions are varieties of the same thing. One may feel that there is a continuity or kinship, or presuppose on the basis of one’s prejudices, inklings, or tastes that the extremely variable and imprecise characteristic of a belief in the supernatural constitutes proof of a common ancestry or type. But all this remains a matter of interpretation, vague morphologies, and personal judgments of value and meaning, and attempting to construct a science around such intuitions amounts to little more than mistaking "all the things I don’t believe in" for a scientific genus. One cannot even demonstrate that apparent similarities of behavior between cultures manifest similar rationales, as human consciousness is so promiscuously volatile a catalyst in social evolution.

Moreover, the task of delineating the phenomenon of religion in the abstract becomes perfectly hopeless as soon as one begins to examine what particular traditions of faith actually claim, believe, or do. It is already difficult enough to define what sort of thing religion is. But what sort of thing is the Buddhist teaching of the Four Noble Truths? What sort of thing is the Vedantic doctrine that Atman and Brahman are one? What sort of thing is the Christian belief in Easter? What is the core and what are the borders of these phenomena? What are their empirical causes? What are their rationales? Grand, empty abstractions about religion are as easy to produce as to ignore. These, by contrast, are questions that touch on what persons actually believe, and to answer them requires an endless hermeneutical labor-an investigation of history, and intellectual traditions, and contemplative lore, and so on and so forth-which ultimately requires a degree of specialization that few can hope to achieve; even then, the specialist’s conclusions must always remain open to doubt and revision.
-David B. Hart, Daniel Dennet Hunts the Snark

I hope Hart's clever little denial of the field of religious studies will go far in ending all the vacant-eyed ramblings on religions and their threats from Daniel Dennett and his friends. In our age men find it more open-minded to dismiss religion tout court than to target specific creeds or cultures for disdain. Were one to start blasting Quakers or Evangelicals or Calvinists any other specific religion, vague contempt cannot be sustained. Religion: "creepy!"

At the same time, the vague therapeutic invocations of religion are to be shunned. The other day, one acquaintance said that True Islam wasn't anything like the violent barbarians who use its name. I wished I had pressed that idea more. For a muslim to speak of true Islam is piety. For a non-muslim to speak of true Islam is vacuity. How should a non-muslim judge the best kind of Islam? According to some other non-Islamic philosophical or theological criteria, of course.

Our present sectarian and anti-sectarian confusion is entirely because nobody knows what religion is anymore. The declension of the concept "religio has been mapped out by William T. Cavanaugh:

Religio for St. Thomas is just one virtue which presupposes a context of ecclesial practices which are both communal and particular to the Christian Church. Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that during the Middle Ages, considered by modems the "most religious" period of Christian history, no one ever thought to write a book on religion. In fact he suggests that "the rise of the concept 'religion' is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself."32 In other words the rise of the modern concept of religion is associated with the decline of the Church as the particular locus of the communal practice of religio.

The dawn of the modern concept of religion occurs around the late fifteenth century, first appearing in the work of the Italian Renaissance figure Marsilio Ficino. His 1474 work entitled De Christiana Religione is the first to present religio as a universal human impulse common to all. In Ficino's Platonic scheme, religio is the ideal of genuine perception and worship of God. The various historical manifestations of this common impulse, the varieties of pieties and rites that we now call religions, are all just more or less true (or untrue) representations of the one true religio implanted in the human heart. Insofar as it becomes a universal impulse, religion is thus interiorized and removed from its particular ecclesial context.

The second major shift in the meaning of the term religion, which takes shape through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is toward religion as a system of beliefs. Religion moves from a virtue to a set of propositions. Political theorist Hugo Grotius, in his De Veritate Religionis Christianae, can therefore write that the Christian religion teaches, rather than simply is, the true worship of God. At the same time the plural "religions" arises, an impossibility under the medieval usage.

The next time someone asks me if I am religious, I'll play the pedant and ask "what do you mean?" I entertain few warm and fuzzy thoughts about self and universe, and I do not recognize myself in most televised religiosity. All I can say is Credo... Amen!

Groupthink Critics are a Tiresome Herd

Roger Sandall, doing what few men have done before, courageously denounces groupthink in his essay The herd instinct:

I once attended an event at the Sydney Opera House where some 2500 people had gathered. A Danish percussion group were performing and they wanted the crowd to participate. Their leader stood and gave orders—clap, shout, stand, pat your knees—and 2500 men and women obeyed his commands. I myself declined to take part, but the elderly woman beside me, with shining eyes, followed every movement as though she had been waiting eighty years for instructions. She would have stood on her head if they asked.

Asserting one's individuality by opting out of a sing-along! What an independent spirit! Surely he will pay for his refusal to join the notorious herd that is the audience at the Syndey Opera House.

I'm a loner myself, but I know when my habits are being flattered. Anybody who feels superior to a grandmother enjoying herself needs different role models for his self-comparison.

Sandall goes on to repeat some obvious individualist errors, blaming collectives for error but finding truth in the solitary refusenik. He claims rational thinking is an individual activity, with little recognition of its inevitably contingent social character. He praises the leader, with little awareness that leadership presupposes a group to lead; it is also, like rationality and irrationality, learned in groups.

Arts and Letters Daily needs to find some better material, or I'll have to find a better aggregator for essays of intellectual interest.

Wikipedia vs. Human Nature

I often find criticism of Wikipedia more interesting than Wikipedia itself. Case in point, Jason Scott's speech on the Wiki project:

Jimbo Wales is a Randian Objectivist. This means that in his particular interpretation of that philosophical thought, he does not like to interfere, he likes to give general ideas, he likes to trust in people, and he likes that the truth, that the truth represents an honest objective entity that cannot be questioned. A is A. That is to say, if somebody says "this is blue", no amount of your stupid liberal whining is going to make it not blue. That's the theory behind that aspect of Randian Objectivism.

What he did with Wikipedia was, put forward a number of very simple credos: Wikipedia will have a neutral point of view; Wikipedia will always cite it's sources; Wikipedia will never be an original source of information; and then said: "Go with it."

[...]

When we look at something old (I'll leave it with this thought) when we look at something old, when you walk into an old church, when you walk into a place, and you find say a handrail, and your hand goes down, your hand goes down and touches the handrail. You do not find the hand rail up here, you do not find the handrail down here. This is because at some point, somebody who was a designer, who was an architect, looked at where human beings were, and put the handrail where human beings are, so that a hundred years from now, four hundred years from now you can still put your hand there.

That is an important design aesthetic, sometimes that is forgotten. Things where they forget that, for instance when language is written, which is full of hype and horror and whatever else, say in the 19th century talking about -- "oh, in the future airships will do this and there will be wondrous wires and you can..." -- those words are forgotten, they weren't designed for human beings, they were designed to sell a
product.

When Wikipedia started out, Wikipedia was designed for an idea, a theoretical idea. An idea of human knowledge edited by everybody, with no idea of how human beings actually are. Over time, Wikipedia is becoming an accurate handrail, it's letting people now put their hand where it is, and it's not the place that I think Jimbo Wales expected it was going to be.

via Deep Furrows

We are all Individualists!

...all except Daniel Larison, who tears into David Brooks:

"Individualism itself glories in uncertainty and confusion, because individualists define these things as being part and parcel of "being free," but psychologically, spiritually and in all other important ways uncertainty and confusion are crippling and paralysing. Instilling people with the belief that they are in control of their own destinies, especially when they have been led to believe in the guiding hand of Providence or the will of God, would have to fill many of these people with the utmost sense of despair. After all, given the uncertainties and accidents of life, what fool really supposes himself to be in control of his own destiny? If it were true that my destiny were in my hands, I doubt very much that this would be very satisfying; because it is not true and misunderstands the human condition entirely, it is guaranteed to yield little if any happiness."

Why Yes, I Do Want to Burden My Loved Ones

via CWNews.com, an excellent reflection on how altruism in end-of-life medical care veers into isolating suicide:

Perhaps it is a good thing, lest we be tempted to injustice, that the dying burden the living. Some years ago Robert Burt wrote a book about medical decision-making for incompetent patients. The book's title was Taking Care of Strangers. Burt's point, which carried a double entendre, was essentially this: Patients who are unable to make decisions for themselves are often in a state (e.g., severely demented, comatose) in which they become strangers to us. They make us uneasy, and we react with ambivalence. And to say of such a patient, "I'll take care of him," may be a statement freighted with ambivalence. Burt worries that, no matter how devoted our care, our uneasiness with a loved one who has become a stranger to us may prompt us to do less than we ought to sustain his life. (Nor, we should note, are physicians immune to such uneasiness.) It is, therefore, essential that we structure the medical decision-making situation in such a way that conversation is forced among the doctor, the medical caregivers, the patient's family, and perhaps still others, such as pastor, priest, or rabbi. Advance directives, designed to eliminate the need for such extended conversation--lest it should burden loved ones--are, from this perspective, somewhat problematic. They may not force us to deal with our own ambivalence in "taking care of" a loved one who is now a burdensome stranger.
-Gilbert Meilander,
"I Want to Burden My Loved Ones"(PDF)
(First Things, October 1991, pp.12f)

Romantic Psychotherapy Powered by Whirlwind of Desire

The New Pantagruel has just published a stunningly brilliant essay on Freud, Democracy, and the Therapeutic Ethos. Steven L. Gardner's "Psychological Man: Eros and Ambition in Democratic Desire" is a must-read examination of Freud and his influence in democratic societies. It possesses so many choice quotations I had to check my desire to simply steal the whole thing.

Freud offers an indispensable orientation to the psyche of modern man, but he is also a barrier to deciphering adequately the secret mechanisms of modern man’s passions. Ironically, this is not because they are buried in the unconscious depths of the body, as depth psychologists might like to think. Rather it is because they are so near at hand, on the surface, right beneath our noses. What obscures them are the mythemes of depth psychology itself, above all the idea of the somatic unconscious canonized in the libidinal theory of desire. In his book on Freud, Rieff shows that his somatic theory of desire is a “scientific” decantation of romanticism. But romanticism, I suggest, is the “natural religion” of democratic culture, its spontaneous mythology, which Freud baptizes in affording it one of its most sophisticated intellectual justifications and forms. The fundamental exigency of democratic culture is the claim to originality, individuality, or genius. In a world of equality, everyone must distinguish himself in order to count. These are constitutive dogmas of romanticism. Freud’s somatic theory of unconscious libido serves the romanticism of democratic culture in two ways: first, it ascribes this originality or individuality to virtually everyone, in the unconscious “poetry” of their desires; and second, as Mikkel Borsch-Jacobsen has shown (The Freudian Subject, 1988), it underwrites Freud’s own claim to genius.

[...]

For this new type, psychology would replace ontology or theology, and therapy would replace community, hitherto the most potent psychic medicines in Western culture. Emancipated by modern technology, commerce, law, and consumerism from integral community, the modern individual found himself abandoned to contradictory passions and impulses and alienated from the remnants of a cultural order that, nonetheless, he could not do without. He thus entered into the twilight zone of modernity, the realm of ambivalences and ambiguities that ensue when every fixed point of reference is dissolved into the sheer interplay of individuals in a culture that can no longer sustain its origins. Freud appeared as his savior and advocate, the inventor of a technique of survival not physical but psychical. He promised to teach the modern individual how to desire in a world where all desires were equal and arbitrary, void of any intrinsic order, but not necessarily equally permissible or socially estimable. Here was a human type where interiority and its dilemmas were not a mark of the spiritual or transcendent but exactly of their absence, at best of their fading images-where interiority and the sense of alienation from the outer reflect the social fact of “negative community.”

[...]

The fundamental law of Psychological Man is the law of temporization, to keep things going, in the absence of any definitive, authoritative ends. The problem for Psychological Man is not, finally, that of the satisfaction of desire, because he is conditioned in advance by the knowledge that desire is inherently unsatisfiable, at least in any definitive, classical, or teleological sense. His problem, rather, is how to keep desiring in the face of that knowledge. His aim is how to postpone the inevitable, the end of desire. His greatest fear is Pascalian boredom, the helpless feeling of not being able to desire, the loss of the power of distraction. The individual who is to survive in the modern world must become the “genius” of himself, the artist of his desires as the vital source of his being. In crafting a “scientific” advocacy for this individual, Freud wanted to help him become his own advocate, the negotiator of his desires, mediating between his eros and the demands of society. In Freud, Psychological Man came of age; in Freud, he found his classic exemplar, his ethical model, his theorist, and his doctor.

Choice: A Crunchy Tragedy

Gilbert Meilander has reviewed Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons in the latest issue of First Things, beginning with this anecdote:

Making a long drive home from a meeting late last summer, I found myself hungry in the early afternoon. I needed something that would be quick inexpensive, and good. And there (providentially?) was the sign: a Burger King off the next exit. I felt like a flame-grilled Whopper, and the beauty of it is that you can "have it your way" which in my case meant hold the tomato and mayo, and mustard. Here is a realm of life where being pro-choice is just the thing for me...As I began to eat, two young boys (probaby about ten and eight years old) sat down with their parents at an adjoining table. Both boys had on Chief Wahoo caps, so I would have known they were Cleveland Indians fans even if they had not been discussing the previous night's game, which they had seen on ESPN. It happened that in my hotel room I had myself spent the last part of the evening watching that same game. I decided therefore to venture a brief conversational gambit. "Go Tribe," I said to the younger of the two boys...

Our ability to watch the Indians on television even though we did not live near Cleveland created a little shared community among us as we sat there eating in Burger King. The experience was so satisfying that I went back up tot he counter for a Hershey's Sundae Pie and stayed longer than I'd planned.

Meilander went on to attack Dreher for elitism, smugness, and preening, though there is a certain type of "Just Plain Folks" smugness evident in his own review, making it ripe for evisceration.

Daniel Larison critiques Meilander's critique:

Just consider the language Meilaender used to describe his veritable pilgrimage to the shrine of the Burger King: he wanted something "quick, inexpensive and good." In other words, everything Rod was saying about family meals, communion, sacramentality is completely lost on this man who thinks that eating is about getting things quickly and cheaply and who mistakes Burger King fare for something good.

Larison echoes an Italian cleric who opined a few years ago that Fast Food is Protestant:

"The style of fast-food completely ignores the sacred dimension of meals," Salani told the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire on the occasion of his book launching this January. "At McDonalds you satisfy your hunger in a rushed way so that you can move on to do other things," he lamented. Adding fuel to the fire, he insisted: "It lacks the communitarian or sharing aspect of a meal. Fast food is not Catholic. It is Protestant."

Not only is Meilander a Lutheran, but he praises such things as the community he thought he found while eating alone!

Larison's critique continues:

...using the word community in connection with fellow supporters of a pro baseball team, with whose city you don't even have a personal connection, suggests that you have no idea what "community" is. This is not Meilaender's problem alone. Entire generations of "conservatives" have grown up in rootless America not knowing what community really is, or grew up believing that the common good had something to do with Hillary Clinton trying to socialise health care, which is why they both virulently reject any attempt to promote community even as they lamely grasp onto whatever shreds of it they can find, because I suspect they know the desperate truth that man is not meant to live as so many of us do, but they have no idea how to change.

Men like choice, but one of the fundamental things that conservatives need to relearn is that choice is unnatural. We were not created with choice, a choosing will. We were created with free will, and the difference between the two is all-important. Our choosing, deliberative will is not only a product of our fallen state, but the source of our continuing waywardness. Prizing choice is like prizing doubt and uncertainty. It is not something to be prized, but something to be restrained and mortified.

The abortion movement is euphemistically, but significantly, called pro-choice. Though this whole crunchy con fad can distract from important endeavors like combating the abortion regime, it has revealed that the same presuppositions which animate pro-choicers have much influence among their opponents as well.

Someone wiser than I remarked that the phenomenon of human choice is essentially tragic, because it means that man does not truly know his own good. All choices are made through some combination of reason and virtue with vice, ignorance, or innumerable other personal shortcomings. Like all political movements, contemporary conservatism is set up for a dramatic failure, commitment to choice being one of its tragic flaws.

Down With Memes!

Stuart Buck directs us to Alister McGrath's speech The Spell of the Meme,(PDF!) in which the Oxonian theologian remarks on the Hierophant of Memes Himself, Daniel Dennett:

First, the meme is just an hypothesis – one that we don’t need, as there are better models available – for example, in economics, but also in anthropology. If genes could not be seen, we would have to invent them – the evidence demands a biologically transmitted genetic replicator. Memes can’t be observed, and the evidence can be explained perfectly well without them. As Maurice Bloch - professor of anthropology at LSE – commented recently, the “exasperated reaction of many anthropologists to the general idea of memes” reflects the apparent ignorance of the proponents of the meme hypothesis of the discipline of anthropology, and its major successes in the explanation of cultural development – without
feeling the need to develop anything like the idea of a “meme” at all.

Dennett, creator of a thousand brainless scarecrows, makes himself such an easy target. McGrath also makes a nice comparison between memetics and the theory of the ether, and wishes for a new Michelson and Morely to rid us of this tiresome idea.

Homo Eligens Futuris, Confounded

Charles T. Rubin reflects on transhumanism in the characteristically superb journal The New Atlantis. His take on the "Choosing Man of the Future" promoted by technotriumphalists:

Of course, liberty is a crucial element of any decent human life. But the more one observes the extreme libertarianism at the heart of the rhetoric of extinction, the harder it is to take seriously. As we saw in Chorost’s account of himself, the free play of choice is what is left when the ability to think seriously about what is choiceworthy is lost. The rhetoric of extinction makes it seem as if we will no longer have to make choices based on scarcity of time or resources; it casts out faith and reason alike as grounds for universal norms that might direct choice; and it can hardly adduce tradition or human nature as compelling guides in the remanufactured world it imagines. When natural constraints are increasingly non-existent and moral constraints are entirely up to the individual, what can liberty be but choice for the sake of choice, or mere willfulness?

Also from the journal, whose unfortunate acronym is the combination "TNA": Mark Halpern on Turing Machines

Cavanaugh On Freedom, Desire, and the Market

Two corollaries follow from this conception of voluntary exchange. The first is that freedom is defined negatively, as freedom from the interference of others, especially from the state. Freedom is what exists spontaneously in the absence of coercion. This approach is agnostic about the positive capacities of each party to a transaction, for example, how much power or property each party has at his or her disposal. To be free, it suffices that there be no external interference. The second is that a free market has no telos , that is, no common end to which desire is directed. Each individual chooses his or her own ends. As Friedrich Hayek says, "this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends" does not mean there can be no common action among individuals, but the ends on which such actions are based are merely the "coincidence of individual ends"; "what are called ‘social ends’ are for [a free market view] merely identical ends of many individuals – or ends to the achievement of which individuals are willing to contribute in return for the assistance they receive in the satisfaction of their own desires." To claim that desires can be ordered either rightly or wrongly to objectively desirable ends has no place in a free market. To stake such a claim within the market itself would be to interfere in the freedom of the market. As Michael Novak says, democratic capitalism --of which a free market is a crucial component -- is built on the explicit denial of any unitary order. There is no common telos or "sacred canopy" above the diversity of desires, only an "empty shrine" or "wasteland" where common goals used to stand.

[...]

Nevertheless, the idea that this type of economy is free is also problematic. The problem with this view is that it assumes that the abolition of objective goods provides the conditions for the individual will to function more or less autonomously. The reality, however, is quite different. For as Augustine sees clearly, the absence of objective goods does not free the individual, but leaves it subject to the arbitrary competition of wills. In other words, in the absence of a substantive account of the good, all that remains is sheer arbitrary power, one will against another. This is what Augustine calls the libido dominandi , the lust for power with which Pharaoh was possessed. Without the idea that some goods are objectively better than others, the movement of the will can only be arbitrary. Persuasion in this context can only be the domination of one will over another. The will is moved by the greater force, and not by any intrinsic attraction to the good. The difference between authority and sheer power has been eliminated.

[...]

In the absence of any objective conception of the good, sheer power remains. The prevailing models of business strategy recognize this fact and are unsentimental about it. For example, marketing is marketed on the one hand to the broader public as the provision of information about products so that consumers may make choices that are both informed and voluntary. Here consumers are depicted as autonomous and rational, perfectly sovereign over their choices of products and ends. On the other hand, marketing presents itself in-house to its practitioners and clients as a machine fully capable of creating desire and delivering it to its intended goal. These two aspects of marketing are two sides of the same coin; marketing can manipulate desire successfully in part because of its success in convincing the broader public of consumers that their desires are not being manipulated.

-William Cavanaugh, The Unfreedom of the Free Market (PDF)

Priesthood Controversies: Being vs. Functioning

The issue is not about the marriage or celibacy, or sexuality at all _ not really. The issue is how does our culture make sense of Catholic priesthood when we have come to understand the diminishing role of clergy (Protestant as well as Catholic) solely in terms of functionality?

[...]

Now contrast this development with what was claimed of the Catholic priest in the same 16th century. Committed to the idea that what one is has priority over what one does, Roman Catholicism came to understand the priest as an icon of sorts: He was a sign of the "other." It wasn't that he was holier or wiser, or even necessarily a good person. But the priest bore a certain other-ness, often (usually?) in spite of himself.
Rev. David Lewis Stokes, Jr., When the Priesthood Becomes a Bundle of Cliches
Via Eve Tushnet

In her work Icarus Fallen Chantal Delsol noted the collapse of role into function:

“In a practical sense, roles remain determined. Not that playing them is compulsory—a mother may abandon her child, and [Vaclav] Havel could have refused to lead. But to take on a role is very often a response to a felt moral obligation. In a sense, the person inherits the role because of the position he is in, the responsibility he has accepted, or the irreplaceable experience he alone can draw upon. Because he is irreplaceable, and because action is necessary, he simply cannot turn away without failing to live up to his duty.

The very idea of obligation, in combination with the inegalitarianism inherent in the notion of role, has led contemporary society to reject roles in favor of functions. Functions have no obligations because they can always be carried out by someone else. They leave open the freedom to abandon one’s post, which is not considered a desertion. And because of their neutral and anonymous character, they presuppose that virtually every and any individual can fulfill them. Functions serve both liberty and equality. And so our contemporaries reject roles, which create both obligations and distinctions.

Just as functions have replaced roles in modern society, the individual has come to replace the person, the latter phenomenon being a corollary of the former. The person is unique, the individual interchangeable. The more functions there are, the more human beings define themselves by their competencies and repertories of technical abilities. This is the price of equality. With the disappearance of roles, the individual is left to himself and is henceforth able to choose anything. A society cannot make absolute equality a reality. In our society, however, we have managed to at least make it a virtual reality: anyone can, in theory, take the place of anyone else.

Thus, the modern individual no longer expects at all to be “indispensable.” Everywhere replaceable, he has become free and indistinct. He has gained liberty at the expense of his uniqueness, and even further, at the expense of his identity. For we identify with what makes us distinct from others more than with what makes us the same: we prefer to present ourselves to others by talking about our athletic accomplishments, the volunteer work we do for such-and-such a cause, or a hobby in which we have suddenly found interest,rather than by referring to our professional titles, which we share with a hundred thousand others. It is obvious that personal identity is attached to roles rather than functions.

The society of roles saw inequality everywhere, even where it did not exist. The society of functions sees equality everywhere, even where it does not exist.”
(Icarus Fallen, p. 143-144)

So too we see the flattening of "Father" or "Mother" into a functional "caregiver," and a "husband" or "wife" or even "spouse" is transmogrified into "partner." Even the origin of life itself, the womb, is now viewed as simply a functional uterus which can be replaced by artificial and impersonal means in just a few years.

All this functionalism makes one feel like one is simply another part in the Matrix. No wonder the movie was so popular.

An Excellent Summary of Christian Anthropology

Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God covers a vast range of subject matter in a succinct, surprisingly thorough manner. Psychology, bioethics, ecology, and evolutionary theory are all touched upon, though I particularly appreciated this passage on mind and body:

Two themes converge to shape the biblical perspective. In the first place, the whole of man is seen as created in the image of God. This perspective excludes interpretations which locate the imago Dei in one or another aspect of human nature (for example, his upright stature or his intellect) or in one of his qualities or functions (for example, his sexual nature or his domination of the earth). Avoiding both monism and dualism, the Bible presents a vision of the human being in which the spiritual is understood to be a dimension together with the physical, social and historical dimensions of man.

Contemporary academic approaches tend to either dismiss or praise Christian thought as dualistic, so it is nice to see a contrary voice, though I would much like to find some book expanding on this idea at length.

Also of note, an attention-grabbing speculation on the reconciliation of Darwinism with an Aristotelian philosophy of the forms:

In order to maintain the unity of body and soul clearly taught in revelation, the Magisterium adopted the definition of the human soul as forma substantialis (cf. Council of Vienne and the Fifth Lateran Council). Here the Magisterium relied on Thomistic anthropology which, drawing upon the philosophy of Aristotle, understands body and soul as the material and spiritual principles of a single human being. It may be noted that this account is not incompatible with present-day scientific insights. Modern physics has demonstrated that matter in its most elementary particles is purely potential and possesses no tendency toward organization. But the level of organization in the universe, which contains highly organized forms of living and non-living entities, implies the presence of some "information." This line of reasoning suggests a partial analogy between the Aristotelian concept of substantial form and the modern scientific notion of "information." Thus, for example, the DNA of the chromosomes contains the information necessary for matter to be organized according to what is typical of a certain species or individual. Analogically, the substantial form provides to prime matter the information it needs to be organized in a particular way. This analogy should be taken with due caution because metaphysical and spiritual concepts cannot be simply compared with material, biological data.

Stephen Barr recommended this paper in his essay on the Cardinal Shoenborn controversy, The Design of Evolution, as did Chancellor Fran Maier of the Archdiocese of Denver while introducing Richard Weikhart's presentation "From Darwin to Hitler."

Quantum Agents versus Mechanistic Handpuppets

'Is there anything more boring than using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
to try to prove free will?'
-Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Since my sophomore year in college, I haven't put much store in using contemporary physics theories to establish the freedom of the will. For one, I haven't the advanced knowledge necessary to speak with any authority on quantum physics. I've read Hawking's Brief History of Time, a few other articles written for laymen, and I've had a few basic physics classes. What's worse, it seems to be a major talking point for crappy new age inspirational works, one example being, I am told, the movie "What the Bleep do We Know?" So on the principle that better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt, I simply passed it by. Besides, I hadn't come across any explication of how quantum mechanics could be brought to bear on the question.

That is, until I came across QUANTUM PHYSICS IN NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY: A NEUROPHYSICAL MODEL OF MIND/BRAIN INTERACTION.

By necessity, it's an interdisciplinary work written by a Berkeley physicist, a neurologist, and a neuropsychiatrist. The paper has been published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which hopefully means it has passed through a crucible of quality peer review.

I sure can't critique many of the arguments invoking the big names of twentieth century physics. However, my concern about this article is that it seems to believe that human influences on descriptions of the world actually shape the world itself. Perhaps this isn't a confusion, but a foundational discovery or assumption of the new physics, but when the authors write "Thus the choice made by the observer about how he or she will act at a macroscopic level has, at the practical level, a profound effect on the physical system being acting upon" I suspect they are blowing something out of all proportion. I can grant that some observations change the observed thing, but I haven't a clue how that works on a cosmic level. If somebody wants to explain to me how telescopic measurement of light a star put out 50,000 years ago affects the star today, please do.

The paper jibes with some recent findings on how mental habits can change even the physical structure of the brain. I believe those studies concentrated on Buddhist monks, and oddly enough the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness pops up in this paper. As soon as Buddhist writings were cited, I feared I had stumbled onto some crappy new age pseudophysics, but the Buddhist remarks were relevant and not dwelled upon.

Anyway, the authors claim that, in contradistinction to classical Newtonian physics, wherein the observer was simply one more part(or sum of parts) in a mechanical universe, contemporary physics incorporates the observer's "inner space:"

The core idea of classical physics was to describe the “world out there,” with no reference to “our thoughts in here.” But the core idea of quantum mechanics is to describe both our activities as knowledge-seeking and knowledge-acquiring agents, and also the knowledge that we thereby acquire. Thus quantum theory involves, basically, what is “in here,” not just what is “out there.”

This philosophical shift arises from the explicit recognition by quantum physicists that science is about what we can know. It is fine to have a beautiful and elegant mathematical theory about a really existing physical world out there that meets various intellectually satisfying criteria. But the essential demand of science is that the theoretical constructs be
tied to the experiences of the human scientists who devise ways of testing the theory, and of the human engineers and technicians who both participate in these tests, and eventually put the theory to work. Thus the structure of a proper physical theory must involve not only the part describing the behavior of the not-directly-experienced theoretically postulated entities, expressed in some appropriate symbolic language, but also a part describing the human experiences that are pertinent to these tests and applications, expressed in the language that we actually use to describe such experiences to ourselves and to each other. And the theory must specify the connection between these two differently described and differently conceived parts of scientific practice.

Happily, the writers do not follow the habit of so many armchair quantum mystics and leave "free will" a vague and cheery phrase. For the purposes of their paper, free choices are free "in the sense that they are not specified by the currently known laws of physics." This is because for the Copenhagen school of quantum physics, "the human experimenter is considered to stand outside the system to which the quantum laws are applied." (In this there is an echo of another Dane, Kierkegaard, who pointed out that the self is always a leftover of one's theory.) I suspect here the difficulties are passed over, which might lead a reader even more casual than I to believe their argument is more solid than it is. In one sense, this can be caricatured as the statement "our system presupposes it, therefore it must be true."

The paper also, alas, invokes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to support free will. as I read them, they hold that nobody will ever be able to completely capture the activity of the calcium ions bouncing between nerve endings, and so determinism is unprovable by scientific means. Obviously, the impossibility of proof for determinism isn't a positive proof for free will. I hope I have misread them here, but it seems they are going about proving human agency, and not human freedom. However, in their defense I believe that they aren't so much arguing for free will as a belief requiring full assent to the belief "this is real," as for a more pragmatic belief "this works." As the psychological section declares, "Quantum physics works better in neuropsychology than its classical approximation because it inserts knowable choices made by human agents into the dynamics in place of unknowable-in-principle microscopic variables." In addition, the paper makes a few predictions about "attention density," a concept I'm not going to touch, the measurements of which they claim should vindicate their position.

Supposedly, quantum mechanics doesn't apply to the atomic level at which the brain works. For what it's worth, the authors of this paper argue against it, claiming neurobiology can be described by "almost classical physics," but not classical physics simpliciter. I'll leave that evaluation to my scientific betters. Also of note, the article touches upon the Libet Experiment, which various popularizers presented as hard evidence for determinism.

Part of their conclusion is worth recording here:

Materialist ontology draws no support from contemporary physics, and is in fact contradicted by it. The notion that all physical behavior is explainable in principle solely in terms of a local mechanical process is a holdover from physical theories of an earlier era. It was rejected by the founders of quantum mechanics, who introduced crucially into the basic dynamical equations choices that are not determined by local mechanical processes, but are attributed rather to human agents.

Their last line reads: "A shift to this pragmatic approach that incorporates agent-based choices as primary empirical input variables may be as important to progress in neuroscience and psychology as it was to progress in atomic physics." In my eyes, an "agent" is not quite a person, but the concept is certainly better off than the marionette theory of the self.