On First Opening Marcel's Man Against Mass Society

I AM BOTH ticked off and ashamed to find that this late in life I wished that back when I was reading a lot of the then still fashionable existentialism that I never came by or bothered to find out about Gabriel Marcel, a French philosopher, playwright, critic, etc. who I now find out is sometimes identified as one of the first existential philosophers.  I will speculate that my early disgust for the approved, canonized (literally in the literary sense of the word) atheist-existentialists I read (and read of) probably had something to do with me not finding out about him earlier, though some of that might have had to do with which ones were placed more prominently on book store shelves and mentioned in journals and magazines.  I think it was sometime after I read Sartre in the original and realized his plays were stupid and his philosophy maybe even more so, his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir and found her as worthless a writer that I pretty much said adieu to existentialism.  

Apparently what became of the word "existentialist" was not what Gabriel Marcel would have chosen himself to be identified with later in his life because he wanted to distance himself from the more famously promoted existentialists such as a student of his work, Jean Paul Sartre and others in that camp.  

I'm not far past the first chapters of his post-WWII work translated into English as Man Against Mass Society and I want to start discussing it and encouraging People to read it.  Translated in the language of seventy years after he wrote it, it's as fresh as any of the more informed of current writing on our current troubles. In fact, it's a lot fresher than even most of that, mired as so much of it is in the kind of academic-journalistic abstraction he railed against.  

Most interesting to me in terms of what I post here is the section that starts here:

. . . On the other hand, this hostility of mine towards the spirit of abstraction is quite certainly also at the roots of the feeling of distrust aroused in me, not exactly by democracy itself, but by the sort of ideology which claims to justify democracy on philosophical grounds.  At no time in my life, for instance, has the French Revolution inspired in me anything at al akin to admiration or even attachment; one reason may be that, when I was still very young, I became aware of the ravages in French social life that are due to a sort of egalitarian bigotry.  But another feeling had its effect.  It was also when I was still very young that my parents - for what reason, I am still not too clear - compelled me to read Mignet's very dry history of that great event;  and the other feeling, which that reading aroused, was my innate horror of violence, disorder, cruelty.  

At that time, the glaring abuses in French social and political life which had dragged on until 1789 struck less feelingly hom3 to me than the crimes of the Terror.  Naturally, as time went on, I arrived at a more just or at least a more balanced estimate of the French Revolution.  But the feelings of indignation which the September Massacres and the other mass crimes of the Revolutionary period aroused in me in adolescence, were not, in the end, essentially very different from those much more recently aroused by the horrors of Stalinism or Nazism, or even by the shameful aspects of a purge nearer home.

Can there be any doubt, then, that a bent of mind so deeply rooted is the point of departure of my whole philosophical development?  But my readers, very naturally, will want to ask me if there is any connection that can be grasped between my horror of abstraction and my horror of mass violence.  My answer is that such a connection does certainly exist.  Even for myself, however, it existed for a long time below the level of conscious understanding.  It is, certainly, only at a fairly recent date that it has become explicit to me; since, as I hope to show in detail in the present volume, the spirit of abstraction is essentially of the order of the passions, and since conversely, on the other hand, it is passion, not intelligence, which forget the most dangerous abstractions. Now I can say without hesitation that my own thought has always been directed by a passionate love (but passionate at another level) for music, harmony, peace.  And when I was still very young I grasped the truth that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions;  though I grasped it, of course, in a form that had not yet reached the stage of conceptual elaboration, (In passing, the fact that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions is the deepest reason for the failure of the League of Nations, and of other pretentious organizations which resemble it.)  Perhaps also the sort of prejudice which I have always had in favor of Christianity, even during the very long period in which I could not envisage the possibility of becoming a practicing and confessing Christian, may be explained by the unconquerable conviction that I had that, so long as Christianity remained true to itself, Christianity could be the only authentic peacemaker.  

A reader may ask, 'But so far as that goes.  Christians of the Left think as you do;  and it is not perfectly permissible to suppose that Christianity of the Right will always remain conformist in spirit,  that its essence is to try to appease and to manage by tact those who hold power in the world, or even to lean on them for support?'  To that my answer would be that in fact I have always been extremely suspicious of a Christianity of the Right!  I have always thought that such a Christianity runs the risk of distorting in the most sinister fashion the true message of Christ.  (I have even been tempted to adopt as my own certain phrases of Pascal Laumiere's from the final act of my play.  Rome n'est plus dans Rome. [Rome isn't in Rome, anymore].)  Only I should like to add immediately that the men of the Right are very far from having a monopoly on the spirit of conformity and appeasement;  there is a conformism of the Left,  there are men of the Left who hold power in the world, there are 'right-thinking people' (in the conformist sense of the phrase) on the Left as well as the Right;  I remember one day before the war saying something of this sort at the Ambassadeurs,  thus greatly shocking Jacques and Raissa Martian.

One must add that conformism of the Left, not only because it has, if I may put it so, the wind behind its sails these days, but because it is in such glaring contradiction with the principles that the Left claims to be defending, must be denounced just as ruthlessly as conformism of the Right.  Not, of course - this hardly needs saying - that there is any excuse for allowing conformism of the Right, with all it to often implies of blindness and unconscious cruelty, to cash in on that weight of reprobation with which, on this count, one must load the shoulders of the Left.  One must recognize the fact that, in certainly countries of Europe and the Americas, the spirit of clericalism, with the hateful political connivances that it implies, is tending to take on a character that, for a truly Christian conscience, becomes more and more offensive.  The note of a truly honest mode of thinking in these matters, as in book-keeping, is to have a system of double entry, and to prohibit oneself from marking down-by an intellectually fraudulent operation - to the credit of the Right what one has to mark down to the debit of the Left.  I am thinking now of people who, because of their horror of the Soviet world, are today tending to regard Nazism with a certain retrospective tolerance.  That is an aberration - end a criminal aberration.  In any case, who could fail to see at once the simple mechanism of the mental conjuring trick by which we belittle a danger that is past, simply because it is past, or because we believe it past?  Is it really past?  Or may it not in fact appear again, and in a form not radically altered?  In this realm of discourse we must learn once more to express ourselves categorically and to denounce the errors of amoral relativism which is, as may be easily shown, radically self-centered.  Human nature being what it is, the movement which I condemn morally is too often the movement which hurts me personally;  and I am likely to go on condemning it for as long as (and just so long as) it is really able to hurt me.  

I hadn't expected to type out so much of Marcel's introduction but I felt compelled to go on once I started.  I will continue this in the coming days but I want to make several comments on the above.

One of the ways in which the Left and certainly the Right that Marcel wrote about in the late 1940s and early 1950s used to refuse to address what someone like him said was to dishonestly associate him with Nazism or Marxism or some other disfavored ism of the time.  I'm not aware enough to know what his detractors in France and in the English speaking world may have done in that regard to Marcel Gabriel's thought but I know it was the typical way of such discourse.  Something like that, today, is rampant in the attribution of "antisemitism" to any critic of Israel and its many crimes against humanity and in the almost comic clowning of the American Neo-Stalinist fanboys and gals (now uniformly Trumpian Republican-fascists!) calling the most conventional of moderate, democracy loving Democrats "communists" and "Marxists."  

There is fodder of that kind in some of what he says, such as his criticism of Jean Genet.

. . . the novels and characters of Jean Genet are a striking case in point.  From such a novelist's point of view, a middle-class hero practicing the dreary virtues of his retrograde social group is a much less brilliant character than a thief and pervert who has the courage to put into action those desires which, for the plodding bourgeois, never get beyond the stage of unadmitted day dreams.

I am sure that someone old enough to still have the rote-reaction against any criticism of Jean Genet - a hero of the mid-brow "left" who knew the name and that he was "homosexual" and risque and allegedly some kind of persecuted artiste.  I may have held that view of him myself until I did what so few of them bothered to do, read some of his work and I have to say, my reaction to what I read there was akin to my reaction to the crimes against humanity during the French Revolution.  Maybe it's because by that time I had been the victim of a violent crime, ironically, one committed on the basis of my sexual orientation.*

I'm sure many if they read him would be inclined to view Gabriel Marcel through the phony, stupid, left-right "which side are you on" pantomime of political identity which I rejected about fifteen years ago.  Or, more typically, those who might skim him to find the kind of dishonest grounds for launching such a leftist (or rightist) fatwa against him such as is mentioned above.

In regard to Genet and his then fashionable elevation of the gutter level of the demimonde of "perversion" and criminality, pretty much the only reason he ever became a championed figure of the fashionable "left" in France and beyond, I'd seen enough of that even in the pre-Stonewall gay milieu to realize it was a vestige of political and legal oppression and violence which was not sustainable or even desireable.  Ironically, thinking about this since reading the above on Monday, I think one of the most striking "artistic" portrayals of that is in the decidedly non-intellectual, decidedly of that genre John Waters movie Female Trouble in which a rich, thrill seeking couple go trawling through the demimonde of Baltimore, Maryland to thrill at the trashy criminality of the character played by Divine and her two cat thieving, probably prostituting "cheap girl" sidekicks, filming the perversity and violence they encourage, including her character murdering her daughter and (in her first star turn, members of the audience).  I mean, if the John Waters of that period saw through that kind of thing, how much more obvious could it get?  

Of course one of the things that will be grasped onto in that way by the several mid-brows who troll me is his mild semi-criticism of democracy and the phrase "egalitarian bigotry."  I will note that the "democracy" he almost certainly meant was the liberal democracy of post-WWII France, probably that of the United States (which had a long, long list of crimes committed by a government democratically chosen), which I have, as well, come to see as something to be overcome, not maintained.  His phrase "egalitarian bigotry" as well has to be seen in the context of the society and times in which he wrote it.  A society in which morality and virtue, even highest levels of those unattached to self-gain or even self-esteem, were disdained.  The popular literature of the 20th century, especially the most fashionable of it, reveled in violence and moral depravity and the virtue of the mentally and morally lazy, cynicism.  The value placed on spectacle, in line with what was in popular literature, and so depravity and violence, is the predominant strain in even what passed and passes even more, today, as high-art.  The kind of equality which I say is the actual foundation on which a genuine egalitarian democracy has to be founded is an equality of human beings, of natural living beings not an equality that covers their ideas or, really, their preferences generally based on their desires and self-gain.  That ties in with Marcel's condemnation of abstraction but it also figures highly into his skepticism of any democracy, any equality which values those things more highly than it does the lives of People and other living beings.  

My reading of the promoted, and so, in a way, approved atheist existentialists, Sartre, Camus. I suppose de Beauvoir, . .  had, by 1975 filled me with a disgust for the word that I'd pretty much stopped paying attention to it.  I don't see Gabriel Marcel as being anything like that, from the little I've read of him and I feel a kindred feeling with him, I could translate a lot of what he said into my own biography.  Even during my long, stupid and cowardly agnostic period I held to the morality of the Gospel and the Prophets and even much of the radical egalitarian economics of The Law.  I could never acquiesce to the elevation of abstractions over the lives and pain of any others, those who looked and spoke like me or those who I only read about in newspaper estimates of the victims of individual or mass slaughter and maiming.  Clearly the ersatz atheist saints of that time, such as Sartre could blithely support Mao as his regime was murdering millions of Chinese People, just as the Left talked about above could the millions already credibly reported on being murdered by Stalin and Lenin before him, just as D. M. Mackinnon in his Foreword to the English edition points out:

There is a deep, albeit unrecognized kinship between the man who in 1937 was denying Guernica, and the man who in 1947 is justifying, or denying Stalinist deportations and slave camps; ('progress' and 'tradition' are excellent examples of the sort of abstraction from whose tyranny M. Marcel would free us).  

The same kinship finds its banality right now in the American free press which recapitulates that in its "journalistic ethics" that excuse and normalize even the neo-Nazi ravings of Donald Trump and his camp with a monumentally lop-sided "even handedness."  But that will get me on to the dangers of viewing even freedom in the abstract as removed from the inconvenience of morality and the concreteness of reality.

I will try to continue this.

Trump using Pavarotti during his post-literate Nazi rallies confirms my dislike of his bellowing going back decades.  

This Is How Stupid Our Media Is

I HAVE YET to read anyone in the corporate or non-corporate media writing about the DOS attacks that have taken Archive.org off line for going on about a week,  if it happened to the organ of idiocy that Twitter(won't call it "X") is they'd be having hysterics over it. 

Archive.org deserves support and protection from its corporate (publishing) enemies as well as those who do things like this, we need it in ways that no one needs Twitter,  the social-disease-media that did at least as much to choke off the promise of online, non-profit journalism as Facebook.   I've got a couple of projects that are stuck because I didn't download books I needed before this happened.   Rachel Maddow, you need to get on this for tonight. 

Some Notes On The Failure Of Catholic Fromation Since JPII

OPINION POLLING is rank pseudo-science of the most obvious kind, there being no way to check the most basic act of it, "data" collection for accuracy or even honesty.   There is little more control over the honesty or validity of the method of structuring questions and asking them and anyone who has looked at the industry and its practices over the past half a century who came away without suspecting the various companies rig those to get results that those paying them to do it want is a chump.  Such chumps comprise most of the corporate media, much of the non-corporate media and huge numbers of those who should know better.

Still, for reasons of argument and because I think there is a real and dangerous phenomenon behind this,  I'm going to assume the reliability of this recent Harris Poll which shows that the Catholic Church and Catholics have a fascism problem, at least in so far as a small majority of white Catholics goes. 

Catholic voters in seven battleground states favor Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 5 percentage points, but the vice president leads the Republican nominee overwhelmingly among Hispanic and Black Catholics in those swing states, according to a new poll conducted by the National Catholic Reporter.

With just more than three weeks to the election, Trump leads Harris 50% to 45% in the closely watched battleground states, a margin that could be an important factor given the closeness of the contest. Most polls say the race is too close to predict, and margins are extremely narrow in the decisive states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Among Hispanic and Black Catholics in the battlegrounds, Harris has an advantage over Trump with nearly seven out of 10 Hispanics and more than three-quarters of Blacks favoring the sitting vice president. The lead among Blacks and Hispanics stems from a strong aversion to Trump as well as an alignment with the vice president on values and key social issues, the poll shows.

That anywhere near 45% of Catholics of any identity could support Donald Trump in 2024 is proof of a complete failure in the morality of Catholics,  when you concentrate on the fact that that 45% is identified as "white" focuses the problem even more on a particular part of the Catholic population.   As someone who would be identified as a "white Catholic" that fact troubles me a lot.  What is it about the past half a century of the Catholic Church that has led to something I'd have found bizarre back then when most of the Catholics of my experience were Democrats, most of them very solidly Democratic voters.  

I would expect the long papacy of the arch-conservative John Paul II would have a lot to do with it, along with the long reign of the even more right-wing "Mother Angelica" at her ETWN, which was sort of a Catholic FOX "News" before FOX "News" was much of anything.   The influence of that putrid outlet on the Trumpization of a large number of Catholics cannot be overestimated.   After her death it has, if anything, become even worse than it was when she ran it. 

I would like to know how much of that 45% are products of the affluent Catholic prep to Ivy Equivalent system.   I saw a little of that back in the 1960s as one of my sisters attended a Catholic Women's College where she was one of the few non-nun blue-collar students there.  I recently looked at the program of her graduating class and of those I knew something of, all the others were what might have been called "Catholic American Princesses."   At least one of whom was rumored to be the daughter of a mobbed up father.    I know at least a few of them were College Republicans.   More recently there is the current Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court with at least five Catho-fascists arguably from that class,  I will always remember Charlie Pierce pointing out that the prep that Kavanaugh went to was nothing like the blue-collar Catholic schools that those of my class attended.  I'm not unhappy that there was none in my town so I am a product of the public schools. 

What has happened to Catholic formation that could have produced such support for the most amoral materialist, overtly pagan to have ever run as a major party candidate?   One with his track record of mortal sin and crime, reveling in violence, reveling in theft and grift and the secular sins of treason and, that most serious of mortal sins hardly considered to be one LYING AND BEARING FALSE WITNESS.  How could that many millions of Catholics, no doubt considering themselves the genuine article favor him over Kamala Harris.   If other polls are to be believed a majority of that 45% would not have their support hinge on anti-abortion because a majority of it almost certainly doesn't hold the official US Catholic Conference of Bishops line on that one issue - they certainly don't fall in line with that line when it comes to their own sex lives and reproductive choices - as Trump certainly never has.  I mean, he's on record as having encouraged what became his second wife to have an abortion when she became pregnant, that is certainly relevant to any consistent anti-abortion voter, you'd think.  

The papacies of John Paul II and his chosen successor Benedict XVI were pastoral disasters, both globally and in the United States in particular.   Their appointments as bishop were notable for their incompetence, their pastoral indifference, their legalism and their unconcern with local parishes (which they shut down more than built) and the religious formation of Catholics.   The current make-up of the U.S. Conference is a moral catastrophe in many regards, including its support for Republican-fascism.  They embody the old anti-Catholic accusation that Catholic majority countries have a better record of producing fascism than democracy.    

It's not only white Catholics which produce these problems and questions, it's white Americans, especially white-male Americans, a group which, as it climbed in affluence went farther right, following other white sub populations in that.  Only you can't have it both ways, you can't both be an adherent to the Gospel and a Trump supporter.   You certainly can't claim to be faithful to Catholic social teaching and support the Republican-fascist party in 2024.   

Good Pope Francis has recently added Cardinal electors to the College of Cardinals, most of which will vote for his successor,  some are pointing out he is doing so as a means of getting ready for that event which will come sooner than later, most likely.   He has now appointed a very large percentage of them.   He is also replacing bishops here as the appointees of JPII and BXVI either die or reach the age of retirement.   That change, if it is change for the better, can't come soon enough.  I go back and look at the American bishops of the 1970s, many appointed by the disappointing Paul VI and it looks like an age of moral light instead of clerical darkness today.   His successor will be faced with the problem of the billionaire-millionaire AstroTurf anti-Francis establishment that is both well financed and entrenched, ETWN being only one part of that.   They will also have to address the Catho-fascists who have been installed in the Judiciary and who are in the Congress, now.  Many of those are the kind of converts who are about as sincere in their Catholicism as Henry VI of France.   Newt Gingrich,  Candice Owen, J.D. Vance, etc.?   There was a push to get fascists to convert and the reason had nothing to do with the Social Teaching of the Church.   The crypto-fascist priests and others involved with that should certainly be investigated.   A similar take-over effort has marred American Orthodoxy, which the Orthodox philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart laments may as well be an arm of the Southern Baptists, now. 

Even The Best Possible Outcome Of The Election Will Be Inadequate In The Long Run

THE ELECTION has me so worried that I have been trying to avoid thinking too much about it.  So much is at risk if Democrats don't both win the presidency and the Congress that I can't sleep as it is.  I've been too ill to have much participation in the election, this time.  Which may account for why I'm so anxious.  Being involved, working on it in the past has helped to alleviate the anxiety about it, the feeling that what ever happens for the bad, it isn't my fault.  I can take some comfort in that my district in my state isn't likely to vote Republican though the Second District of Maine could there's little I can do from the other end of the state to have an effect on that.  

New Hampshire, the only state that Maine has a border with, is also believed to be more or less safely voting Democratic, at least for president.  

That leaves what little effect writing something here would be and I'm pretty certain most of those who read what I write will be voting a Democratic ticket.  My political writing has a far more radical agenda than would be effective on an electoral level, radical reform of the Constitution, including the sacrosanct First Amendment and the god-damned Second Amendment,  such a radical reform of the Supreme and federal courts as to find the recent proposal made in the Senate is inadequate.  Nothing less than a Democratic President and Congress imposing term limits on the sitting "justices" that would remove at least the three longest sitting Republican-fascists, a binding ethics code with criminal penalties on the "justices" and summarily nullifying Marbury vs. Madison would be enough to protect egalitarian democracy from what has in our history been the most corrupt of the branches of government in my reading of American history and the daily news.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is another on the must-do list to save even the dangerous and inadequate liberal-democracy we have now.  And scrapping liberal democracy for egalitarian democracy - INCLUDING ECONOMIC JUSTICE - must be on the agenda of anyone who really cares about any real democracy in the modern sense of the word.  There can be no democracy worth trying for which is not egalitarian.  The modern stupidity that puts "liberty," "freedom" as the paramount virtue of democracy over equality is not only stupid, it is a proven flop.  Economic inequality under liberal democracy is the thing which has made us dangerously vulnerable to the billionaire-millionaire world-wide movement to impose oligarchic fascism.  If the Clinton and Obama administrations had made real moves towards real, effective economic justice to the poor, the middle-class and the destitute, the billionaires and millionaires wouldn't have found such fertile ground in which to plant Trumpian fascist rule.  Of course, what little they did being misrepresented by the "free press" was no help but the Ivy-league lawyer-presidents were never going to touch on that because of the false piety given to the First Amendment even as they were lied into impotence through the mass media feed to lie under it.  

The part played by the entertainment industry in this has to be faced in a way that the idolatry of the First Amendment prevents.  Trump as Reagan before him was a product of that industry.  The producers of The Apprentice, its directors, writers and others which created the phony Trump presented on it, the colluding mass media which presented him first as a clown-prince, then as an increasingly frightening dictator  are who gave us this national and world nightmare.  That the stupidest, sleaziest, liar, rapist, crook and con-man to have ever gained actual power in not only one of the states but over all of them was an As-Seen-On-TV fraud should be generating journalism and academic and political commentary and analysis of the dangers that "The Free Press" as entertainment media is stupidly called.  That all of those are afraid to take on the dangers imposed through the modern reading of The First Amendment, starting under Holmes and Brandeis but most of all through the Warren, Burger, Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, and the vague 18th century poetry of the Bill of Rights proves how far we are from saving even liberal democracy.   I attribute that failure to liberal democracy, itself, what gave us the 18th century structure of government under the Constitution, including all of its intentional corrruptions - the pro-slavery and pro-oligarchy aspects of it - and the false piety for things like the First Amendment.  I have written extensively over the past eighteeen years about the danger of "free speech absolutism" which is a product of the stupidly phrased First Amendment, something which has led even someone as well intentioned as Maya Wiley to foolishly talk about a "right to lie."  It is lies in the mass media, everything from what passes as journalism to the cesspools of "reality TV" which is as phony as can be to hate-talk media and comedy which have brought us here.   The numerous laments about the "death of truth" the profit from the lie machines that are Trump and the like of J. D. Vance have not dared to address the fact that it was the Warren Court, under that dangerously libertarian interpretation of The First Amendment which has produced the delusion that there can be a "right to lie" as granted to the great grey whore, the New York Times and which is the extremely successful business model for FOX Lies.  Murdochian media sets the pace for the rest of it, CNN, the DC and NYC punditry in all of their career polishing vileness.  

Any political or legal ideology which puts the welfare and freedom of words over the lives of People, even under the guise of liberal democracy, will eventually go for those lies which generate the most profit for those willing to lie.  That's as true for "journalism" as it is for hate-talk comedians and shock jocks, it is infamously what makes the legal professions, now judges and "justices" as well as for the jr. level of that in mere lawyers, so famously disreputable.  Judges and "justices" gave their fellow lawyers carte blanche to lie and playing let's pretend even before Holmes, Brandeis and the Warren Courts invented a "right to lie" for the New York Times and, so, all of media.  It's one of the lessons I've had from seeing the antics of the Trump lawyers before judges and "justices" the extent to which lawyers can tell the most transparent lies in legal filings and even before the bench without suffering any real consequences.  You can look at the status of the worst of them and how few of the worst of them have really been removed from the legal profession to see just how much lying is not only tolerated but given free reign in the Courts and the law profession, no doubt out of the professional interest of other lawyers who can expect to profit from that kind of lying while being paid by the billing hour.  You can see that in the career of what Trump took as his ideal advocate, the entirely corrupt and crooked Roy Cohn who was only finally disbarred in the fabled bar of New York as he lay on his death bed, dying of AIDS, even as he lied about even that.   

We are in need of so much reform that even if Kamala Harris gets a Veto proof Senate and a large Democratic majority in the house that most of it will probably not be attempted or even imagined as needed.   I've been considering the skepticism of "freedom" not in the terms that the materialist-atheist-scientistic cult talks about it but as it is asserted under libertarian-liberal democracy, raised by thinkers such as Marilynne Robinson, on one side, and David Bentley Hart on another.  I think the problem with that conception of "freedom" is that it is detached from moral considerations.  I don't mean what most Americans mean by "morals" or "morality," that is the restriction of what Women or LGBTQ+ People do with their own bodies, prohibiting those who want to smoke pot or resonsibly use hallucinogens, harming no one- often not even themselves, I mean the religious morality of doing to the least among us what we would do for God, of doing to others what we would have done to us, OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE TO THE POOR AND DESTITUTE, things like that.   The 18th century definition of "liberalism" as is embodied in the political conceptions of framers of the American Constitution was permissive of the most grotesque immorality of kidnapping and enslaving human beings, of treating them as chattels, of genocide against the Native Americans, of the rankest objectification and submission of Women, etc.  That is the "liberalism" that the prissy "classical liberals" and the tech-bro fascists mean when they talk about "freedom," the freedom of the richest to do whatever they want as the large majority of humanity goes to hell, useful to them only as masses to be manipulated through the lying, algorithm manipulative media can manipulate them, as can be seen in the idiocy of those panels of "undecided voters" who are willing to consider going with Trumpian fascism, yet again.  

But the "left" which is detached from the moral absolutes of religious morality aren't much of help, either.  Well before the tech-bros considered most people as mere "masses" that word was bandied about in such lefty talk, if you go back and read the literature of the American and European and other "lefts" you will find that they were as bad if not worse than the disciples of 18th century European "liberalism" in that regard.  It's no great mystery how they could witness the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. with the kind of equanimity as those who see the crimes of the Israeli government do right now, of the goddamned Green Party Republican-fascist tools like Jill Stein who can't bring herself to admit that Vlaidimir Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity.  

I think the only hope for egalitarian democracy is in that morality, whether it be in the Christian synthesis of Hebrew justice with the Gospel of Love from Jesus or the other monotheistic religions or in the equivalent moral holdings of other, non-Abrahamic religions - though so far in history, those have yet to produce a national government which is egalitarian-democratic.  It's not as if the United States has really accomplished that, either, despite all of the talk about it over the past two-hundred plus years.  Our 18th century Constitution is one of the major inhibitions against equality and real democracy, I think other countries which have more modern Constitutions and a parliamentary system of government have a better chance of taking that step.  You'll never get it under a regime of materialism, intellectual or the far more influential vulgar materialism which even the "intellectuals" of materialist-scientistic-atheism really follow.   You'll never get it under an ideology which puts the rights of words over the rights of living beings, which pretends that privileges granted to artificial corporate entities (such as corporations and "the press") are the same things as rights naturally inhering only to natural living beings, which values legal fictions over even the hardest and most exigent of lived realities, such as flourishes in our "liberal democracy."   If those worked we would never have gone from the exposure of the many crimes of Nixon, including his war crimes in South-east Asia, to the crimes of the Reagan-Bush I administrations, to the Rehnquist Court imposed Bush II regime, to that of Trump in just over a half a century.  All of those crimes, all of them were not only permitted by but happened under the umbrella of what is really permitted under the American Constitution, as acquiesced in by the false-protection of the "free press" and the judiciary, all of them sold to a duped plurality of American voters under the anti-democratic and increasingly non-democratic Electoral College and the gerrymandered, rigged districting of Congress, fed by our lying media.  

Of course, I will be voting by next week for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and a straight Democratic ticket down ballot - I even do that in our local non-partisan elections, now.  I will never vote for a Republican-fascist or a phony turd-party or so=called independent (excepting those who caucus with Democrats, now).  But I am not optimistic about American democracy because the changes necessary to even keep the false substituent we have now won't be made during my lifetime.  But I will be pushing and protesting and pointing out the lies, the hypocrisies and the realities of what is needed.  Starting with the Gospel of Jesus, the radical economics of Abrahamic monotheism, the presence of those in other religious traditions.  I'm not wasting any more time pretending there is a non-religoius force that can substitute for those, there simply is none, including what is sold as an equivalent in our secular civic pieties.  Those have had more than two centuries to produce and they are worse than a flop.  They never really intended to produce equality or democracy.  They certainly have not produced economic justice.

Sorry About Those Line Breaks

Got to remember to type things into a text editor, not a word processor from now on. 

God is known through God’s compassionate involvement in the sufferings of people, Book Report - Theology A Very Short Introduction by David Ford

IN MY RECENT illness, I was looking online and found that there is a Christian Universalist Association book list - as part of their ordination program which I'm not especially interested in - which I decided to read through.  I've already read several of the classics on the list, available in PDF's online so I figured I'd work through the rest of them as I could find them.  One of the books is Theology - A Very Short Introduction, by David Ford, one of the series of books including The New Testament- A Very Short . . . by Luke Timothy Johnson which I recommended as surprisingly good for a "very short introduction."    

So I decided to read the book by David Ford.  It is, also, very, very good as well as being less than two-hundred pages.   Not anything like a survey of the literature, which would take a very long introduction to even get close to, but something which describes the field and some of the most basic ideas of Trinitarian Christianity and theology in general.   I would definitely recommend it as an effective first book to read on the topic for the large majority of those who have never read any theology.   It is a good inoculation against the ignorant prejudice that stereotypes theology as an unworthy intellectual field,  an opinion held in complete ignorance by a very large percentage of our alleged intelligentsia as well as the far larger camp followers who would like to be mistaken as part of it but aren't even willing to put that much of a non-effort into knowing what they talk about. 

Among the other virtues of the book is the description of how the doctrine of the Trinity was a product of serious and rigorous engagement with the experience of the first generation of what would become Christianity, by report, and the continuing experience of believers who experienced what LTJ would all The Living Jesus,  the name of one of the best books on the topic, in my experience.  

I am struck by how much of the content description of The Living Jesus in Johnson's book is said in somewhat different words by.   I'll risk copyright infringement to give you a part of this section which I was so impressed with I typed it out.    I'll try to get the lines to wrap right but there might be breaks.  

Mainstream Christianity believes in God as a Trinity. This God is very different from the vague notions mentioned above, and if someone says ‘I do not believe in God’ they do not usually mean that they have considered
and rejected the Trinity. Faith in the Trinitarian God is remarkable enough to require some basic explanation as to how it came about and what it means. I will tell the story about this from a mainstream Christian standpoint and also point to some of the big questions about it. Jesus and the first Christians were Jews, and so the God they worshiped is to be identified mainly by looking at the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament. One key story there is about Moses at the Burning Bush in Exodus Chapter 3. It is what is called a ‘theophany’, a
manifestation of God, and it became one of the main texts used in Jewish and Christian discussion of God. Moses in the desert near Mount Horeb comes upon a bush that is blazing but not consumed, and a voice addresses
him which says: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). The voice goes on to say: ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt … I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them …’ (3:7–8). God sends Moses to Pharaoh and promises to be with him, and when Moses asks God’s name he is told: ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (3:14. Other translations are: ‘I am what I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’). What conception of God emerges from that? The discussion is inexhaustible, but for now three points are crucial.

First, God is identified through key figures who worshiped him: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; their stories are the main way to understand who this God is. Second, God is known through God’s compassionate involvement in the
sufferings of people, and is on the side of justice. Third, that mysterious name ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’ means at least that God is free to be God in the ways God decides: there is no domesticating, there is
‘always more’, and God can go on springing surprises in history. 

Now leap over hundreds of years to Jesus (of whom much more will be said in Chapter 6).  He is in this tradition of worshiping God. But, as his followers tried to come to terms with who he was and what had happened
through his life, death, and resurrection, they came to affirm that he was one with this God. Is there any way of making sense of that extraordinary conclusion? His resurrection is the pivotal issue. We will look at it in more
detail in Chapter 6, but for now let us look at it from the standpoint of the early Christians.

For the first Christians the resurrection was a God-sized event which affected their understanding of Jesus, of history, of themselves, and of God. In terms of the Burning Bush story, God was now decisively ‘the God of
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus’, and through Jesus God was compassionately involved in history at its worst. The resurrection was the great surprise. They ascribed it to God, seeing the raising of Jesus from the dead as comparable to creation. The content of this event was the person of Jesus, who in this way could be seen as identified with God by God. Jesus was seen as God’s self-expression (or Word), intrinsic to who God is, so that their worship began to include him. There was a wide variety of
expressions, names, and forms of behavior with reference to Jesus, but the central tendency was to see him as having unlimited significance, liveliness, and goodness, inseparable from God. Not only that, his life was shareable in unlimited ways. This was expressed in the New Testament’s stories of the  pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the risen Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into his disciples.

So the basic theological structure of the resurrection event could be summed up as: God acts; Jesus appears as the content of God’s act; and people are transformed through the Spirit that comes through him. That can be seen as the seed of the later doctrine of the Trinity. A creator God says ‘I will be what I will be’; and this God’s decisive self-expression and selfgiving are in Jesus and the Spirit. It is directly in line with the God of the Burning Bush, but tries to do justice to a massive surprise.
 

Yet it took over 300 years for these implications to be worked out and agreed in the doctrine of the Trinity. That process in itself says a great deal about the nature of Christian theology. The complex setting for theological
thinking included teaching the faith to new members (culminating in their baptism ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’), continually worshipping this God, deciding on the contents of the New
Testament, interpreting scripture and tradition, wrestling with the most sophisticated contemporary philosophy and culture, responding to challenges from pagans and Jews, settling internal Christian disputes, and engaging in ordinary living in faith. As the church moved from being a
persecuted community to becoming a major force in the Roman Empire, there were also new political dimensions in Christian debates about doctrine.

That was a messy, complicated process. It makes a fascinating story which it is essential to study in order to be educated in Christian theology. The points it suggests about the nature of theology as understood by Christians
include the following: theological conclusions are not just deductions from authoritative statements, but are worked out by worshipers responsibly engaged with God, each other, scripture, the surrounding culture, everyday
life, and all the complexities, the ups and downs of history; the Bible is the model for this sort of thinking which is deeply involved with both God and real life; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus show the extent to which
God is vulnerably involved in life, allowing people the freedom to misinterpret, misunderstand, and do great evil, while yet never letting that be the last word; there is an endless process of learning to live with each other before this God, and theological thinking is essential to that.
There are still intensive debates about the issues of that time, but as regards our present topic, God, there is to this day a remarkable agreement among the vast majority of Christians that the conclusions of those early centuries were right. It has become basic Christian wisdom that God is Trinitarian, and in the 20th century there was a new explosion of theologies of the Trinity. From many quarters the doctrine has been thought through afresh— by Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, feminists, liberation theologians, missiologists, natural scientists, psychologists, social theorists, musicians, poets, philosophers, Africans, Asians, Australians, theologians of world religions, and so on!

 The rest of the book is like this, some of the ideas were unfamiliar to me and those which I was somewhat familiar with I now understand a lot better due to how David Ford said it.   

While I'm sure a lot of People who've got college credentials like I do would pooh-pooh the reading of these "Very Short Introductions" but this morning I had occasion to remember the role played by reading the World Book Encyclopedia over the course of several years in my childhood - one of my brothers mentioned reading through it as well.   It was a very good elementary school level encyclopedia and back before the internet, it was as close to having that kind of diverse knowledge at your fingertip as it got when we couldn't get to the library.  Considering how prevalent a smattering of ignorance is on diverse topics among those with elite educations - I might get started at how many even PhD level adults seem to believe that movies are real and that the similar level of common received lore of their late adolescence suffices as expertise, I don't think anyone has a right to disdain such a series.  I say that having some deep reservation in the experts who were chosen to write books on some subjects in the series - Susan Blackmore on Consciousness?  Peter Singer on Marx? - those I've read so far are actually excellent, each an invitation to keep going on the subject and not figure reading one book is sufficient to give you an education on a topic.   

Knew I'd Get Covid, It Was Worse Than I Anticipated

FIRST, in lieu of a real post,  here's a comment I left at Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube channel, it contains a real question one which I hope someone answers though I suspect no such study of the reliability of mathematical speculation within physics or any other science has ever really been done.

I'm curious, has anyone ever made a list of the predictions made by theoretical physicists on the basis of mathematical speculations to see what percentage of those which were later confirmed by physical observation were wrong?    The success of such speculation seems to be based on what would almost certainly be a minority of those which were made and published with great confidence.    I started calling this "science fiction written in equations" when Hawking and Mlodinov insisted that the equations about "other universes" alone were what legitimately should be considered confirmed physical theory,  something which you seem to have noticed, as well.   It seems to me that this whole matter of confidently made theoretical claims made without either physical observation or even the possibility of that (especially true of claims made of such lost information as comprises evolution within biology and mulit-verse story telling) accounts for a lot of the decadence of science.   I think this also has a dangerous effect in the general culture as can be seen in the "genetic" speculations of neo-fascist and racist politics and legal theory.

I could point out that this is especially seen in the racist Republican-fascist party right now in the United States and in similar politics in other countries.   I wish I could find out the percentage of criminally billionaire tech-bros who read The Selfish Gene as part of the smattering of ignorance they gained during their so-called educations and believed it.   I suspect the percentage might closely match the percentage of them enthusiastic for or at least not bothered by the flagrant, crude, vulgar, white supremacy of the Republican-fascist party they are funding and using and trying to keep in power.   I suspect the percentage of those in the media and legal profession and judiciary might be at least as high if not higher.  

Considering the part played by the kind of racism that a naive affluent, white liberal c. 1970 stupidly felt confident would soon be a thing of the past in not only U.S. but world politics and given the prediction of a number of dissident biologists, geneticists, etc. that the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology would lead to a renewal of the kind of racist, very potentially murderous eugenics that has flowed out of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, it seems to me to be one of the most important unexamined problems with politics and how to keep and protect egalitarian democracy.   I will point out in relation to that that the liberal democratic ideology which was championed by so many a naive, affluent, white liberal of the 70s and now has proven to not only be entirely comfortable with the renewal of America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, its equally indigenous form of that in white, especially affluent male supremacy,  the question of that libertarian liberalism as a direct contributor to the current flourishing of fascism is as pressing a question.

--------------------

It was obvious that sooner or later I'd get Covid again as I went back to teaching in person - it being impossible to distance while teaching an instrument - but I wasn't expecting it to pack such a wallop .   Still tired but back on my feet.  I'm going to have to learn how to teach without showing the fingering on the keyboard.  With a ventilation fan going.  

Jay Semko - Gospel

 

O

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Belinda McKeon - Dropping Slow

Dropping Slow

 

Marion O’Dwyer stars as Maeve, a woman defiantly at peace in her new oasis – A ghost estate - in Dropping Slow by Belinda McKeon.

 Marion O'Dwyer was Maeve

Featuring Michael Harding

Natalie Radmall Quirk - back announcements.

Featured sound recordings by Chris Watson

Tthe recordings from the Arigna Mine were by Peter Woods.

Producer Kevin Brew

It's a one-act length or shorter play,  didn't have time to listen to a longer one but I'd like to get back into posting one every week, preferably a new one that isn't the same old thing.  

Always A Beginner

GETTING BACK INTO teaching full time has been more challenging than I had expected it would be, which accounts for the large gaps in writing for this site.   Part of that has been incorporating some of the newer software and other digital resources into my teaching, which means I've got to learn that better, myself.   I've also been changing some of my long-established practices in teaching beginners - up to the 3rd grade as that's generally defined.   I've always encouraged experimentation in composing and improvising as well as ear-training but I think it's a good idea, now, to emphasize that even more than learning pieces.   Getting used to changing how I teach has been a real challenge, since I won't teach anything I haven't done for myself, first.   

Every time you touch the instrument or sing you're a beginner if you're still doing it and not just going through the motions.  Betty Carter, not long before she died said that the music has to be new, every day because we were new every day.   That's as good a philosophy of making music as I've ever read or heard or thought of. 

At five-thirty in the morning I am dreaming in a very
quiet room when a soft voice awakens me from my
dream. I am like all mankind awakening from all the
dreams that ever were dreamed in all the nights of the
world. It is like the One Christ awakening in all the
separate selves that ever were separate and isolated
and alone in all the lands of the earth. It is like all minds
coming back together into awareness from all distractions,
cross-purposes and confusions, into unity of love. It is like
the first morning of the world (when Adam, at the sweet voice
of Wisdom awoke from nonentity and knew her), and like the Last
Morning of the world when all the fragments of Adam will return from
death at the voice of Hagia Sophia, and will know where they stand.

Such is the awakening of one man, one morning, at
the voice of a nurse in the hospital. Awakening out
of languor and darkness, out of helplessness, out of
sleep, newly confronting reality and finding it to be
gentleness.

Thomas Merton - Hagia Sophia

Mehdi Hasan vs Eylon Levy on Gaza, FULL DEBATE -With Comments

 

It's pretty clear that Levy almost immediately broke the agreed to rules and took the low ground so I think it was entirely justified for Hasan to respond in kind.  

I'm not a huge fan of formal debating because it's almost never really going to be held to and I think reality can't be effectively dealt with in a fixed format with a fixed time limit, even when you limit the topic.   I've never heard one where everyone followed the rules since I was in high school, and that one devolved into pat generalities that solved nothing, it was an exercise in following a format.   

I think it's pretty obvious that Levy was the less honest of the two which is why I think Israel has lost so much support over its conduct of not only this war but all of the various wars it has conducted since 2000.  I was so shocked and disgusted with its conduct in Lebanon during the Bush II regime that this one doesn't surprise me one bit.   I think the U.S. should seriously restrict any aid it gives to Israel, including an understanding that no more will be given to the present regime or one like it in the future.   Considering Israel's attack using pagers this past week, it could certainly have done something against Hamas than its genocidal war in Gaza.   I like Mehdi Hasan, support all of those prosecutions for war crimes he challenged Levy to support and which Levy refused to.   

You don't have to love the Israeli government to oppose Hamas or any other criminal regime, setting it up so that you're demanded to support one or the other is sort of the ultimate loaded question, which is hardly ever put as a question.   As The Reverend William Sloane Coffin pointed out during the so-called struggle for hearts and minds in a response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, they didn't have to choose either the Soviets or the United States, that they could hate both of us.  I have the same opinion of the Hamas regime and the Netanyhu regime. though I think it's a serious question to bring up.  I'd never accuse the Hamas regime of democratic legitimacy but I can't absolve the voters of Israel for keeping a criminal as the head of its government longer than David Ben Gurion held that position.  

If Kamala Harris become president, I hope she will drastically change U.S. policy towards Israel,  it is my most serious criticism of President Biden, who I think is the best President we've had since Lyndon Johnson left office, that he has given the support to the Israeli government that he has, though even he has gone beyond what Johnson did in public in criticizing the conduct of Israel's war and occupation in Gaza.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Fa’amoana John Luafutu & Tom McCrory - A Boy Called Piano

A Boy Called Piano 

Auckland 1963, three eleven-year-old boys meet in family court. Two Māori and one Samoan: Wheels, Piwi and a boy called Piano. Made wards of state, they are taken to Owairaka Boys home. There begins a story into the heart of darkness, abuse and pain but also the remarkable resilience of the boys as they seek to survive through the power of friendship, culture, music and the light of the human spirit.

Written by Fa’amoana John Luafutu, himself a survivor of state care in the 60s, and performed by Fa’amoana, his son Matthias and two of his grandsons, A Boy Called Piano is a unique opportunity to hear this story live and direct from those who lived it. Building on The Conch’s kaupapa of harnessing the power of drama as a force for social change, this work gives a voice to the thousands of Māori and Pacific children made wards of state.

Internationally acclaimed director Nina Nawalowalo ONZM leads an 8-strong cast for this audio recording made up of three generations of the Luafutu family to tell Fa’amoana John Luafutu’s story.

Written by: Fa’amoana John Luafutu & Tom McCrory

Directed by: Nina Nawalowalo

Music composed & performed by: Mark Vanilau

Produced by: PANNZ & RNZ in partnership with The Conch & Katherine Wyeth

Supported by Creative New Zealand

Developed in partnership with Auckland Live

CAST: Fa’amoana John Luafutu, Matthias Luafutu, Tane Luafutu, Aaron McGregor, Micah Luafutu, Nina Nawalowalo, Tupe Lualua & Tom McCrory

Recording & studio engineering for RNZ by: Marc Chesterman

Supervising producer for RNZ: Adam Macaulay

Orrin Evans Trio - The Answer

 

Orrin Evans, piano 

Eric Revis, bass

Karriem Riggins. drums

 Will J.D. Vance say attempted presidential assassinations are just a fact of life? 

Brahms:String Sextet in B-flat In Brahms' version for piano-4 hands

 

Miwako Takeda & Nobuhito Nakai  Recital in Tokyo Japan

I was unaware that Brahms had issued a version of this for piano 4-hands.   You don't know how tempted I am to find someone to study this with, though I doubt I'd have the time to do it justice for a public performance.  It's one of those pieces which I associate with very late summer or early fall, probably from hearing it performed then while I was in school, though I can't remember.

Here are the parts.   Wish it was in score format but I can understand why a piece of this would have been published the way it is.  Too involved for a score format to be practical.  Brahms did publish a version of the second movement variations for piano solo at the request of Clara Schumann.  I do think this version is more effective though I love the two hand version of it, too.

Why Are The Young And Scientistic All Of The Sudden Declaring Democracy is "Mathematically Impossible" During THIS Election Fall?

Robert Sapolsky, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lawrence Krauss,. . . The list of materialist-atheist-true believers in scientism before the public who strenuously deny the possibility of free thought, free will is a long one.  It seems to be an inevitable result of that triad of beliefs, especially those of materialism and scientism, though I have to say I don't really know of any atheists who talk about it who aren't both materialists and true believers in scientism.  Even when one of those MASers want to claim to accept free will they have to do so through a logical disconnect between their inflexible materialist monism, which is ruled by the scientistic faith that physical causality as can be asserted through science rules everything and free thought or free will which would have to have some degree of non-causality within it or it would not be free.  For example, the loud-mouth MASer Sean Carroll holds the self-contradictory position of "compatablism" that, somehow, free-will is true even though it is a product of physical determinism, which strikes me as an evasion.  If it is because he knows that most People wouldn't welcome the results of an enforced, hegemonic rejection of free will and would choose to reject his faith in MAS, I think that's entirely more plausible than that someone who is aware enough of the problem to take the compatibalist dodge doesn't understand that it is logically incoherent.  The high priest of materialist-atheist-scientism and ultra-Drawinism, Richard Darwkins, has a similar logically disconnected, luke warm assertion that he believes we can, somehow, overcome the determinism of natural selection, though his own claims in his books and articles certainly would make that a logical impossibility. 

This is motivated by what I think is one of the most serious of those results in a belief in materialist-atheist-scientism has been having a bit of a flourish on Youtube and, I'd guess, in other such venues in the claim that democracy is mathematically impossible.  Go to Youtube and type "democracy is mathmatically impossible" into the search window and you'll see what I mean.  This seems to be something that the smug, young egotists of sciency atheism are pushing quite hard even as the real scientist MAS .  I can't, for the life of me, not think that it has some connection to the assault on democracy funded by tech-bros in league with the vulgar materialists who are bros without any tech, at least other than owning shares in tech businesses.  

I haven't had the time to write the second post on "Learning People" but when I came across these videos extending the denial of free thought, free will to the claim that democracy is mathematically impossible, during an election year which could be the end of America's imperfect democracy I couldn't not make a comment that their sciency style of argument, ignoring the reality of democratic government and society in real life, with all of its oddities and in-built corruptions (the anti-democratic Electoral College's effect on America's presidential elections, the anti-democratic practices of vote suppression and things like gerrymandering on other offices) ties in very well with Luke Timothy Johnson's observations about how you can't learn People like you can learn non-living things and my eternal slamming of the pseudo-social-sciences of which this is definitely a manifestation.

I have come to the conclusion that just as eugenics, scientific racism and everything from proposals for genocide to the actual practice of genocide is a consequence of the scientific hegemony of the theory of natural selection, the holding of materialism, of scientism, of atheism will inevitably lead to a disintegration of the intellectual prerequisites for democracy, especially egalitarian democracy, the only democracy worthy of the name in any modern language.  I think it's all an over-extension of scientific method, which is a human invention, not anything like an alleged law of nature, into things where scientific method can rather obviously not be practiced.   It is related to the declaration of Ernst Haeckel that attributed to Darwinism the final triumph of the materialist monism that was his favorite ideological position,  though I have always suspected the real motive behind that was the atheism that it is inevitably held to prove  when it is asserted that is where the real emotional force behind that assertion lies. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Alan Archibald - Testimony

 Testimony 

We speak of truth. We speak of the whole truth. We speak of nothing but the truth. Where then in the long run does the truth lie? The truth is, the truth lies everywhere. It always lies. It is always unwholesome. It is anything but.

Testimony is a tense two-hander in which a middle-aged couple ruminate on the small and sombre detail of a tragic death in the family in the hope of finding light and life at the end of an endless post-mortem involving a culprit as well as a casualty.

Written by Alan Archbold

Andrew Bennett and Cathy Belton star as Michael and Sandra

Sound Supervision Mark Dwyer and Damian Chennells

Produced by Aidan Mathews

Betty Carter - Geri Allen Stardust / Memories of You

 

I never get tired of this, two great artists interpreting two great songs.

I am not referring to the knowledge of humans claimed by certain proponents of the so-called social sciences, who proceed on the basis of dismissing considerations of freedom and interiorty and treat humans collectively, as though they were only a slightly more disorganized hive of bees -Instead Of Just Another Darwinism Post

IN THE BOOK recommended by me last month, Living Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson wrote a section about the difference between studying things and studying living beings.  Much of what he writes he attributes to the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel who I have never read - the paperback publishing industry in the United States and Britain were far more apt to push materialist-atheists like Sartre and Camus than religious existentialists so that's the existentialism I was exposed to and which formed my judgement of it.  I can say that if I'd read the kind of ideas Johnson gives in this section my opinion of existentialism, as a whole, would be far more positive than it has been.  

I'm going to give you much if not all of this section with some commentary about it before I give you the material I mentioned in my last post because the difference between an authentic way of learning People (and, I assert, other living beings) and learning things in the way that the sciences and pseudo-so-called-social sciences do makes all the difference in how someone will understand the intersection between Darwinism and eugenics, both "mild" eugenics (there really is no such thing) and genocidal eugenics.  Johnson's proposal for studying, for "learning" People is wiser and more honest than any scientifically based study of them.

Here is where LTJ begins on page 57:

A good place to begin is with the recognition that all learning between people involves a process so complex and opaque as almost to defy analysis.  For humans to learn about things is fairly straightforward, even though we cannot yet claim to understand such cognition in its entirety.  Insofar as the things themselves stand still, however, and insofar as we can devise fair and accurate tests, we can determine - in the case of numbers and forms and ancient languages and all sorts of historical data - that people take things into themselves, as it were, and eject them again pretty much intact, not noticeably affected by having passed through a human brain.  Things that live and move and grow, however, are much trickier, and learning them requires quicker feet.  The more life and movement involved, in fact, the more complex the process of learning.  The more such complexity of life involves interiority and some form of consciousness, the more the gap between how we are learning and what we are learning gets closed, the more critical become the changing positions of observer and observed, and the more flexible and responsive must be the learner.  And when it is a matter of learning from and about another human person, then the process is difficult and delicate, indeed.

It is important to emphasize here that I am not referring to the knowledge of humans claimed by certain proponents of the so-called social sciences, who proceed on the basis of dismissing considerations of freedom and interiorty and treat humans collectively, as though they were only a slightly more disorganized hive of bees.  I am not interested in challenging the validity of knowledge reached by such premises and procedures, but only in pointing out that such knowledge is gained by reducing people to the level of things and is,therefore, of limited value to those who seek to learn other human beings as people - that is, precisely as creatures possessing interiority and freedom.  Although the social sciences tend to treat people as problems to be solved, people are in fact  best learned whey they are viewed as mysteries to be experienced.

The distinction between "problem" and "mystery,"  which I touched on briefly in Chapter 1, came to my attention through the writings of the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel.  He distinguishes between the kind of thinking that is appropriate when people respond to a problem and that which is appropriate to a mystery.  A problem is something that lies outside us and has certain objective character, with enough energy, time and intelligence, we can solve a problem. [I would say we can sometimes solve a problem.] In that solution seeking process, furthermore, it is important not to get personally involved.  Budgets are best dealt with by folks who treat them as financial problems rather than a measure of their personal worth, for example, and broken carburetors are best fixed by mechanics who have no string opinions about the place of internal combustion engines in the cosmos.  In contrast, mysteries enter into those dimensions of human existence in which we are by definition very much involved; situations of heath and sickness, birth and death, alienation and reconciliation, Because our selves are already deeply involved, we cannot detach ourselves from such situations without distorting them.  If we treat grief as a problem to be solved rather than as a mystery to be experienced, then we will relate to grief in unhelpful and possibly destructive ways.  In the ream of mystery, it is not the calculating intelligence of problem solving that is called for, but the meditative intelligence of reflection.  

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If LTJ had not so carefully couched the reliability with which he asserts the possibility of solving problems and the appearing objectivity with which things about numbers, . . . historical facts unaffected by the "human brain" they pass through I might argue those points, though I'll settle for pointing out that he is subtle in discussing their reliability and freedom from coloring by human minds and expressions.  I'm a lot less apt to grant that as a given, maybe having read the physicist A.S.  Eddington on the philosophy of physical science* and the early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum on the fact that what we claim to know is, fundamentally based on beliefs has something to do with that.  But I'll let that go for now.

What he said about the allegedly scientific study of living beings, especially human beings, especially those aspects of interior human experience and that experiences effect on actions by individuals in the world - the actual thing that can be seen by an outside observer is entirely more intellectually honest and responsible than anything I have read by any champion of or claimed practitioner of the scientific nature of any study of human minds or, in fact, from any biological scientist of any kind.  

Including those who I greatly admire and respect.  Richard Lewontin came close to it a number of times such as his essay debunking sexology and opinion surveying and surveys allegedly discovering data about individuals' actions as they report those things but he didn't get close to the kinds of distinctions that Luke Timothy Johnson lays out within what is a theological essay. His essay was based on the absolute fact that all interiority of human minds can only be viewed through the claims People made about that internal experience.  He also pointed out the same thing Johnson did, that without means of testing anything People report about their interior experience, there was no way to verify it or to even test its truthfulness.  

Every single proposed study of human minds, individually in Psychology, collectively in Sociology, Anthropology, with pretty fMRI and other images, Neuro-and Cog Science, and by making up retrospective fiction about them and our forever unviewable and unknowable ancestors, human and otherwise, long-jumping over hundreds of millions of years to assert common-traits  in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology is based on the absolutely known to be false premise that they have means of overcoming the impossibility of objective observation of that interiority, the false claims that they "can devise fair and accurate tests" of their claims and hypotheses or even of what is taken to be their raw data.  There is simply no way to do that without direct, somewhat objective observation of that interior experience and continuing, constantly changing lives and much else that can never be had, no more than the lives of the 99.9999999999. . . percent of living beings over about three and a half billion years of life on Earth can ever be observed.  All proposals to do science about what cannot be observed even indirectly is a fraud and it always has been since the first such claims based on the ideology of materialist monism and its related dishonesty were published.  

This passage from Living Jesus is among the most succinct and profound expositions of the difference between an honest way of learning about People and other living, behaving creatures and the dishonesty about that which pervades modern culture.  Not that Johnson's observations are not modern in the sense that it is part of current instead of ancient culture.  I would say it is an example of the kind of jumping over and out of so-called "enlightenment" materialist-atheist-scientism which is necessary for us to escape that as well as all previous cultural cul-de-sacs.

It was one of those things I discovered when I started reading theology in a serious way twenty nine years ago that what I found, especially in more modern theology, was often far more persuasive and, so, impressive than what I read in secular philosophy or, in fact, any of the alleged sciences that deal with human interiority and which, almost inevitably, deny the reality of human freedom.   And, as I am always at pains to point out, we can at least experience the world as human beings and we can learn what other human beings say about their interior lives, we have no such access to the experience or reporting of other living beings, animals, micro-organisms, etc.  Any claims made about their interior experience or lives is pure lore masquerading as science even as so much of what is claimed about human beings by other human beings, as seen through the methods and lenses of scientific method (much of which in the case of the behavioral sciences is anything but scientific) is not much more reliable.  If Johnson will not fight about that in the context of his essay, I will not leave that without saying.  It is exactly on the kind of "science" that Luke Timothy Johnson describes here that the scientific beliefs of the Nazis rested on, with that, the bases of their genocides and other crimes against humanity.  We know that because that is what they claimed, right up and including the reason given by Reinhardt Hydrich to kill even those Jews who somehow didn't die through the Nazis attempts to enslave them unto death because he thought such Jews would be biologically superior and could restart an even more formidable Jewish population, something he got directly from the theory of natural selection, something which starts with the first publication of On the Origin of Speices and, especially, as was claimed in The Descent of Man.  

I will give you links to the two videos that I was going to post instead of getting into this again in September, from Yad Vashem Holocaust Education 

Roots of Nazi Ideology

and

The Main Principles of Nazi Ideology

While they go very far in coming clean about the fact that the Nazis had every reason to believe that they based their ideology on scientific fact because they got their ideas largely from the claims of scientists.  Mostly from the 19th and early 20th century,  Darwinism. the theory of natural selection and the eugenics that followed on almost immediately as a logical conclusion drawn from the theory of natural selection.  I will fault the two videos for making common errors so as to get out of not having to attribute the Nazis eugenics and genocide to the theory of the person of Charles Darwin.  Those are the:

The common dodge of attributing such eugenics and genocidal ideas to Herbert Spencer's "Social Darwinism,"  encapsulated in his phrase "Survival of the Fittest."  We know to an absolute certainty that such a distinction is false because no less a figure than Charles Darwin, himself, in the fifth edition he wrote of On the Origin of Species says, at length, that not only did he consider "Natural Selection" to be identical to Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest," his co-creator of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace encouraged him to make that clear.

There is the dodge that eugenics was derived from the naive view of genetics held at the time.  We know that to be false, to an absolute certainty by what the inventor of Eugenics, Francis Galton said in Chapter Twenty of his lengthy Memoir of My Life in which he said his inspiration to invent eugenics was his reading of On The Origin of Species, which led him to do research which resulted in two lengthy articles in Macmillan's Magazine and the book Hereditary Genius, which he counted as his first works on eugenics.  And from that same chapter we know that Charles Darwin approved of Hereditary Genius because he wrote Galton, his cousin, with his. his wife (and cousin) Emma and their son George's delighted acceptance of the claims made in the book.*  That was decades before Galton or, in fact, anyone within Darwin's' inner circle knew anything about genetics.  Gregor Mendel had sent his 1866 paper to Darwin who seems to have never read it because nowhere does he acknowledge a knowledge of genetics.  Galton doesn't seem to have known of it as he developed a non-Mendelian theory of heredity of characteristics, interestingly, he was opposed to the Lamarckian ideas of Charles Darwin, he being more in the Weismann school of thought on that. But the invention of eugenics proceeded from the theory of natural selection.

There is the unfortunate slip of attributing Nazism's genocidal eugenics to "the theory of evolution" in the second of the videos instead of the more limited and accurate attribution of it to the theory of natural selection and the eugenics that flowed as naturally from that as  the approval of any elite flattering and championing theory by the members of the aristocracy and those who wish to join that economic class.    There is nothing intrinsically eugenic or genocidal within the theory of evolution, or as I agree with about a man I agree with about little to everything else about,  Jerry Coyne, the fact of evolution.    Eugenics didn't come from previous theories of how evolution was supposed to happen, it was almost an immediately arrived at logical conclusion with the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection, as soon as On the Origin of Species was published.  It was a huge boost to both the Malthusian economics of anticharity,  scientific racism,  other science-supported claims of bigotry and the demotion of human beings to things in exactly the way critisized above by Luke Timothy Johnson.  

The first video also has the virtue of coming up with a distinction I've called for being made for a number of years now, distinguishing between the biological hatred of Jews, antisemitism, and the distinctly different, though still evil practice of Christian antijudaism.  There is all the difference in the world between wanting to murder all Jews and wanting Jews to convert to Christianity and join Christians as being Christians, as, in fact, Jews have since the very start of Christianity, as virtually every named disciple of Jesus in the New Testament were Jews.   It is very likely the entire New Testament is written by Jews who considered themselves to be Jews.   Antisemitism is a biological theory, the exact analogue to scientific racism,  antijudaism is the mistaken idea that the People of the Covenant were to all convert to Christianity and to disappear as a distinct People by assimilation.  The violence and killing and coercion of antijudaism was a sin which most Western Churches have confessed and repented of,  antisemitism has been successfully published as peer-reviewed science both before WWII and which was cited by Nazi literature and as late as the 1990s when Kevin MacDonald and others were doing to little to no objection within evolutionary psychology.  MacDonald was appointed as a professor of science, the editor of professional journals, etc. and I have seen no evidence of science ever issuing the kind of confession and ban on such stuff being published as science even after it was humiliated by having MacDonald's work exposed to the wider world when the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier David Irving had him testify in his infamous suit against Deborah Lipstadt.   I have mentioned that the high priest of neo-Darwinism,  Richard Dawkins praised another such antisemtic scientific publication by a champion of MacDonald's antisemitism, John Hartung in his antireligious screed, The God Delusion.  I don't know if Dawkins has edited that out of subsequent editions of that book.

* We can also know for an absolute fact that Darwin supported Galton's and Ernst Haeckel's eugenic claims because of his many repeated endorsements and citations of those in his second major work on natural selection,  The Descent of Man. 

Those absolute facts obtained by reading the very words of people like Darwin and Galton are far more absolutely knowable than any claim made in the science based on natural selection or the derivative claims of eugenicists or in any of the so-called social or behavioral sciences, sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, included.