Brendan Hodge, If You Can Get It

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The cell phone buzzing in her hand was a reproach. Jen had promised herself she would avoid screens and spend her Sunday morning relaxing. Instead she had been checking her work e-mail, and now Katie was calling. (p. 7)

Summary: Jen Nilsson has an excellent job, but in the modern world it is better to have an excellent resume, as Jen learns when she is suddenly laid off shortly after her sister Katie shows up at her doorstep in need of a place to stay. The first job afterward is something of a bust, when Jen is sent immediately to China to make sure a special project will meet its deadlines and finds the experience less than satisfactory. A new job surfaces almost immediately, but this one requires moving across the country.

Jen's world is a world in which the most real things are brands, which are stable and familiar and often genuinely handy, and the story is filled with brands, both real and fictional: AppLogix, Aspire, Mercedes-Benz, Schneider and Sons, Starbucks, Coke, Jaguar, Home Depot, and more. Her life there is a busy life, a life full of things she likes. They are the usual building blocks of our modern world, in much the way that personal reputation and family name once were. But this brand-structured world in which we live, while it provides endless opportunities to fill your life full of useful things and interesting activities, creates a strange gap between a life filled full and a fulfilled life. What we like often falls short of what we want; we can and do distract ourselves from the lack, paper the gap over by filling our time with other things, many of which are often interesting but none of which are the right kind of thing for fulfillment. Busy-ness is not the business of life. But by filling up our time we can miss seeing how much we are missing until something shakes things up.

Moving to the new location, Jen and Katie buy a nice little Sears home, updating and redecorating which gives them an extra focus in their lives, and introduces them to the handyman, Paul Burke, whose world and life is in some ways very different from Jen's, quiet and local, Catholic and focused on productive craftsmanship. Her work continues to be important to her, but everything having been unsettled through such a short stretch of time leaves her much more open to seeing the ways in which her life, busy and satisfying as it might often be, is not covering all the bases.

It was a bit interesting coming to this book after The Screwtape Letters, because I think there's a sense in which one can say that if that work is about internal temptations, this one is about the external temptations of the World. One thing that's very nice about the story is that it takes no easy roads out. It's not that the brand-structured culture of global consumerism is all hollow, or unproductive, or even always unsatisfying. It's not that the world would be better if we were all farmers or craftsmen and there were no product managers with MBAs or the endless layers of middlemen that make up the modern corporation. There are reasons why we have these things, and some of them are tied to very genuine benefits. Nor is it the case that there is any position -- any position at all, no matter how true -- to which you can convert and magically all things will thereby align with the ideal. We are all seekers, always in need of more, in this life. But the world around us can distract us from the fact that we are, in fact, in need of more; it can fill our bellies without nourishing us, fill our minds without enlightening us, and fill our time without cultivating us. What it offers is often fine in itself; it's just not everything we need. Brands and endless choices and availability are often great. They just can't replace faith or family or friendship, or any number of other things. The danger is that we can get so filled up with what is offered that we fail to get what we need -- indeed, that we sometimes fail even to realize that we aren't getting what we need. Sometimes we need a new vantage point to see some of the gaps in our life. And then we need to make the choices that start to fill them.

Favorite Passage:

This visit was followed by others, similar in outline but each excruciating in its own way. One factory had produced a bag that looked, to the native eye, exactly like the prototype but had been reduced slightly in dimensions such that it no longer fit a fifteen-inch laptop. At another factory, the Courier design had been abandoned entirely and replaced by one that the factory already had patterns cut out for. (It was a very popular bag, the owner assured her. Jen remained unmoved.) In the most extreme case, not only did the design presented not match the prototype at all, but the factory they toured clearly did not manufacture bags at all. Under heavy questioning, it was eventually admitted that the bags were being provided by the factory owner's cousin. "From where?" was a question that no one was willing to answer.... (p. 82)

Recommendation: Recommended.

****
Brendan Hodge, If You Can Get It, Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 2020).

Music on My Mind

Merle Travis, "Sixteen Tons". It's Travis's song, although the most widely known versions of this are Tennessee Ernie Ford's version, which made it famous (and is one of the best uses of snapping fingers as a musical instrument), and Eric Burdon's soulful rock version, best known for being the opening song of Joe vs. the Volcano. In any case, it's Joe vs. the Volcano which brought the song to mind; an excellent, excellent movie (and in my opinion far and away the best Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan movie). Which came out thirty years ago, if I ever want to remind myself of how increasingly old I am, since I saw it almost as soon as it hit VHS.

SS. Pontian and Hippolytus

Today is the feast of SS. Pontian and Hippolytus. They were enemies. St. Hippolytus of Rome was perhaps the most brilliant Roman theologian of the second century. He fell out with the popes; possibly he accused Pope St. Zephyrinus of the heresy of modalism, but very definitely he criticized Pope St. Callixtus for laxness; St. Callixtus would, contrary to custom, impose no penitential period on repentant schismatics and claimed that he had the authority to absolve the sins of adultery and murder for those who repented of them, without requiring any further penance, and he gave special dispensations for counting concubinage as marriage. An anti-Callixtan party rose up among many of the clergy of Rome, with St. Hippolytus at their head, and things got so bad between them that the anti-Callixtans broke away and elected St. Hippolytus their pope, making Hippolytus one of the earliest antipopes, and (unless you count maybe-Saint Felix II) the only antipope on the calendar of saints. St. Callixtus was martyred and succeeded by Pope St. Urban I; the schism continued. Pope St. Urban I died, apparently in relative peace, and was succeeded by Pope St. Pontian; the schism continued. There was a wave of persecution in Rome under Emperor Maximinus, and St. Pontian got wind that he was almost certainly going to be arrested, so in order to preserve the succession, he became the first pope to resign from the office, and was succeeded by Pope St. Anterus. Pontian was indeed arrested and sentenced to hard labor in the mines of Sardinia, where he died. Hippolytus was arrested in the same sweep, and also sentenced to hard labor in the mines of Sardinia, where he died. St. Anterus died and was succeeded by Pope St. Fabian. As the persecution was winding down and Fabian was apparently quite good at negotiating, Fabian negotiated the return of the bodies of both St. Pontian and St. Hippolytus from the Roman government. He buried them both with honors and entered them both as martyrs in the Roman Martyrology. It healed the schism, one of the few things Fabian was able to do, because a new Emperor led to a new sweep of persecutions, and St. Fabian was arrested and executed.

There are accounts according to which St. Hippolytus and St. Pontian were reconciled with each other, some say before the persecution, some say in the mines. But all of these accounts are quite late, and could very well be hypotheses about why St. Hippolytus of Rome, Martyr and antipope, is celebrated on the same day as his opponent, St. Pontian, Pope and Martyr. We don't really know at all. But, one way or another, the brotherhood of martyrdom is itself a great reconciler.

From a fragment of what seems to be St. Hippolytus work, The Refutation of All Heresies:

The Logos alone of this God is from God himself; wherefore also the Logos is God, being the substance of God. Now the world was made from nothing; wherefore it is not God; as also because this world admits of dissolution whenever the Creator so wishes it. But God, who created it, did not, nor does not, make evil. He makes what is glorious and excellent; for He who makes it is good. Now man, that was brought into existence, was a creature endued with a capacity of self-determination, yet not possessing a sovereign intellect, nor holding sway over all things by reflection, and authority, and power, but a slave to his passions, and comprising all sorts of contrarieties in himself. But man, from the fact of his possessing a capacity of self-determination, brings forth what is evil, that is, accidentally; which evil is not consummated except you actually commit some piece of wickedness. For it is in regard of our desiring anything that is wicked, or our meditating upon it, that what is evil is so denominated. Evil had no existence from the beginning, but came into being subsequently. Since man has free will, a law has been defined for his guidance by the Deity, not without answering a good purpose. For if man did not possess the power to will and not to will, why should a law be established? For a law will not be laid down for an animal devoid of reason, but a bridle and a whip; whereas to man has been given a precept and penalty to perform, or for not carrying into execution what has been enjoined.

Major Civilizations and Moralizing Religions

An interesting summary of a recent journal article (PDF) looking at the relation between the rise of major civilizations and moralizing religions. A serious flaw in the summary is sloppiness about what exactly is being looked at. A good example is seen here:

As part of our research we created a map of where big gods appeared around the world. In the map below, the size of the circle represents the size of the society: bigger circles represent larger and more complex societies. The numbers in the circle represent the number of thousand years ago we find the first evidence of belief in moralising gods. For example, Emperor Ashoka adopted Buddhism 2,300 years ago after he had already established a large and complex South Asian empire known as the Mauryan Empire.

Although 'big gods' and 'moralising gods' sound vividly descriptive, that these are, despite colloquial appearance, being used as potentially misleading terms of art is seen quite clearly from the inclusion of Buddhism as a 'big god' religion. And the Ashoka example is particularly interesting for highlighting the limitations of this approach. We don't in fact know anything for certain about Ashoka's conversion of his dominions to a Buddhist empire, or about his prior life and beliefs, except what Ashoka tells us in his inscriptions:

(1) He conquered the Kalinga region in the eighth year of his rule.
(2) The violence and devastation of that war was so great (Ashoka claims that hundreds of thousands of men and animals died) that, having annexed Kalinga, he suffered remorse.
(3) As a result of this, he began actively devoting himself and his empire to the dharma or eusebeia (in the Greek translations added to his edicts in previously Greek-ruled areas of his empire), and this is pretty clearly Buddhism in some sense.
(4) This seems to have had several stages, as recorded in the various Edict Rocks of his reign.

We know nothing of Ashoka's earliest views, unless we take highly conflicting legends as evidence. Some legends suggest he was already Buddhist before the Kalinga War; others that he was a Brahman; others that he was a wicked, amoral, and godless man. His conversion may have been a clean break from his past life, or it may have been a case of someone believing loosely and in a worldly fashion converting to a stricter and more intense version of the same religion. According to some legends, he was a devout supporter of Brahmanism in his early years, but was unhappy with the morals of the Brahmin class, and became interested in Buddhism because of the quality of its teachers. According to some legends, by his eighth year, Ashoka had built thousands of Buddhist temples. We just don't really know. We do know, of course, that Buddhism was at least a hundred years old by Ashoka's day, perhaps two hundred years old; Buddhism undeniably pre-exists the Mauryan Empire, and was well-established already in a number of areas that Ashoka came to rule.

So here we have a religion that is definitely highly moralizing, believing in universal moral principles, but in which gods play only a secondary part, definitely pre-existing the major civilization in question, and while we know that Ashoka converted to some strict and devout version of it, we don't know exactly when he actually started affirming his adherence to it. Each clause here indicates a problematic point in the summary.

Looking at the original study, what the study really suggests is that early major empires were not originated as empires specifically favoring religions that held universal moral principles, although most of them eventually favored some such religion at some point; in particular, that, measuring according to common standards used to measure social complexity of ancient civilizations, major expansions of social complexity occurred before they began actively favoring a moralizing religion. Thus the study confirms what other studies have suggested, namely, that there is a connection between the growth of large early empires and the political establishment of religions advocating universal moral principles, but could be used to argue that the latter was used to consolidate and stabilize empires grown large, rather than being a cause of the expansion itself.

On the Theory of the History of Philosophy

Uriah Kriegel has a very nice manuscript, Sketch for a Theory of the History of Philosophy ("just for fun...", he says on his own website). Kriegel suggests four stages in theorizing with respect to the history of philosophy;

(1) Singular Causation: This stage obviously deals with influences between thinkers and the like.

(2) Processes: When we take singular causal links and chain them together, we get processes. In historiography of philosophy, this is associated with the study of changes in movements and schools; Kriegel gives as examples studies of the evolution of scholastic metaphysics from Aquinas, of the evolution of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel, and of the evolution of analytic philosophy from the early days of Frege, Moore, and Russell to its later days.

(3) Causal Laws: Causal laws take causal links and categorize them so that we are no longer talking about the relationships between tokens but the relationships between types. Kriegel suggests that this has largely vanished from philosophical discussion.

(4) Total Theory: This considers the history of philosophy as a unified and coherent whole; Hegel is the most famous example of an attempt at this. This, Kriegel suggests, has also largely vanished.

While I think it's true that (3) and (4) have largely vanished from explicit discussion by philosophers, I think this is more symptomatic of a crisis in the understanding of what philosophy is than anything to do with history of philosophy as such. That is to say, your positions on (3) and (4), and how to go about them (if at all), will primarily derive not from any historical facts but from your account of what philosophy is. The total theory of Hegelianism or Absolute Idealism or Marxism falls out of how philosophy is understood in these approaches. If you think of philosophy as just a sort of hunting for and systematic exploration of solutions for problems, you will get another implied total theory; if you think of it as proto-science, you'll get another implied total theory; and so forth. The lack of any explicit discussion of total theory has a great deal to do, I think, with the failure of modern philosophers to grapple properly with the nature of philosophy itself -- and in particular with the extent to which they disagree on that very subject, and perhaps even fail themselves to have a consistent view of it.

But in practice, if you look at discussions of processes and even singular causal links, there clearly are assumptions being made about the domain of (3) and even (4); people will assume that philosophy has no particular directionality, or that secularization arises naturally from arguments over ideas (rather than, as one might well hold on the basis of other historical evidence, from political classes using political power to marginalize religious influences that can interfere with them), or that extensive theorizing eventually leads to overtheorizing and that to reaction, or that eclectic approaches through intense argument morph into systematic approaches, or that systems with a lot of ad hoc additions tend to 'break down' in the sense that they become too costly to hold, and so forth. These aren't systematic, but things like these are there, assumed and sometimes even loosely argued for. And something like them has to be there. We don't, even in everyday life, always start with singular causal links and then get processes and then get classifications of processes and their parts; we often have a vague sense of the whole context and we analyze down to understand the singular causal links in that vaguely conceived context. Thus, while purely textual analysis of (say) Malebranche's influence on Berkeley is done, most discussion of it is in context of a general sense of disputes between rationalists and empiricists (in which assumed context rationalist Malebranche being such a direct and important influence on empiricist Berkeley is a boundary-crossing case in need of special clarification, which is the sort of thing a graduate student might study for a dissertation).

Part of this shows up in periodization, which Kriegel discusses. It is, of course, commonplace that the standard Ancient-Medieval-Modern periodization is absurd; 'Medieval', as its name implies, is very obviously just a miscellaneous period for whatever happened between the Ancient and the Modern periods; as Kriegel notes, we largely use this periodization as a sort of relic of the German Enlightenment. Regardless of source, this approach to periodization -- now almost unavoidable given the way academic philosophy has built itself around it -- regularly sidelines important figures and makes divides at the boundaries seem sharper than they already are. The source, however, is relevant, because in fact the periodization comes from 'total theory' assumptions about universal history.

Kriegel proposes a parallel-streams total theory, which he suggests is "the most banal and undaring theory of the history of philosophy one might come up with" (p. 9). I don't think this is an accurate description at all -- it is neither banal nor undaring, and I think, with respect to what I have previously said, that it requires a rather schizophrenic understanding of what philosophy is, since its implied characterization of philosophy is as a very simple oppositional dialectic. But in any case, Kriegel imagines two 'temperaments'. Temperament A is inclined to be favorable to abstracta, necessities, a priori cognition, monism, literary presentation; Temperament B is inclined to be favorable to eliminating these things. It seems clear that these are not 'temperaments' at all; despite nominalists giving themselves airs, nobody actually has a temperamental inclination to Platonic heavens or desert landscapes, and the Coleridgean notion that everyone is either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian depends on a rather robust total theory of dialectic, not facts of psychology. Rather, these are stances that end up being loose commitments given other things that are accepted. And the things that are jumbled together on each side are only related relative to these kinds of background assumptions; that is to say, how related they are to each other just depends. Even allowing for idealization and simplification, Aristotle looks Temperament B only if you compare him to Plato; he perhaps looks Temperament A if you compare him to Hume, although Hume is in reality much more obsessed with literature-style presentation than most people who would naturally be put under Temperament A. And nothing really rules out taking what might be called the Neoplatonist view and regarding Plato and Aristotle as effectively sharing the same temperament (Temperament A), just discussing somewhat different fields.

(Kriegel, I think, overstates the evidence of the history of philosophy in his favor on this point; his characterization of most of history up through the Renaissance as Plato vs. Aristotle is largely an artifact of the Renaissance rediscovery of multiple Platonisms and the humanist back-to-the-sources approach. For most of the thousand years before that, most thinkers saw Plato and Aristotle as largely the same, with some difference of emphases and maybe some un-explain-away-able disagreement on an issue or two; there were hyper-Platonists and hyper-Aristotelians here and there, but they were by no means the dominant views. Bonaventure is more Platonist than Aquinas, explicitly agreeing here and there with Plato against Aristotle, and Aquinas more Aristotelian than Bonaventure, but they both saw Platonism and Aristotelianism as largely of a kind, and both can be categorized as either, depending on what you look at.)

In any case, Kriegel suggests that within a given stream (A or B), change is a result of three tendencies: influence of similar earlier thinkers, counter-influence by thinkers of opposing temperament, and individual motivations and dispositions. We then take major figures to be those who show much clearer individualization and much more extensive influence and counter-influence on others, which I think is certainly true of what has usually been actual practice, although I think this can be said independently of any posited temperaments or streams. As Kriegel notes, thinking of things this way suggests that we should periodize not by times but by phases within streams (which will not be wholly independent of what is going on in the other stream, due to influence and counter-influence); it's very interesting to think about how this sort of multi-stream periodization would work, on which he makes some other interesting comments.

These things are always interesting to think about. In a similar 'just for fun' vein, I did some thinking a number of years ago about how you might give a simplified but reasonably accurate approach to the dynamics of long-term philosophical interaction if you were attempting to simulate it in a history-of-philosophy strategy video game:

Some Thoughts Toward a Philosophy Video Game
I
II
III

Obviously there are concessions purely to the requirements of such a game, and simplifications for approximate effects, but I put a lot of thought into the HoP background, and it's worth contrasting with Kriegel's suggested theory; the one I posited is not stable dual streams in parallel but partly randomized crisscrossed multiple streams, it is not strictly dialectical, and it depends as much on external institutions as on internal dynamics and influence. The last of the three points is, I think, particularly noteworthy; analytic philosophy or phenomenology, for instance, would not survive for long, at least in anything like their current forms, outside the modern university, which effectively subsidizes them, and there are many similar cases of philosophies surviving and exercising the influence they do because they are subsidized by institutions of various sorts. And sometimes this is at least as influential as anything to do with the ideas or philosophers themselves.

Come We to the Summer

Summer
by John Clare

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,
And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,
And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast;
She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,
And I will to my true love with a fond request repair;
I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest,
And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.

The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,
The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,
And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest
In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's breast;
I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her ear
That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my dear;
I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away
Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.

How Vast, How Little Is Our Store

To the Number Three
by George Boole

When the great Maker, on Creation bent,
Thee from thy brethren chose, and framed by thee
The world to sense revealed, yet left it free
To those whose intellectual gaze intent
Behind the veil phenomenal is sent
Space diverse, systems manifold to see
Revealed by thought alone; was it that we
In whose mysterious spirits thus are blent
Finite of sense and Infinite of thought,
Should feel how vast, how little is our store;
As yon excelling arch with orbs deep-fraught
To the light wave that dies along the shore;
That from our weakness and our strength may rise
One worship unto Him the Only Wise.

No Vocation to the Single Life

Mary Cuff has a very good article at Crisis, noting that there is no vocation to the single life, despite the increasing tendency of people to talk as if there were. The usual suspects have risen in protest across social media, but Cuff is entirely right; and as it is a point I have made myself, I think it needs reiteration. A vocation is not something to which you are entitled; it is, quite literally, something to which you are specifically called by God and the Church, for the common good. Ordination is a vocation; it is not merely something people fall into, but it is something to which they are called by God and the Church, and specifically for the common good of the Church. Marriage is a vocation; it is not merely something that happens to people, nor even a choice that they make, but something to which they are called by God and the Church, and specifically for the common good of the Church and the human race. Consecrated religious life is a vocation; it involves a calling by God and the Church, and the whole purpose of it is to benefit the whole Church. Ordination, matrimony, consecration, these are things whose whole purpose, properly pursued, is to benefit all of us. They involve our choices, but the principal agent of them as vocations is God.

Singleness itself is nothing like this. It is the default state of the entire human race. Do you know what you have to do to be single? Nothing. It's just what you are unless you change it. And, except in jokes, nobody is permanently single, if that's all that's on the table, for the common good. Being single may be an incidental aspect of another vocation, one that requires celibacy, for instance, and it may help you to do many things helpful for the whole community, but it is not a vocation in itself.

I have had this argument, vehemently, with my fellow Catholics over many years; married Catholics in particular tend to be the worst in trying to insist that I have this completely fictional vocation, although you get priests who are very stubborn about it, too. No! I don't have your made-up vocation. There's actually something kind of nice about that. A vocation is a terrible, weighty responsibility to God and the whole community. In every matter to which you are called by God and the Church, you have to answer to God and the Church for that very thing. Singleness is not a vocation, and thus has no responsibility like this. I have no special responsibility to answer to anyone for my being single. I think also people insist on the fictional vocation because they regard it as some sort of affirmation. It isn't. It is patronizing, condescending, and absurd. I don't need a participation trophy.

And I think it has become a common thing because people do not have a vivid sense of one very important thing: that in a real sense you already have a vocation from your baptism and confirmation, vocations to the Christian life. Forgetting that they are already called to something sacred and glorious, they make up new callings, despite the fact that the callings they have are vocations that are on their own weighty enough to bow the heads of emperors, and responsibilities enough for a lifetime. For these we will certainly answer to God and the Church. Singleness adds nothing at all to these. It does not add an extra dimension of priestliness nor does it bind the Church together more fully. As Cuff rightly notes, "The only rules that govern Catholic singles are the same rules that govern all Catholics."

And because of that, you are not bound to it. There's a very big problem if you betray any vocations you might have tomorrow: you will answer to God and the whole Church in the Final Judgment for that. Perhaps there will be exculpating conditions, but be assured, it will be under review by the highest of high tribunals. There is no disgrace, no shame, no elaborate process, nothing to answer for, if you give up being single; you have betrayed nothing, you have lost nothing, you have not even discovered that by a terrible error you thought you had a calling for which you were in fact unfit, for which you must throw yourself on the mercy of the heavenly court. It is simply a change. And it is simply a change because singleness is not a vocation.

Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Today is the feast of St. Edith Stein, Martyr. She was a student of Edmund Husserl. Unable to get a university position because she was a woman, she became a teacher at a girl's school until her Jewish background made that impossible as the Nazis came to power. She was baptized a Catholic in January of 1922, a conversion brought on by reading St. Teresa of Avila's Autobiography. She eventually became, like Teresa, a Discalced Carmelite, and took the name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. Soon afterward she wrote her major philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being. The order transferred her to the Netherlands in an attempt to protect her from the increasing Nazi threat to all people with Jewish background, but the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and after the Dutch bishops issued a statement against Nazism in July 1942, the Nazis began arresting all Jewish Catholics. Stein and her sister Rose were arrested on August 2 and deported to Auschwitz on August 7. It's not clear when exactly she died, but she was probably killed in a mass execution on August 9. She was beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998, and was declared one of the patron saints of Europe.

Association demands of its components only this, that they undertake a function which contributes to achieving its constitutive purpose. Association lays no claim upon their entire inner being. But matters are otherwise with the genuine community. Within the community, and thus within the individuals that belong to it, there lives an inclination to reach out beyond themselves toward a complete unification. Before it stands the image of a complete community that can't be achieved by any earthly community -- can't in principle, not just accidentally. However, the possibility of complete community becomes insightfully given, on the basis of what can be achieved in the midst of the earthly community toward overcoming absolute loneliness. Consequently, an inner incompleteness clings to every earthly community, and an inclination beyond itself.

[Edith Stein, "Individual and Community", Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Baseheart & Sawicki, trs., OCS Publications (Washington, DC: 2000), pp. 285-286.]