This morning, as it happens, I am standing, puzzled, in the kitchen, with a little book set down before me. I am in the midst of one of those moments where the folly of my solitary undertaking takes hold of me and, on the verge of giving up, I fear I have finally found my master.

His name is Husserl, a name not often given to pets or to brands of chocolate, for the simple reason that it evokes something grave, daunting, and vaguely Prussian. But that is of little consolation. I believe that my fate has taught me, better than anyone, to resist the negative influences of world thought. Let me explain: if, thus far, you have imagined that the ugliness of ageing and conciergely widowhood have made a pitiful wretch of me, resigned to the lowliness of her fate – then you are truly lacking in imagination. I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept. I may be indigent in name, position, and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivalled goddess.

Thus Edmund Husserl – and I have concluded that this is a name fit for vacuum cleaner bags – has been threatening the stability of my private Mount Olympus.

–the thoughts of Renée the concierge, from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, pp. 53-4.

It’s not a calling, there are choices, the field is wide. You do not take up philosophy the way you enter the seminary, with a credo as your sword and a single path as your destiny. Should you study Plato, Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, or even Husserl? Esthetics, politics, morality, epistemology, metaphysics? Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite – for this turns the university into a sect.

–from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, p. 252.

It’s a revealing experiment to put side by side bookstores and the Internet—or even just Google Books, which now offers 15 million of the world’s 130 million unique books. Both the Internet and Google Books strive to assemble the known world. The bookstore, on the other hand, strives to be a microcosm of it, and not just any microcosm but one designed—according to the principles and tastes of a “gatekeeper”—to help us absorb and consider the world itself. That difference is everything. To browse online is to enter into a search that allows one to sail, according to an idiosyncratic route formed out of split-second impulses, across the surface of the world, sometimes stopping to randomly sample the surface, sometimes not. It is only an accelerated form of tourism. To browse in a bookstore, however, is to explore a highly selective and thoughtful collection of the world—thoughtful because hundreds of years of thinkers, writers, critics, teachers, and readers have established the worth of the choices. Their collective wisdom seems superior, for these purposes, to the Web’s “neutrality,” its know-nothing know-everythingness.

Read more: The End Of Bookstores | The New Republic

As the intrepid Sister Gertrude reminds us in Muriel Sparks’ The Abbess of Crewes:  a problem you solve; a paradox you live with.  A long-standing question in philosophy is whether the relationship between mind and body (or mind and brain) is a problem to be solved or a paradox to be lived with.  If it is a problem to be solved, then the history of Western thought (that deposit of our faith) has provided us with two main approaches to solving it.  We can be either dualists or monists.  The decision is based on the number of types of things we think there are.

The dualistic approach to the mind/body problem, as presented to us most famously and rigorously by Descartes, but which may date as far back as Plato, says there are, ontologically speaking, two fundamental sorts of things.  There are extended things (res extensa) and there are thinking things (res cogitans).  Extended things are those which are composed of parts outside of parts, and thinking things are those which are not extended, i.e., which have no parts.  Extended things can be quantified, measured, plotted on a grid, located, and are—at least in principle—accessible to all.  This means they supersede perspective.  They can be fully comprehended in their surfaces, in their geometry and geometrical relations, in their mathematico-physical determinations.  Note that when I say “in their surfaces” I am not referring to anything necessarily simple or superficial.  As extended things are composed of parts, each part will have its “surfaces,” and these parts may form extremely complex networks of relationships.  In any event, they are the foundation for a “third-person” ontology, which in turn is the foundation for science.

Thinking things, in that they have no parts, are not susceptible to measurement, quantification, or localization.  They cannot be mathematically or physically determined—they are not that sort of thing at all.  They are the foundation for a “first-person” ontology (if there is such a thing), but they will not be comprehensible by science (or by the same sort of science, if there is more than one kind science) as  are extended things.

In short, extended things and thinking things are, as they say, apples and oranges—two fundamentally different types of things.

The trouble is, these apples and oranges always make their appearance at the same time.  Hence the mind/body problem:  how does an immaterial, nonphysical, non-locatable (it is literally nowhere) thinking thing produce effects in a material, physical, tangible extended thing?  Descartes had his ideas about it.  He thought that in the pineal gland somehow thought interacted with body.  But even if he were right, he would only be answering the “where” question, not the “how” question.

The temptation to accept the dualist position stems from its taking seriously mental life.  It makes no effort to explain consciousness, emotion, intentionality, will, desire, or any other aspect of mental life in terms of material or physical being.  That would be, to a dualist, not to explain but to explain away consciousness.  But most of us have no wish to give in to this temptation because the cost seems much too high.  It would require that we abandon our hopes for a science—which would appear to depend upon “third-person” ontology—of consciousness.

In fact, most of us—and almost all of us who are denizens of the kingdom of science and technology—are monists.  We think there is just one fundamental sort of thing, viz., matter.  That is our working assumption.

Now one way to be a monist is to adhere to a program of reductive physicalism.  That means, your hope would be to explain absolutely everything in terms of matter in motion.  You might take “matter” in a wide sense to include “energy” (as we know they are convertible), but nevertheless what there is is matter.  The temptation to this position stems from its promise of something like a grand unified theory of everything, a consistent theory that at least in principle promises completeness.  And with completeness would come—again, at least in principle—predictability.  At the atomic level we have very substantial (even though not perfectly good) reasons for thinking that what happens happens according to the strictly deterministic laws of nature.  So much about reality allows itself to be explained according to physical laws that admitting the existence of some “thing” that does not submit to these laws strikes us more as giving up the game of science all together.

But what are the prospects of explaining, say, the collapse of the international finance system due to the unsupportable risks of credit default swaps in terms of protons and neutrons, quarks and charms?  Exceedingly slim, I would say…about the same as predicting earthquakes at the molecular level.  And the prospects are no better for explaining why I reach for the freezer door handle when I want a frosty mug for my beer at the neuronal level.

An important question is why would we even want to make explanations at this level.  If all reality—including human social reality—were fully explicable in terms of deterministic physical laws, then what would become of, say, the ideas of moral responsibility, creativity, and love?  These ideas depend upon a metaphysical concept of freedom (whatever exactly that means) that would be dashed on the rock of physical determinism.  Some thinkers seem sanguine about such a prospect, but it is a minority view.  Most of us want to maintain what we take to be perfectly meaningful talk of choice and responsibility, as the cost of forgoing it would be much too high.

Thus on the one hand we do not want to admit that science has such narrow limits as to tell us nothing about consciousness but on the other we do not want to give up a “first-person” ontology all together.  Both naturalistic and materialistic science and the psychological, social, economic, aesthetic, and moral discourse we all engage in are too important to dispense with.

So are we left with a problem or a paradox?

Neil Campbell has given us a concise and excellent example of an attempt, if not to solve, then at least to point towards a solution to the problem of mental causation—how the mind has causal effect on the brain/body.  His general position on mental causality is not original.  In fact, it is perhaps the most widely help position among philosophers of mind and consciousness.  Campbell’s book is teasing out some of the nuances of the position by way of critically elaborating the views of Donald Davidson.  However, the book offers the neophyte to such questions a clear and succinct presentation of the philosophical issues at stake and is accessible to any interested reader.

Campbell is one of many proponents of non-reductive physicalism.  Non-reductive physicalism is purportedly an alternative to reductive physicalism, but one which does not revert to dualism.  It is best not to think of non-reductive physicalism as a theory in its own right.  Think, instead, of non-reductive physicalism as a disideratum, as a standard by which to judge how satisfactory to our intuitions is any particular theory of mental causation.  The tenets of non-reductive physicalism represent our basic intellectual commitments going into the question from the start.  What are those tenets?

First, there is the commitment to non-reductionist explanations of consciousness, of mental states, and of mental causality.  We will not be satisfied with any theory that explains away thought, consciousness, intentionality, desire, creativity, or moral responsibility as mere illusion.  We are committed, for example, to the idea that our wanting a drink is causally connected to our getting a drink.  We are committed to the idea that our desire for that which is not our own is causally connected to our stealing that thing and that we are responsible for that theft.

Socrates, in the Phaedo, shows us the distinction between the cause of something and the conditions without which the cause would not be a cause.  Suppose, Socrates says, one were asked to explain why Socrates is in jail at just that moment.  Reflecting the answer of one who confused cause with condition, Socrates says:

I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture—that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming. [Jowett translation]

So non-reductive physicalists do not want to make this “mistake and misnaming” of mental causality.  But they do nevertheless recognize that the mental has conditions without which there could be no consciousness and therefore no mental causation.  The non-reductive physicalist is committed also to what Campbell describes as “minimal physicalism.”  The commitments of minimal physicalism are three:

1.    a commitment to supervenience, the idea that while the mental is not reducible to the physical it nevertheless depends upon the physical.  This commitment entails that “physical properties are ontologically primary in some sense.” [3]
2.    a commitment to causal closure, the idea that “nothing outside the physical domain (should anything exists beyond it) can affect the physical domain,” i.e., that “all physical events have physical causes and only physical causes.” [3]
3.    a commitment to the goal of explanatory completeness, the idea that “there is an explanation, in physical terms, for every mental event and human action.” [4]

The second commitment rules out dualism.  Couple that with the first commitment, and the third seems to follow.  But notice the slippage in the terminology.  Physical events have (only) physical causes.  Mental events have explanations couched in physical terms.  Commitment 3 does not say that mental events have (only) physical causes, for that would violate the commitment to non-reductionism.  If non-reductive physicalism is a disideratum, a standard for evaluating theories of consciousness, then can any theory satisfy its requirements?  And, if a theory were to satisfy its requirements, what kind of a theory would we have?  Non-reductive physicalism addresses our (apparently conflicting) intuitions about reality and ourselves, but are our intuitions really correct?  Can we save the appearances?  How can we have a theory that includes supervenience but that does not end up reducing the mental to the physical, on the one hand, or that does not end up reintroducing an irreducible dualism, on the other?  Is non-reductive physicalism a matter of trying to have our cake and eat it, too?

Campbell is well aware of this problem.  He recognizes that commitments to both non-reductionism and minimal physicalism “places considerable strain on the commonsense view of mental causation.” [4]  For example:

If my action of drinking a lemonade is a physical event, as it must be, then by closure it has a physical cause, and hence an explanation in physical terms.  And if, given antireductionism, the mental property of my desiring lemonade is not reducible to the physical property that causes my drinking, it seems my desiring lemonade qua the tokening of a mental property makes no causal contribution to my drinking.  If the property of desiring the lemonade is epiphenomenal, then we seem to have abandoned the commonsense view of mental causation.  Indeed, it seems we have abandoned mental causation altogether. [4]

Clearly, there is some sort of anomaly here.  In fact, the position of Donald Davidson goes by the name of “anomalous monism.”  Campbell focuses on two key papers of Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, Causes” (1963) and “Mental Events” (1970) in order to account for this difficulty.  In the latter paper, Davidson expounds and attempts to reconcile three principles, as Campbell lists them [17], that apparently conflict:

1.    At least some mental events enter causal relations with physical events.
2.    Events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws.
3.    There are no psychophysical laws.

Certainly, the first principle is true.  I hit my thumb with a hammer (physical event) and I feel pain (mental event).  Or I desire to eat cake (mental event) so I slice myself a piece (physical event).  The second principle has to be true.  In physics, we have Boyle’s law: “For a fixed amount of an ideal gas kept at a fixed temperature, P [pressure] and V [volume] are inversely proportional (while one increases, the other decreases).”  In other words, decreasing the volume of a fixed amount of gas causes the effect that the pressure increases. This is an example of just what we mean when we say that X causes Y. Every time X happens, Y happens because of X in a regular, predictable, deterministic, law-like manner.

The third principle is the controversial one.  Think about it:  I might say that “I voted for Obama because I liked his war policy.”  I will be very, very unlikely to say, for instance, “I voted for Obama because of the state of my hypothalamus.”  But why is this?  To answer this question, we have to look at “type identity theory”—the idea that for every type of mental event there is a type of physical event that is identical with it—and why this theory is implausible.

The reason type identity theory is implausible is as follows.  For type identity theory to give us the kind of satisfaction we desire in our explanation of the mental, it would have to include what is known as “bridge laws.”  Remember the second and third commitments  of “minimal physicalism” – every physical event must have a physical cause (causal closure) and every mental event must have an explanation in physical terms (explanatory completeness).  So if we want to say that the mental causes something physical to happen, then there must be some “bridge law” that links the mental to its physical cause.  Can we find such bridge laws?  Consider the following:

a.  multiple realization – mental states can be realized in various ways (and not just one way).  For instance, in humans beings pain is a function of the stimulation of c-fibers.  But what would pain be for, say, an ant or an octopus or a Martian?
b.  neural plasticity – even if we were to limit ourselves just to discussing human beings, it turns out that our neurological systems are, in fact, highly “plastic” or variable or malleable.  We know that damaged brains are able to re-wire themselves and become alternative sets of functionings (but still resulting in, for instance, pain).
c.  mental holism (from Donald Davidson) – all beliefs and desires are modified and mediated by other beliefs and desires.  None of us has exactly the same network of experiences and beliefs, so we cannot have the same types of physical states tied to them.

From these three points, we can conclude with Davidson and Campbell (among many others) that there are no strict psychophysical laws.  I.e., there are no clear “bridge laws” from the mental to physical or vice versa.
So if all three of Davidson’s principles are true, then it seems like we are forced into a choice to figure out what the real cause is.  Is it mental or physical?

a.  Only mental causality is the real cause.
–But then we are back in dualism, with the mental as something mysterious.  We are committed both to causal closure and explanatory completeness, and this choice would give us neither.
b.  Only physical causality is the real cause.
–But then the mental seems “epiphenomenal.” In other words, the mental seems to “ride on top” of the physical and be more or less illusory.  This would not explain the mental, but explain it away.  But we are looking for a theory that is committed to non-reductionism, but this choice reduces the mental to the physical (i.e., says that the “mental” is nothing but the physical).

Donald Davidson thinks he has an answer:  “anomalous monism.”  Basically, it is “token identity theory.”  For every token of a mental state there is a token of a physical /brain state.  So, there is no choice between the mental and the physical, because the mental is the physical.  Better put, Davidson wants to say that there are events (which are particular, datable occurrences—i.e., events are not types, but tokens).  For any single event of the relevant type, however, there are two types of causal explanation which do not reduce to one or the other.  We can explain what’s going on via descriptions of physical causality or we can explain what’s going on via descriptions of mental causality, depending on our interest.  But we do not need to have a mental causal explanation of a physical causal explanation or a physical causal explanation of a mental causal explanation.  We do not (and probably cannot) reduce one type of causal explanation to the other.

In any case, it seems like the best choice for understanding the mental in a physical world is a type identity theory.  Notice how Davidson’s “anomalous monism” appears to satisfy all the requirements for non-reductive physicalism.  First, it is minimally physicalist.  It accepts supervenience (at least in a weak sense), and it allows for both causal closure and explanatory completeness.  And, it is non-reductive in that it allows for the mental have its own (explanatory) realm.  Davidson’s “anomalous monism” is more or less a “black box” functionalism, in that it seems to suggest that we do not need to know how the brain actually works to understand the mental.

The aim of Campbell’s book is to defend Davidson’s position of anomalous monism against its critics.  Chapter Two outlines three objections to anomolous monism.  The first objection (from Honderich, Hess, and Stoutland) claims that anomalous monism results in the causal inefficacy of mental properties, i.e., epiphenomenalism, that the mental is causally irrelevant to physical events.  Campbell deals with this objection in Chapter Three.  The second objection (from Stoutland and Honderich) is that if there are no psychophysical laws, then it is no more than a coincidence or an accidental connection that physical events have the mental properties that they do.  The third objection comes from Jaegwon Kim, which is that anomalous monism’s adherence to supervenience runs afoul of Kim’s “exclusion principle.”  The exclusion principle states that “no single event can have more than one sufficient cause occurring at any given time—unless this is a genuine case of causal determination.” [36]  Anomalous monism, says Kim, which holds that the mental is not reducible to the physical, ends up implying that any attempt to explain how one mental state causes another will have two possible and irreducibly distinct sufficient causes.  Again, this shows, according to Kim, that Davidson’s position results in epiphenomenalism.   Campbell deals with the second and third objections in Chapter Four.

Nevertheless, after defending Davidson on anomalous monism, Campbell argues that Davidson is wrong to think that reason-giving is a form of causal explanation.  Thus Campbell’s two main claims in the book are that “(1) mental events cause actions because they are token-identical to physical events; (2) explanations of intentional action that appeal to mental events (‘reason explanations’) are not causal explanations.” [5]  Campbell defends the latter thesis in Chapters Five and Six.  Campbell argues for what he calls “explanatory pluralism,” the idea that at least some events have multiple explanations, explanations of irreducibly different types.  In so arguing, Campbell concludes that Kim’s “exclusion principle” is unjustifiably constraining and fails to recognize different species of explanation.  Campbell is willing to admit that anomalous monism does entail a certain type of epiphenomenalism, but it is of an explanatory rather than of a metaphysical nature.  “Explanatory epiphenomenalism” [83 ff.] is no barrier to the full acceptance of physicalism, according to Campbell.  In fact, this approach might shed light on the perennial problem of the “explanatory gap” or the “hard problem” of consciousness—how the phenomenal properties of conscious experience can be captured in physical terms [103].  Campbell writes:

Given the anomalousness of the mental I claimed, as does Davidson, that the fact a physical event is also a mental event that rationalizes an action is not something one can determine from knowledge of the physical facts and the laws that determine them.  When events are characterized under their physical descriptions rationality drops out of the picture entirely.  This doesn’t mean that physics (or whatever the basic physical theory turns out to be) is incomplete.  Since explanation is an intenstional relation and functions only when events are appropriately described, one shouldn’t expect knowledge of the physical facts to entail knowledge of the rational relation between reasons and actions.  To think otherwise is to play fast and loose with the canonical form of explanation statements…. [103-104]

But where does this all leave us?  The mystery remains as to why consciousness admits of both physical causal “third person” explanation and “first person” mental explanation.  That “why” question might not, itself, be a problem to be solved but a paradox to be lived with.

The book that contains all books?

Personal exhaustion?

Caputo’s estimation of all this?  He finds neither Žižek nor Milbank to be really interested in matter…i.e, matter doesn’t really matter for them.  Milbank denigrates matter by seeing it as a moment or a stage to be passed through on the way to the resurrected body (which, if matter, is no matter we’re familiar with)—his not-so-radical orthodoxy.  For Žižek, it is not so much matter that matters but our ability to embrace our fantasies and to give ourselves over to a Cause even though we know there is nothing more to what is than matter, despite the utter despair this produces.  The “matter” that matters to Žižek is “spectral” or virtual matter that is the result of our pursuit of desires, fantasies, causes.

In the end, Caputo thinks this debate on matter doesn’t really matter at all.  Why be forced to choose if presented by a false dilemma?

Why do we need the notion that at the metaphysical base of things there lies either a primordial peace or a primordial violence — or a primordial anything, at least one that we could ever get our hands on? Why do the multiple repetitions of which our lives are woven need to be cast either as a downbeat and futile search that will be always frustrated or as underwritten by an uplifting metaphysics of participation? Why inscribe either absolute contradiction or absolute peace at the heart of things instead of ambience and ambiguity? Why chaos instead of the unsteady chaosmotic process of unprogrammed becoming? Why not see life as a joyful but risky business that may turn out well or badly, a repetition forwards in which I produce what I am repeating, in which I invent what I am discovering, but in which I am divested of any assurances about what lies up ahead — let alone deep down at the metaphysical base of things? Žižek’s notion of the contingency of necessity is close to this insight, but he insists on treating the Deep Trauma like some Metaphysical Meteor that cratered downtown Ljubljana. Is this not just the search for a transcendental signifier all over again? Why do we have to believe that something deep is out there but alas it is lost and we are hopelessly searching for it?…

Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other? Why must we posit either a primordial loss or a primordial gain? Is there some reason we get only two choices, either God as an illusion spun by the objet petit a or God as the Alpha and Omega, the really real and really Big A? Is this not simply metaphysics spinning its wheels all over again, a point Milbank supports when he says neither of these views can be proven (153)? All that is truly given is a promise/risk, what Derrida calls a “perhaps” not reducible to one or the other. Why must we believe that underneath it all is something profoundly productive or destructive? Why not simply confess that the “matter” that really matters is the risky matter of life, life marked by an unknowable and fundamental undecidability, an ineradicable secret or mystery which reminds us that we do not know who we are, that we do not know what is (deeply) what or what we truly want, yet to make this confession without nostalgia and without despair and without theological triumphalism but with a joyful sense of discovery?

To put this set of questions my own way:  Why not try to feel our way through [phronesis] that space between idolatry (a set-in-stone guarantee that it will all work out in the end and I know what “work out” means precisely; i.e., that I know God as the god-that-I-know, and the god-that-I-know is the One True God) and foolishness (that nothing matters, not even matter, and that what is is just what I say and nothing more, i.e., nothing more than nothing at all)?

My only reservations with Caputo’s review is the tendency that bubbles up here and there of the pot calling the kettle black.  Caputo doesn’t like Žižek’s nasty criticism of Derrida (whom Caputo loves), but then lays into G.K. Chesterton in a manner equally unfair—he “mocks mercilessly,” just as Žižek does Derrida.  Sometimes Caputo himself has, in his own words directed at Milbank, “a disturbing and dogmatic theological dismissiveness of anyone who disagrees with him.”  I risk this comment under the dictum, “he without sin cast the first stone….”  We all do this, I suppose.  But I do want to point out that Caputo’s is not the only (or best) way to read Chesterton….

I prefaced this review-of-a-review with a qualifier:  If you are one of those people for whom these kinds of things matter….  You don’t have to be.  As Caputo asks:

Does anyone really think the Sermon on the Mount has anything to do with any of this bombastic metaphysical tilting and jousting?

Jack’s message is this:  The matter that really matters is the flesh of your neighbor.  Just go take care of it….

David Plotz says we should read the Bible, every single word of it.  And we should read his book, too.  Why?

Question: After someone reads the Slate article, do they have any reason to buy your book instead of just buying a Bible? What does your book have that a Bible doesn’t?
David Plotz: You can leave my book in the bathroom, and not feel guilty about it!
My book is by no means a substitute for the Bible. It’s an effort to bring a new, curious, irreverent perspective to a book that has been made inaccessible and difficult by clergy and academics. If there is anything I hope Good Book does, it is to show readers the exuberant, fascinating messiness of the Bible, and encourage them to read it themselves.

Seems like a good enough reason.

John Rawls also says (from the beyond the grave) that we should read the Bible.  He said the following in his recently published undergraduate thesis:

An ounce of the Bible is worth a pound (possibly a ton) of Aristotle.

Even the Peripatetic Prattler can’t disagree.

David Harvey says we should read Marx’s Capital.  He’ll even help us.

Economist and blogger  Paul Krugman says we should read torturers the riot act in order to reclaim America’s soul.  Why?

…because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for [...] the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

(“Never before”?  Really?  Maybe Krugman hasn’t read Zinn or Chomsky.  Maybe he doesn’t watch Democracy Now! Anyway, I hope his net’ll catch all the Democrats who were briefed a long time ago about all this, along with the Republican S.O.B.s).  You can read some of the relevant memos here.

A. N. Wilson says we shouldn’t bother reading C.S. Lewis.  Anything at all linguistic should be sufficient to lose our atheistic faith:

The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: “It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names.”
This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

You can read an interview with this convert here.

Mark Edmundson says we shouldn’t be reading “readings.” Rather, we should just be reading.  He begins:

If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx’s, Freud’s, Foucault’s, Derrida’s, or whoever’s — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we’d declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we’d give readings a rest.

Amen, brother!

And speaking of amen, the Pope will have to read this secret memo (scroll down…it’s the second piece) before President Obama will visit the Vatican.

A character from John Updikes’ novel, Roger’s Version, warns of a danger in pursuing something like the “constructive engagement of science and religion”:

Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned. In the sixteenth century astronomy, in the seventeenth microbiology, in the eighteenth geology and paleontology, in the nineteenth Darwin’s biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the lumber pile.

Maybe.  But it seemed to be not like that for Updike himself. Not entirely.  Not unambiguously.  In this novel, for instance, it’s the “scientist” who’s out to prove God’s existence once and for all, and the world-weary Divinity School professor who’s giving the advice above.  The professor has proof of another sort:

Indeed, it has occurred to me that in my sensation of peace post coitus, of sweet theistic certainty beneath the remote vague ceiling, of living proof at Verna’s side, I was guilty of heresy, the heresy of which the Cathars and Fraticelli were long ago accused amid the thunders of anathema–that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God’s forgiveness can magnificently play.  Mas, mas.  But thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God.

Updike did, I think, understand temptations well…of all sorts.  No one could conjure abominations better.  R.I.P.

To Read or Not To Read is not an elegy for the bygone days of print culture, but instead is a call to action—not only for parents, teachers, librarians, writers, and publishers, but also for politicians, business leaders, economists, and social activists.  The general decline in reading is not merely a cultural issue, though it has enormous consequences for literature and the other arts. It is a serious national problem. If, at the current pace, America continues to lose the habit of regular reading, the nation will suffer substantial economic, social, and civic setbacks.

And yet, our IQ seems to be rising.  But what does that really mean?  William Saletan at Slate is thinking it over in a series of essays.

Synchronicity:  today my mom tells me that she got an invitation to a holiday celebration that will feature “hours devours” followed by “desert.”  Sorry I’m going to miss it.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

James Seaton critiques Jeffrey Hart’s version of “prudential conservatism” in The University Bookman:

It is true that prudence is a great virtue in politics, and there is a good deal to be said in favor of “prudential conservatism.” Unfortunately, however, when prudence is detached from principle, it becomes mere expediency. The effect of Hart’s lively book is to commend a “prudential, effective conservatism” whose effectiveness would, one fears, be measured not by its success in putting conservative principles into practice—prudently of course—but simply by its success in winning elections.

Roger Kimball throws prudence to the wind, daring to speak ill of the dead (Norman Mailer).  Not so Jürgen Habermas on Richard Rorty.  Rorty would have certainly agreed with Mailer when he (Mailer) said in a recent interview:

The point is that the purpose of life may be to find higher and better questions.

This might make good advice for a (possibly) “great infidel,” Simon Blackburn, featured in a piece in the Financial Times, who’s a smart guy who proves he’s not immune from the unsubtleties of fashionable (and literarily lucrative) atheism.  Blah, blah, blah…

Carlin Romano reports on philosopher Anita Allen, and the situation in philosophy for African American women like herself.  Allen says,

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them.

“The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow.

“Why would you do that when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?

“I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”

“I don’t think I would encourage a black woman who has big ideas necessarily to go into philosophy Why? What’s the point? Go out and win the Pulitzer Prize! Don’t worry about academic philosophy. On the other hand, I would like to see that world open up to more women and women of color.”

There you have it.