Or in What High Metropolis of Mars

 The Absence of the Muse
by Clark Ashton Smith 

 O Muse, where loiterest thou? In any land
Of Saturn, lit with moons and nenuphars?
Or in what high metropolis of Mars --
Hearing the gongs of dire, occult command,
And bugles blown from strand to unknown strand
Of continents embattled in old wars
That primal kings began? Or on the bars
Of ebbing seas in Venus, from the sand
Of shattered nacre with a thousand hues,
Dost pluck the blossoms of the purple wrack
And roses of blue coral for thy hair?
Or, flown beyond the roaring Zodiac,
Translatest thou the tale of earthly news
And earthly songs to singers of Altair?

Hieroglyphics and Rebusses

 Jeremy Bentham's Church of Englandism and Its Catechism Examined gets a passing mention in Newman's Loss and Gain, so I went back and re-read it, and, holy moly, I had blocked out how much of an unhinged, lunatic, nearly eight-hundred-page rant it is. Bentham has a besetting sin in which he will often not provide any arguments for his position, merely classifying things in tendentious ways, and yet clearly thinks he is providing an argument by doing so; he also often, when he does deign to give an argument, clearly thinks he is speaking in a plain, literal way, when in reality load-bearing parts of his arguments almost always depend on metaphors and analogies. Church of Englandism takes both of these Benthamite traits and exponentializes them. But I also looked into some of the critial responses to the work, and they are sometimes a delight. The very best is the review in The British Critic for November 1818, which begins:

We have been very credibly informed, that Mr. Jeremy Bentham is an original thinker; and we are not inclined to doubt the assertion. We feel certain that he is a most profound thinker; for in many a part of this work before us, we have run out every fathom of our critical line, without once being fortunate enough to sound the bottom of a meaning. Words, as we have been taught, or so many signs and symbols of mental conceptions; and as we have no other means by which we can determine the quantity of such conceptions, unless through the medium of these signs and symbols, it is no unfair deduction, if we assert that unintelligible speaking is a proof of equally unintelligible thinking; in other words, that a man who writes in hieroglyphics, conceives in rebusses. Or to put the proposition in terms which Mr. Jeremy Bentham himself will not deny, unless, (which is not probable,) he supposes there can be any other authority equal to his own, "uncognoscibility being the end; indistinctness, voluminousness, confusion, and uncertainty, are so many means," Pref. xxxvii. We know not how we can put our readers more completely in possession of the present work (except excip; for where mischief is to be done this writer can speak plainly enough) than by the above appropriate quotation.

Mr. Jeremy Bentham is known to his own coterie of petty sophists and political quacks, as the author of a variety of treatises, more or less closely printed, published or unpublished, out of print, or waste paper, of which a "list hastily and imperfectly collected," is subjoined in his new volume. He has employed himself, at divers times, on morals, legislation, hard-labour, usury, mad-houses, taxation, special juries, perjury, economy, and parliamentary reform; and his depth of knowledge on each subject is said by those who have read his works, to be co-extensive with its variety -- a fact which we will not take upon ourselves to dispute, as we have no means of denying it. Moreover, he lives in a cock-loft, looking into the bird-cage walk; and as he cannot always make his countrymen understand the English, in which he thinks, he has occasionally employed a most respectable foreigner, to do it into French, for the benefit of our neighbours across the water.

From this slight sketch of the nature of Mr. Jeremy Bentham's lucubrations, our readers of course will be prepared for the impossibility of our attempting to present them with any detailed analysis of the contents of the work before us. As a literary phaenomenon it must always be regarded with curiosity; for except the lobster-cracking Bedlamite, we recollect no professed lunatic whose hallucinations have been published under his own immediate inspection; and they related more to physical than to moral effects....

The British Critic also had an association with Newman, although that came later. It was founded in 1793 by a bunch of High Church Anglicans who wanted to counteract ideas from the French Revolution and a public forum for discussing conservative Anglican ecclesiology. In the early 1810s, it was bought by Joshua Watson, the philanthropist, and Henry Handley Norris, the theologian, who were both key figures in the so-called Hackney Phalanx, a loosely strutured High-Church Tory group that was more actively engaged in reform and activism. (The review above is from this period.) For financial reasons, it combined with another review in 1826 to become officially The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record. In the 1830s, it was having significant financial difficulties, and in 1836, Newman made a deal with Joshua Watson and the then-editor, James Shergold Boone, to provide them with authors who would write a portion of the review entirely for free. This led to The British Critic being a major vehicle for the Oxford Movement, and was arguably a more important, and perhaps more successful, and certainly less self-destructive, part of the Movement than Tracts for the Times. Nonetheless, Boone and Newman couldn't really agree on editorial matters, with the result that he resigned in 1837, to be replaced by Samuel Roffey Maitland, who soon after resigned. For all his many admirable qualities, including being famously sweet-tempered, it is a consistent feature of Newman's career that he was difficult to work with, in the paradoxical way that you would expect someone affable, headstrong, and arguably oversensitive to be. After Maitland, first Newman and then, in 1841, Thomas Mozley became editors, and the dominant editorial view of the review became rather bellicose, used less often to give a general High Church voice and more often for polemic about internal disputes in the broader High Church movement, and eventually came to an end in 1843.

Links of Note

 * Tim Sommers, Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Cansu Hepçağlayan, Political friendship as joint commitment: Aristotle on homonoia (PDF)

* Kendric Tonn: Painting in an Age of Digital Art, at "Trunkville"

* Chloé de Canson, Bayesianism and the Inferential Solution to Hume’s Problem (PDF)

* Lucia Oliveri, Imagine Learning Through Play, at "The Junkyard"

* Phil Corkum, Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (PDF)

* Brian Potter, How Common Is Accidental Invention?, at "Construction Physics"

* John Walsh, Wolff on Obligation (PDF)

* Francine F. Abeles, Lewis Carroll's ciphers: the literary connections

* Razib Khan, How the West was wrought, "Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning"

Little Flower

 Today is the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church. From The Story of a Soul, Chapter XI:

But how shall I show my love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! The little child will strew flowers . . . she will embrace the Divine Throne with their fragrance, she will sing Love's Canticle in silvery tones. Yes, my Beloved, it is thus my short life shall be spent in Thy sight. The only way I have of proving my love is to strew flowers before Thee—that is to say, I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love. I wish to suffer for Love's sake, and for Love's sake even to rejoice: thus shall I strew flowers. Not one shall I find without scattering its petals before Thee . . . and I will sing . . . I will sing always, even if my roses must be gathered from amidst thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song. 

 But of what avail to thee, my Jesus, are my flowers and my songs? I know it well: this fragrant shower, these delicate petals of little price, these songs of love from a poor little heart like mine, will nevertheless be pleasing unto Thee. Trifles they are, but Thou wilt smile on them. The Church Triumphant, stooping towards her child, will gather up these scattered rose leaves, and, placing them in Thy Divine Hands, there to acquire an infinite value, will shower them on the Church Suffering to extinguish its flames, and on the Church Militant to obtain its victory.

Renato Casaro (1935-2025)

 Renato Casaro -- arguably the greatest film-poster artist of all time -- died today. Perhaps more than anyone else he established what people expect film posters to be, handpainting the original of each one in a dashing style. You have certainly seen some of his posters; some of his more famous ones were for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Total Recall, Terminator 2, True Lies, La Femme Nikita, The Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, and Dances with Wolves. (You may notice that there are a fair number of Arnold Scharzenegger films; Casaro once said that he was the perfect actor to paint.) But, of course, he was a major influence on many other film poster artists. Film poster art is a bit of niche aristic genre, but Casaro put an immense amount of genius into it, and it always showed.

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus

 Today is the feast of St. Jerome, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. Everybody always remembers St. Jerome's crotchetiness, but he had a softer side. From a letter to Gaudentius, who had asked how he should raise his infant daughter for the religious life:

It is hard to write to a little girl who cannot understand what you say, of whose mind you know nothing, and of whose inclinations it would be rash to prophesy. In the words of a famous orator she is to be praised more for what she will be than for what she is. For how can you speak of self-control to a child who is eager for cakes, who babbles on her mother's knee, and to whom honey is sweeter than any words? Will she hear the deep things of the apostle when all her delight is in nursery tales? Will she heed the dark sayings of the prophets when her nurse can frighten her by a frowning face? Or will she comprehend the majesty of the gospel, when its splendour dazzles the keenest intellect? Shall I urge her to obey her parents when with her chubby hand she beats her smiling mother? For such reasons as these my dear Pacatula must read some other time the letter that I send her now. Meanwhile let her learn the alphabet, spelling, grammar, and syntax. To induce her to repeat her lessons with her little shrill voice, hold out to her as rewards cakes and mead and sweetmeats. She will make haste to perform her task if she hopes afterwards to get some bright bunch of flowers, some glittering bauble, some enchanting doll. She must also learn to spin, shaping the yarn with her tender thumb; for, even if she constantly breaks the threads, a day will come when she will no longer break them. Then when she has finished her lessons she ought to have some recreation. At such times she may hang round her mother's neck, or snatch kisses from her relations. Reward her for singing psalms that she may love what she has to learn. Her task will then become a pleasure to her and no compulsion will be necessary.

The rest of the letter takes a somewhat darker turn, as Jerome turns to reflecting on the evils of the day, but flashes like this little comment on raising girls are found throughout his works; he was the sort of curmudgeon who is a bit of teddy-bear if you catch him at the right time and in the right way.

O Well for Him that Loves the Sun

 Ballad of the Sun
by G. K. Chesterton  

O well for him that loves the sun,
That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,
The splashing seas of sunset won,
And shouts for victory. 

 God made the sun to crown his head,
And when death's dart at last is sped,
At least it will not find him dead,
And pass the carrion by. 

 O ill for him that loves the sun;
Shall the sun stoop for anyone?
Shall the sun weep for hearts undone
Or heavy souls that pray? 

 Not less for us and everyone
Was that white web of splendour spun;
O well for him who loves the sun
Although the sun should slay.

Fortnightly Book, September 28

 The Oxford Movement began in the 1830s and developed afterward in response to shifts in the relationship between Parliament and the Church of England; a significant early stimulus was the passing of the 1833 Church Temporalities Act, in which Parliament peremptorily reorganized some dioceses of the Church of Ireland and shut down a source of ecclesiastical revenue in order to solve a broader political problem. The actual provisions were deliberately chosen to cause minimal disruption, and even greater efficiency and sustainability, but it unsettled a significant portion of the Church of England, to whom it brought home the point that Parliament could easily just disestablish the Church or overrule it or reorganize it for any purpose it pleased, despite this apparently being inconsistent with both the notion of a Church going back to Christ and the customs of England. John Keble's 1833 Assize sermon, "National Apostasy", touched a chord in a wide variety of people. Nor were they unjustified in this worry, and a series of other controversies, both small and large, expanded the movement. A number of figures, including Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey, began publishing polemical tracts to make their ecclesiology public; this Tractarian movement was the intellectual core of the movement, although there were many people involved with the Oxford Movement whose relationship with the Tractarians was rather loose and sometimes even critical. The Tractarian refusal to back down made the Oxford Movement one of the central intellectual disputes of the age, and their very 'High' notion of what was meant by the Creed in talking of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" led to people accusing them of being Romanizers. Indeed, while it is not by any means true of all, a significant portion of the movement, including some of its leading lights, eventually did leave the Church of England to join communion with Rome. Newman's conversion was the most explosive, happening in 1845.

One of those who converted relatively early on was Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris, who found, once she became Catholic, that she did not like it. She wrote a book, originally anonymous, From Oxford to Rome: And How It Fared with Some Who Lately Made the Journey, published in 1846. It was a dialogical novel that attempted to warn people about the dangers that led to the horrifying increase in conversions to Rome. I've skimmed through the book; it's actually quite intelligently, if perhaps idiosyncratically, written, and I suspect that Harris captures a great deal of the way in which the flourishing of Romanticism made the Oxford Movement attractive to people. Someone sent it to Newman in 1847 (Newman never mentions mentions the book by name, but from his references to it, it was almost certainly Harris's), and he was very unimpressed. He thought that its depiction of Oxford life was wrong ("wantonly and preposterously fanciful" was his phrase), that its characterization of those involved was generally implausible even given the diversity of views in the Oxford Movement, and that in particular it treated the movement as mired in a pompousness and pretentiousness that failed to grasp the sincerity of many of the people involved. (It is certainly true that the major figures in Harris's work speak and thinking in an over-heated, flowery way that goes beyond common Victorian novelistic conventions, even for a dialogical novel.) It perhaps also did not help his opinion that the novel can be read as implying that Newman was heavily to blame for turning an idealistic reform movement into a Roman-Catholic-generating machinery. However, it was substantive enough that it needed response. But responding to a novel with a treatise or a vigorous polemic seemed a poor choice, so Newman decided to write a better novel on the same subject. That novel was Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, which was published in 1848.

The novel was successful, being immediately a bestseller and (not unrelatedly) also a source of considerable controversy. Dialogical novels are not very popular today, but they were at the time, and it is generally considered one of the most brilliantly written examples. Newman seems to have suceeded in his attempt to capture what Oxford University life was actually like in his Oxford days, and his satire of English incoherence on religion have impressed more than a few people through the years. The novel was often read, and criticized, as an apologetic work, although Newman himself did not think that a novel was a good place for apologetics, and explicitly denied that it was ever intended to be such a work rather than what it was, an attempt to write a better novel. It's very likely that the fact that Newman was primarily focused on writing a novel with more truth, probability, and insight than an already existing novel, rather than making a specific argument, is one of the reasons it stands above so many other dialogical novels in the period.

In any case, for the next fortnightly book, I am re-reading Loss and Gain.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

In the middle of the night somebody began to cry outside of Chauntecleer's Coop. If it had been but a few sprinkled tears with nothing but a moan or two, Chauntecleer would probably not have minded. But this crying was more than a gentle moan. By each dark hour of the night it grew. It became a decided wail, and after that it became a definite howl. And howlying -- particularly at the door of his Coop, and in the middle of the night -- howling. Chauntecleer minded very much. (p. 13)

Summary: Long before the rise of men, Chauntecleer is lord of the Coop, and of all the land around. He's a bit silly and a bit vain, a foolish Rooster, but he makes an honest effort to keep peace and uphold order, and with a bit of muddling he mostly does well enough. The book opens with him meeting a creature new to his domain, Mundo Cani Dog, a perpetually over-humble, over-sensitive, weepy, mourny dog, who irritates him to no end, but he soon learns that it is handy for Rooster to have a Dog help with some things, even if the Dog is a mope who never stops talking about how much of a failure and a nothing he is. Unbeknownst to all the animals in the land, they were made by God to be the Keepers of the Wyrm, a terrible and ancient power imprisoned in the earth beneath him, who, if he should ever be freed, would devour the world.

Nor is the Wyrm quiescent. In another domain, ruled by an aging Rooster named Senex, he has begun to whisper. Senex has no heir, and as his abilities slip in his age, he is terrified of being a failure. With Wyrm's help, Senex lays an egg, and the unnatural abomination of the Rooster-laid egg is hatched beneath a Toad. This is Cockatrice, who is like a Rooster and yet not, a scaly, featherless thing of great malice who soon kills Senex, usurping his place, and initiates a regime of terror focused on only one thing: the breeding of snake-like and venomous Basilisks. A Hen, named Pertelote, eventually escapes this regime and finds shelter in the lands of Chauntecleer.

Some elements of the story here have been told elsewhere, but instead of Wyrm, Cockatrice, and Toad, the characters in that story were called the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. For this is a story about the End of the World, or, at least, a first taste of it. As Chauntecleer keeps the peace in his little realm, unaware of the dangers beneath his feet or multiplyling in the rivers, all things move slowly toward the Armageddon of the animals. And against the pride of the Wyrm, the wickedness of Cockatrice, the malice of the Basilisks, against all of that evil, there is nothing to defend what is good and prevent the end of all except a decent but foolish Rooster, and a loyal Dog who never stops mourning, and some beasts, brave in their way, sometimes, but narrow in their views. God has not left them entirely without resource, since He sends to them the Dun Cow, who gives Chauntecleer what he needs to fight, but the fighting will have to be their own.

Do not let the talking animals give you the wrong idea; this is a book about war, the War, and there are books about war with human characters that are not as brutally honest as this one is about how bad even a necessary war can be. The brutality of Cockatrice's regime, or the terror and loss of the Final Battle in which beast after beast dies from the poison of the Basilisks, are laid out without any pulled punches. Obviously, the earth is still here, and thus Chauntecleer and his allies will narrowly win, but the sacrifices will be terrible by the end, and the Wyrm that wants to devour the world still waits to be freed.

Favorite Passage: Chapter Twenty-Four ends in the middle of a sentence with this passage:

Suddenly Chauntecleer took dizzy and began to sway. How many battles make a war? How muh, and how much more, can a rooster bear before the break? He let his slack wings touch the ground on either side of him so that he wouldn't fall altogether, and then dragged back to the camp. But again and again he turned his head to look behind, trying to believe what he saw.

He stumbled into the trench at the bottom of the wall. Slowly he raised his eyes. There was Pertelote, still standing on its top and looking at him. Chauntecleer  shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile. He spread his wings empty in front of her. The smile didn't work. It hung too crooked on his face. "Do you know? Do you know?" he said as if he were very young. "Pertelote. I don't know anymore," he said, and then he fainted. Many of his bones had been broken.

Chauntecleer had won. Chauntecleer was victorious, but

(p. 223)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow, Pocket Books (New York: 1978).

Dashed Off XXIV

 The Church participates the Mediatorship of Christ by being socially and sacramentally His Body.

In petitionary prayer, we socially participate in God's beneficence.

Prayers may seem ephemeral but they are ever before the Lord.

We learn in the Old Testament, in its history corrected by prophecy, what God means by a 'priestly nation'.

"For since the doctrine of Our Lord's Mediation is funded upon His taking our flesh: since its primary law is the re-creation in His person of our common nature, the entrance of divine graces into humanity ni its Head and Chief;--therefore some medium is required, by which those things, which were stored up in Him, may be distributed to His brethren. To speak of the Head as the fountain of grace, is to assume teh existence of streams, by which it may be transmitted to His members. Now this function is so plainly assigned to Sacraments, that nothing else can be alleged to supply their place." R. I. Wilberforce

evidences as channels of intelligibility

On Van Leeuwen's acount of belief, almost nothing we usually count as a belief turns out to be a belief -- only a few things directly connected to the evidence of empirical experience still get counted.

Anticipation is the soul of rhetoric.

'It war guid tym of wykkitnes to ces.'

expansion to Gentiles as Peter's use of the keys; Council of Jerusalem as apostles' use of the key

When a man is counting noses, the nose he is most likely to miss is the one he sees in the mirror. Sometimes we forget to include the most obvious truth precisely because it's so obvious we treat it as if it were already included, even when it hasn't been.

"The mind is under the power of the demons of evil intellect and duality. / But when the mind surrenders, through the Guru, it becomes one." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 222
"Through the Word of the Shabad, merits are gathered in and demerits are burned away."
"To practice forgiveness is the true fast, good conduct and contentment." 223
"Union with God is not obtained by arguments and egotism, / but by offering your mind, the comfort of the Naam is obtained." 226

Words get their meanings within the context of personal connections.

A jack of all trades gets to enjoy many things.

"The only phenomenological access that we have to the gift is in the 'thank you' of gratitude." Jean-Louis Chretien

Human beings do not merely adapt to their environment but mirror it, both behaviorally and symbolically.

felicitas as a divine gift of good fortune given to boldness (fortune favors the brave)

pignora imperii: Palladium, Sacred Fire of Vesta, the Ancilia of Mars, are the commonly recognized ones. Servius the Grammarian in the fourth century identifies seven:
(1) Acus Matris Deum (in the Temple of Cybele)
(2) Quadriga Fictilis Veientanorus (on the roof the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus)
(3) Cineres Orestes (in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus)
(4) Sceptrum Priami
(5) velum Ilionae
(6) Palladium (in the Temple of Vesta)
(7) Ancilia of Mars (in the Regia)
--- The Ashes, the Scepter, and the Veil are not attested anywhere else.

Role-playing games are constructed out of patterns of deciding factors, which may be choice, calculation, or chance process.

"The Rationalistic notion, that man's regeneration  may be effected through the progress of society, and the development of his natural powers, is the delusion of a cultivated age." R.I. Wilberforce
"Coincidence, resemblance, and proportion, the three keys to our knowledge of creation, require it exist within us, in order to be called forth."
"Ingratitude and oppression, justice and truth -- the feelings of which these are the natural objects -- testify clearly to some close alliance, which binds together all the far-severed sciions of the family of mankind."
"A system of worship upon earth is the necessary correlative to a work of intercession in heaven."
"The imported objective truth of the Word written, requires the engrafted subjective influence of the Living Word as its expositor."

Sex essentially has reference to other people.

Human society, like human life, is both natural and artificial.

marriage as a mutual consecration

Babel as the general template of societal corruption

In the calendar of saints, we celebrate the Church as prophetic.

Our choices, like us, eventually die.

civil functions of states
(1) mediation between citizens
(2) coordination of citizen projects
(3) protection of citizens as citizens
dominial functions of states
(1) giving laws to subjects
(2) enforcing laws on subjects
(3) adjudicating matters of law for subjects

All the sacraments express aspects of Christ's mediation.

People mistake their attraction to good for their own goodness.

"Only the individual who experiences himself as a person, as an integrated whole, is capable of understanding other persons." Edith Stein
"Whenever we come into contact with realms of value that we cannot enter, we become aware of our own deficient value and unworthiness."

'Religions' in general tend to be very good at articulating over time their phenomenological character as bounded idealities.

Phenomena are signs of both phenomena and noumena.

"Language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well." Merleau-Ponty
"Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has to do only with language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning."

"The whole course of nature that we are so familiar with has certain natural laws of its own, according to which both the spirit of life which is a creature has drives and urges that are somehow predetermined and which even a bad will cannot bypass, and also the elements of this material world have their distinct energies and qualities, which determine what each is or is not capable of, what can or cannot be made from each. It is from these baselines of things, so to say, that whatever comes to be takes in its own particular time span, its risings and continued progress, its ends and its settings, according to the kind of thing it is." Augustine (Lit Comm 9.17.3.2, cp. 6.13.23)

The divine inspiration of the Scriptural text implies the divine inspiration of its originary context, as originary, and of its appropriate interpretive context, as appropriate and interpretive.

Bo-me-rang

When we have seen a thousand stones fall to the ground, we may see one which does not fall under the same apparent circumstances. How then, it is asked, can experience teach us that all stones, rigorously speaking, will fall if unsupported? And to this we reply, that it is not true that we can conceive one stone to be suspended in the air, while a thousand others fall, without believing some peculiar cause to support it; and that, therefore, such a supposition forms no exception to the law, that gravity is a force by which all bodies are urged downwards. Undoubtedly we can conceive a body, when dropt or thrown, to move in a line quite different from other bodies: thus a certain missile used by the natives of Australia, and lately brought to this country, when thrown from the hand in a proper manner, describes a curve, and returns to the place from whence it was thrown. But did any one, therefore, even for an instant suppose that the laws of motion are different for this and for other bodies? On the contrary, was not every person of a speculative turn immediately led to inquire how it was that the known causes which modify motion, the resistance of the air and the other causes, produced in this instance so peculiar an effect?

[William Whewell, The History of Science, Volume I, p. 269. At "a certain missile", Whewell has a footnote, "Called a Bo-me-rang"; hence the title of the post. The argument here, minus the boomerang, is similar to one also found in Lady Mary Shepherd's criticisms of Hume.]

Particular Practicables

As said above, prudence is concerned with particular practicables. As such things are almost infinitely diverse, no one man can adequately consider them all, nor in a short time rather than over a long period of time. Thus in things relevant to prudence, man especially needs to be taught by others, and particularly by elders, who have achieved a sensible understanding of practicable ends [qui sanum intellectum adepti sunt circa fines operabilium]. Thus the Philosopher says, in VI Ethic., "It is fitting to attend no less to the indemonstrable claims and opinions of experienced people who are older and prudent, than to their demonstrations, for by experience they see principles." Thus also it is said in Prov. III, "Do not lean on your own prudence"; and it is said in Eccli. VI, "Stand in the multitude of presbyters," that is, elders, "that are prudent, and join yourself from the heart to their wisdom." And this pertains to teachableness [docilitas], to be very receptive to learning. And so teachableness is appropriately posited as a part of prudence.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.49.3 co. (my translation). The Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

Johnson on Tragic Catharsis

 I introduced Aristotle's doctrine in his Art of Poetry, of 'the [Greek: katharsis ton pathaematon], the purging of the passions,' as the purpose of tragedy. 'But how are the passions to be purged by terrour and pity?' (said I, with an assumed air of ignorance, to incite him to talk, for which it was often necessary to employ some address).

JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you are to consider what is the meaning of purging in the original sense. It is to expel impurities from the human body. The mind is subject to the same imperfection. The passions are the great movers of human actions; but they are mixed with such impurities, that it is necessary they should be purged or refined by means of terrour and pity. For instance, ambition is a noble passion; but by seeing upon the stage, that a man who is so excessively ambitious as to raise himself by injustice, is punished, we are terrified at the fatal consequences of such a passion. In the same manner a certain degree of resentment is necessary; but if we see that a man carries it too far, we pity the object of it, and are taught to moderate that passion.' 

My record upon this occasion does great injustice to Johnson's expression, which was so forcible and brilliant, that Mr. Cradock whispered me, 'O that his words were written in a book!'

[Boswell's Life of Johnson, Volume 3 (sections 117-119).]

Evening Note for Tuesday, September 23

 Thought for the Evening: Convertibility of Signs and Principles

One of the most important aspects of human life consists of probable reasoning, by which I mean not 'reasoning with those quantities called probabilities' but reasoning that deals with the truth-like, the apparent, and the only partially proven, with signs rather than proofs. A significant part of any intellectual inquiry consists of pulling these signs together, first in a way that starts to make sense, and then in such a way that they serve as a foundation for claims about truth, and then in the development of what is effectively a proof (although not always a strict demonstration). The key issue governing proof by signs is convertibility of evidential signs with actual principles and causes.

Following (somewhat loosely) St. Albert the Great in his discussion of signs of verisimilitude (Topicorum 1.1.2), we can organize these evidential signs in something like the following way.

(1) Evidential signs that are immediate phenomena, 'on the surface'. These are typically sensible qualities or immediately experienced features of the world which have a connection with deeper things. Thus, the whiteness of snow gives us a clue about its internal structure, but there is a significant gap of inquiry in the two, because the whiteness of snow is immediately recognizable but the internal structure to which it is a clue takes a considerable amount of investigation to reach.

(2) Evidential signs intermediate between the immediate phenomena and underlying principles. Albert takes the intermediate level of signs of truthlikeness to be the ones that are recognizable to many with only a little reasoning. His example is the pole star as a sign of the movement of the earth; the former shows the latter with a little reasoning that is of the sort that closely connects with things that most people don't have a difficulty understanding, if they put an effort into understanding the reasoning.

(3) Evidential signs convertible with the underlying principles. 'Convertibility' here means that they have an immediate connection such that they go together.  Albert's example is the eclipse and the relative motion of the moon. These signs can only be recognized by considerable reasoning and investigation, and so are only apparent 'to the wise', but when you recognize them, it is practically like recognizing that of which they are signs. These signs themselves have three grades:

(3a) Convertible so as to be recognizable by reflection on experience. These are are cases in which the actual convertibility is something we can sense.

(3b) Convertible so as to be recognizable given relevant competency. The actual convertibility requires at least a general kind of  skill to recognize.

(3c) Convertible so as to be recognizable with great experience and familiarity. The actual convertibility requires what we call relevant expertise to recognize.

However, we can take complexes and patterns of evidential signs together, and interlink them in various ways to get new signs, and because of this we can embed a superficial sign in a context of signs that gets us to (2) or (3). We can also strengthen signs by ruling out possibilities, and so we can transform a type (1) or type (2) sign into a type (3) sign by ruling out all connections but one between the sign and the underlying principles of which it is evidence.

Historically, people seem to have worked out at least four kinds of methods for transforming signs so that they are convertible with principles -- at least, methods that can be seen as such. The earliest, which we find forming in Plato's account of dialectic and developed in Aristotle's Topics and commentary on it, consists of maximal propositions and commonplaces (topoi or loci communes) and topical differentiae, which are principles for how to construct arguments given various starting points. An example of a maximal proposition would be, 'When a material is lacking, what is made from the material is lacking', whose differentia is 'from a material cause'. Suppose you were inquiring into whether a society had swords, but you don't have any direct information about it. To answer, "Does this society have swords?", you can apply the maximal proposition from material causes by recognizing that effective swords require certain kinds of materials -- bronze, iron, steel -- and then you can see if you have evidence that rules out each kind of material being commonly available. The more completely you can rule out the materials needed to make the swords, the tighter connection you create between your evidence and the actual causes and features of the situation. Another maximal proposition is, "It is not right to contradict what seems to be the case to everyone or the many or the wise." This differs from the previous one by being the maximal proposition for an 'extrinsic' topic, and the way you would approach convertibility would be by looking at the reasons why it seems true to everyone or the many or the wise, since, if something seems true to all or to many or to the intelligently informed, then even if it were strictly speaking wrong, there would have to be a reason why it seemed true to them.

A second method people have worked out to get convertibility of signs and principles is Nyaya, the systematic logical approach developed around the 2nd century by (it is thought) Aksapada Gautama in the Nyaya-sutra, and which, in the roiling turmoil of Indian intellectual thought, where massive numbers of different intellectual positions were put into argumentative competition, was raised to a high degree of sophistication, taking various forms in different Indian philosophical schools but perhaps reaching its most thorough form in the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school. The term that approximates what we are calling 'convertibility' here is in Nyaya called vyapti, or 'pervasion/concomitance'. The Nyaya approach identifies various pramanas, or ways of knowledge -- like perception, inference, and testimony -- which allow conclusions to have a connection to what is true, and an elaborate, and sometimes remarkably clever, apparatus was developed for analyzing ways in which such connections can go wrong and right. The result is encapsulated in what has popularly become known as the 'Nyaya syllogism', roughly: "There is fire on the hill? There is smoke on the hill. Wherever there is smoke, there is fire (i.e., pervasion between smoke and fire) as with a kitchen hearth (example of another actual case where the same pervasion is found) but unlike a steaming lake. This hill is smoky in that way. So there is fire on the hill." Or another example: "Atoms and karma have to be given direction by a conscious agent before they can function? They are insentient like an axe. Insentient things come to function only when directed by a conscious agent as a cause, as axes cut only when directed by an axeman. So atoms and karma also have to be given direction by a conscious agent as a cause."

A third method, which overlaps the first, is that of demonstrative regress. Some comments in passing in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics on demonstration in causal reasoning caused problems for commentators, because Aristotle seemed to attribute demonstrative status to a kind of argument that he elsewhere denies can be demonstrative. Early commentators interpreted him as using 'demonstration' (apodeixis) loosely, but in the Renaissance, commentators were not so sure and began to explore other possibilities, and this tradition, which perhaps can be said to begin with Agostino Nifo, reached its clearest form in the works of Giacomo Zabarella. Zabarella, pulling together ideas from prior commentators, argued that there is a kind of beneficial circular argument (regressus) in which you start by inferring the existence of a cause from the effect (Nifo calls this syllogismus conjecturalis, where 'conjecturalis' means not conjectural but non-necessary), and then by a business of understanding (negotiatio intellectus) or intelligent inspection (examen mentale) you make confused ideas more distinct; as you might expect, it consists of making distinctions and working out the implications of those distinctions until the whole field, so to speak, is well ordered, at which point you can prove the effect from the cause with a syllogism that has necessity ex condicione -- and thus you get a genuine demonstration for a conclusion, where certain conditions discovered in the negotiatio are respected. Cassirer noted that there were similarities between Galileo and Zabarella, and through the work of William Wallace and others it is by now established that Galileo knew the demonstrative regress and often makes use of its terminology, but he begins to rework the negotiatio to focus on geometry and experience rather than a priori distinctions, and as time goes on thinks less in terms of syllogisms than in terms of geometrical analysis. Wallace used this to show that many classical scientific discoveries could fairly easily be put into regressus demonstrativa form, even when the discoverers were not themselves thinking in those terms.

A fourth method we find developing with Francis Bacon's attempt to give an account of induction. Bacon suggested that we find the forma naturae of a given phenomenon by drawing up lists of what we found to happen with it in various circumstances and see what in these lists agrees and disagrees with what. This was put in a more rigorous form by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic. Mill, looking over common patterns of inductive reasoning, condensed them into four or five 'methods' (depending on how they are counted) along the lines of Bacon's lists, which are summarized in the Canons of Induction: the Method of Agreement, the Method of Difference, the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, the Method of Residue, and the Method of Concomitant Variations.  For instance, in the Method of Agreement, you note that a phenomenon occurs in a number of different situations, which also share another phenomenon; from this you conclude that the two have a causal connection, and then you just keep applying the different methods until the causal connection becomes clear. Mill intended this to be a complete account of experimental reasoning; Whewell at the time pointed out that this is not how large portions of scientific inquiry works, but it had a great deal of influence in a number of scientific fields, for an extended period of time.

Various Links of Interest

* Ian J. Campbell & Gabriel Shapiro, Can You Deny the PNC? (Metaphysics Γ.3, 1005b11-34) (PDF)

* Nils Peterson, Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Mauricio Suárez, The Pragmatics of Scientific Representation (PDF)

* Marie Leborne Lucas, Neither One Nor Two. Philosophy of Pregnancy, at "Blog of the APA"

* Jeffrey Maynes, The method(s) of cases (PDF)

* Katja Crone, Foundations of a we-perspective

* Katie Ebner-Landy, David Hume vs literature, at "Aeon". This is an interesting argument, but I think things are slightly more complicated if we taken into view Hume's historical works, which certainly do use the character-sketch method as one of several methods.

Currently Reading

In Book

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow
Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities
Oliver O'Donovan, The Disappearance of Ethics

In Audiobook

Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game
Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

In Tales Irrevocably Gone

 Lost
by G. K. Chesterton 

So you have gained the golden crowns, so you have piled together
The laurels and the jewels, the pearls out of the blue,
But I will beat the bounding drum and I will fly the feather
For all the glory I have lost, the good I never knew. 

 I saw the light of morning pale on princely human faces,
In tales irrevocably gone, in final night enfurled,
I saw the tail of flying fights, a glimpse of burning blisses,
And laughed to think what I had lost -- the wealth of all the world. 

 Yea, ruined in a royal game I was before my cradle;
Was ever gambler hurling gold who lost such things as I?
The purple moth that died an hour ere I was born of
That great green sunset God shall make three days after I die. 

 When all the lights are lost and done, when all the skies are broken,
Above the ruin of the stars my soul shall sit in state,
With a brain made rich, with the irrevocable sunsets,
And a closed heart happy in the fullness of a fate. 

 So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell,
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.

Augustine's Ascent of the Soul

 We are inquiring, of course, about the power of the soul, and the soul has the power to perform all these acts simultaneously, although it may think that it is really doing only that act which implies some effort or, at least, some fear. For it performs that act with greater attention than the rest. To teach these grades to anyone, let the acts of the soul, from the lowest to the highest, be called, first, Animation; the second, Sensation; the third, Art; the fourth, Virtue; the fifth, Tranquillity; the sixth, Approach; the seventh, Contemplation. They can be named also in this way: 'of the body'; 'through the body'; 'about the body'; 'toward itself'; 'in itself'; 'toward God'; 'in God'. Or again, in this way: 'beautifully of another, beautifully through another, beautifully about another, beautifully toward a beautiful, beautifully in a beautiful, beautifully toward Beauty, beautifully in Beauty.'

[St. Augustine, The Magnitude of the Soul, McMahon, tr.,  in Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume 2, Ludwig Schopp, ed., CIMA Publishing Co., Inc. (New York: 1947) pp. 146-147.]

What does the soul, or the human being qua alive, do? It holds together and maintains the body (Animation), interacts with its physical environment like other animals (Sensation), acts in a way distinctive to it as rational (Art, Virtue), purifies itself for higher good (Approach), and is united with supreme good (Contemplation). Thus is the fullness and beauty of human life according to Augustine.

Augustine's Ascent of the Soul
First Step	Animation (Being Alive)	Of the Body	beautifully of another
Second Step	Sensation	Through the Body	beautifully through another
Third Step	Art (Productive Skill)	About the Body	beautifully about another
Fourth Step	Virtue	Toward the Soul	beautifully toward the beautiful
Fifth Step	Tranquillity	In the Soul	beautifully in the beautiful
Sixth Step	Approach (Entry)	Toward God	beautifully toward Beauty
Seventh Step	Contemplation	In God	beautifully in Beauty

The Principle of the Uniformity of Nature

 In philosophy, sometimes things seem to be the obvious thing, and then they just vanish. The Principle of the Uniformity of Nature (PUN, no pun intended) is a good example. There was a time when it was practically everywhere. It was the foundational principle of induction, and likewise the  fundamental warrant for reasoning beyond our immediate experience. It was the key element in widely accepted proofs of determinism, of the impossibility of miracles, of the eternity of the world. Scientists appealed to it in scientific investigations of all different kinds. It perhaps began soaring in importance somewhere around the 1850s, and then, with some up-and-down, seems to have begun a slow collapse in the 1880s, until in the 1950s Wesley Salmon (if I recall correctly) pronounced it dead, and certainly nobody takes it quite seriously on its own terms today. To rise suddenly into prominence as one of the most important of all rational principles and then just to end up as an artifact of purely historical interest, and to do so in about a century, is an interesting career. 

Of course, it's not quite so simple. The above rough resume is that of a principle specifically being called 'the principle of the uniformity of nature' or 'uniformity of nature', discussed specifically as such or casually referred to in the course of proving other things. The big question is what the principle actually was. Is the above resume the history of a label which made an already existing principle prominent? Is it the history of a particular use of a principle? Was there actually any such principle at all?

Ironically, given its once-sovereign importance, one could make an argument that there was never such a principle. Indeed, part of the downfall of the entire notion of a PUN is seen in the fact that people increasingly began to be confused about what it meant, and by preface or apposition would remark (for instance) about the difficulty of finding an exact formulation. And when we look at attempts to make it more specific, we find that people trying to formulate the PUN more exactly do not come up with the same formulation.

We have the Naive Formulation, which is perhaps most often used, because it is naturally connected with the name: The course of nature is uniform. But even in the 1850s it was clear that this was not adequate. W. G. Ward, in his debate with J. S. Mill about a priori propositions in the mid-century, noted, without putting a lot of emphasis on it, that there was a lot of evidence that the course of nature was not so very uniform. Later figures also note that it's unclear what 'nature' is supposed to mean here. If we try to take the Naive Formulation seriously, it's difficult to get more out of it than that there are some kinds of general principles describing the things into which we inquire, which is perhaps true, but not so obviously helpful.

Perhaps the most successful and widely accepted specification we can call the Causal Sameness Principle: The same causes have the same effects and the same effects have the same causes. This is an attractive candidate, because it has a very venerable history, long preceding the PUN label; it tends to be the formulation used by more philosophically minded scientists, like James Clerk Maxwell; and it would mean that PUN was not some fluke, because it's still often used today, even if it is no longer treated as having the importance or centrality that it once did. Unlike the Naive Formulation, whose status as a fundamental principle gave people considerable difficulty, it is fairly plausible to argue that it is a necessary principle, and therefore not in need of any further explanation. But even at the time it was occasionally noted that the Causal Sameness Principle can't do most of the things attributed to the PUN. It's useless for disproving miracles or free will, for instance, because miracles and free will deal with things that are neither 'same effects' nor 'same causes'; they are explicitly dealing with different kinds of causes. While you can perhaps see vaguely how a theory of induction might be based on it, the details of how were surprisingly tricky to work out -- in particular, it's not clear that the Causal Sameness Principle gets you closer to a full theory of induction than any other causal principle. Perhaps more serious is a point noted by Mill, that not all 'uniformities of nature' could be causal in the way the Causal Sameness Principle required. (Mill's example is fundamental properties, which as fundamental could not have any cause, unless you count God, but even if you do, that plays no role in how we usually reason inductively about them.)

Mill, in fact, provides in A System of Logic what I think is probably the best alternative to the Causal Sameness Principle, although he does it almost in passing: What is true in one case is true in all cases of a certain description. This has the advantage of being consistent with the Causal Sameness Principle while have flexibility more like that of the Naive Formulation. Call it the Description Formulation. What is, I think, most attractive about the Description Formulation is that it is the only version of PUN in which it is very obvious what it actually has to do with induction. In induction you are, more or less, going from 'Some A is B' to 'All A is B', and the puzzle is what you are doing that lets you do this. The Description Formulation gives an answer: you are not doing so simpliciter, but only under a description. And what we think of as induction is the work of finding and ruling out candidates for that description. (Mill thinks of this as happening, Bacon-like, with the various methods like the Methods of Agreement.) I start with this case, in which X is Y, and then I, by various kinds of trial and error, find a description D that lets me say 'All X is Y' in the context of D. At the extreme you can do this trivially -- if some A is B, then all A that is B is B -- which shows that the principle is not just an arbitrary claim, since we know it is a legitimate move for at least one description, but of course, in induction we are looking for non-trivial descriptions. That there are non-trivial descriptions to be found is not something we know beforehand, but Mill wouldn't be bothered by this, because he doesn't think the PUN is necessary, a priori, or indefeasible; he just thinks it is a principle that we've found to work in a lot of different kinds of situations, and so is suitable for practical purposes. But he also would have to concede, on the same grounds, that the Description Formulation can't do many things that people wanted it to do -- you can't use it to establish determinism, for instance. All that's really salvaged by the Description Formulation is a general format for inductive inquiry.

So it seems like the best summary here is that, while there are a few things that could be considered a principle of the uniformity of nature, they are quite limited and don't have the features that the PUN was generally taken to have; the PUN, as such, despite all the fanfare, never actually existed in any form at all. It was almost entirely carried by the rhetorical force of the phrase, 'uniformity of nature', in a context in which people would describe scientific inquiry as being concerned with 'uniformities of nature'.  People could point to particular 'uniformities of nature' -- in the period, astronomical phenomena and Newton's Laws would have been the obvious cases -- which is what made it plausible. But a general principle was never really formulated; the phrase was a placeholder, a stand-in serving as an IOU, whose place was never filled with anything that could deliver even a portion of what was promised.

The Fathomless Daylight Seems to Stand and Dream

 September
by Archibald Lampman 

 Now hath the summer reached her golden close,
And, lost amid her corn-fields, bright of soul,
Scarcely perceives from her divine repose
How near, how swift, the inevitable goal:
Still, still, she smiles, though from her careless feet
The bounty and the fruitful strength are gone,
And through the soft long wondering days goes on
The silent sere decadence sad and sweet. 

 The kingbird and the pensive thrush are fled,
Children of light, too fearful of the gloom;
The sun falls low, the secret word is said,
The mouldering woods grow silent as the tomb;
Even the fields have lost their sovereign grace,
The cone-flower and the marguerite; and no more,
Across the river's shadow-haunted floor,
The paths of skimming swallows interlace. 

 Already in the outland wilderness
The forests echo with unwonted dins;
In clamorous gangs the gathering woodmen press
Northward, and the stern winter's toil begins.
Around the long low shanties, whose rough lines
Break the sealed dreams of many an unnamed lake,
Already in the frost-clear morns awake
The crash and thunder of the falling pines. 

 Where the tilled earth, with all its fields set free,
Naked and yellow from the harvest lies,
By many a loft and busy granary,
The hum and tumult of the thrashers rise;
There the tanned farmers labor without slack,
Till twilight deepens round the spouting mill,
Feeding the loosened sheaves, or with fierce will,
Pitching waist-deep upon the dusty stack. 

 Still a brief while, ere the old year quite pass,
Our wandering steps and wistful eyes shall greet
The leaf, the water, the beloved grass;
Still from these haunts and this accustomed seat
I see the wood-wrapt city, swept with light,
The blue long-shadowed distance, and, between,
The dotted farm-lands with their parcelled green,
The dark pine forest and the watchful height. 

 I see the broad rough meadow stretched away
Into the crystal sunshine, wastes of sod,
Acres of withered vervain, purple-gray,
Branches of aster, groves of goldenrod;
And yonder, toward the sunlit summit, strewn
With shadowy boulders, crowned and swathed with weed,
Stand ranks of silken thistles, blown to seed,
Long silver fleeces shining like the noon. 

 In far-off russet corn-fields, where the dry
Gray shocks stand peaked and withering, half concealed
In the rough earth, the orange pumpkins lie,
Full-ribbed; and in the windless pasture-field
The sleek red horses o'er the sun-warmed ground
Stand pensively about in companies,
While all around them from the motionless trees
The long clean shadows sleep without a sound.

 Under cool elm-trees floats the distant stream,
Moveless as air; and o'er the vast warm earth
The fathomless daylight seems to stand and dream,
A liquid cool elixir -- all its girth
Bound with faint haze, a frail transparency,
Whose lucid purple barely veils and fills
The utmost valleys and the thin last hills,
Nor mars one whit their perfect clarity. 

 Thus without grief the golden days go by,
So soft we scarcely notice how they wend,
And like a smile half happy, or a sigh,
The summer passes to her quiet end;
And soon, too soon, around the cumbered eaves
Sly frosts shall take the creepers by surprise,
And through the wind-touched reddening woods shall rise
October with the rain of ruined leaves.

Dashed Off XXIII

 Morality is tiered and not flat. (We see this very obviously with treatment of children and with situations of heightened responsibility.)

One thing that can always be guaranteed with regard to family is that your plans will not turn out the way you think.

"I must in all cases recognize the free being outside me as free being, i.e., I must limit my freedom through the concept of the possibility of his freedom." Fichte
"The finite rational being cannot assume the existence of other finite rational beings outside it without positing itself as standing with those beings in a particular relation, called a relation of right."

Rights presuppose both moral law and freedom.

If there is no obligation to be rational, there is no obligation at all.

"To ask a religious man why he believes in God is like asking a happy man why he enjoys life." William Temple
"The great aim of all true religion is to transfer the centre of itnerest and concern from self to God."
"The appeal to authority is always a rational appeal in its own nature."
"The inner meaning of History is the conflict between the Lamb and the Wild Beast -- Love and Pride."
"The essential instrument of God is the community of persons, and the Book is the instrument of the community."

Iconoclasm tends to be associated historically with attempts to further state propaganda.

Christ fulfills both ceremonial law and moral law, making them symbols of a higher order, although they function differently as symbols.

representative vs vicarious functions of signs

Hooker on internal hierarchy (1.8.6)
on perpetual prayer (5.48.1)

Multitudes, when acting as multitudes, have difficulty distinguishing reality and appearance.

"When an individual's conduct consistently appears cruel, wicked, selfish, or ungenerous, the Akan would say of that individual that 'he is not a person' (onnye onipa)." Kwame Gyekye
"The judgment that a human being is 'not a person,' made on the basis of that individual's consistently morally repehensible conduct, implies that the pursuit or practice of moral virtue is intrinsic to the conception of a person held in African thought."

Berger's signals of transcendence: order, play, hope, damnation (outrage), humour

(1) All physical things have efficient powers.
(2) We understand efficient powers in terms of final causes.
(3) The efficient powers of physical things are intelligible.
(4) Therefore all physical things have final causes insofar as they have efficient powers.

Physics leads all physical sicences only because it serves all physical sciences. Physics is not a despot; it does not dictate terms. It provides tools that aid the development of other sciences on their own terms. When physicists have tried to dictated terms to other sciences, they have often tended to be wrong, like Lord Kelvin lecutring biologists on evolutionary timescales. Nor is surprising that they would; the physical phenomena that other sciences study in detail have to be accommodated by physicists as much as any of the paradigmatic ones with which physicists usually start. If other scientists do a good job of identifying and studying a phenomenon, physicists are in no position to dismiss it.

Complicated passions tend to resolve into simpler passions, and ulimtately into the principal passions, which have the simplest orientation to their objects.

"God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God." Berdyaev

Death affects us so deeply because we are in a sense immortal in all the wrong ways.

We are immortal enough to see something beyond any death, but not immortal enough to avoid death itself.

"The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content." Einstein

"One of the principal objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity." Gibbs

"A doubt which makes an impression on our mind cannot be removed by calling it metaphysical." Hertz

The unity of all science consists neither in its material nor in its method, but in its end.

"The sound experimental criticism of a hypothesis is subordinated to certain moral conditions; in order to estimate correctly the agreement of a physical theory with the facts, it is not enough tob e a good mathematician and skillful experimenter; one must also be an impartial and faithful judge." Claude Bernard

No k nowledge is complete until it is returned to divine principles, but one must also not try to short-circuit the route.

"Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion." Bacon

The measure of a good explanans is not whether the explanans is clear but whether the explanandum is made more clear by it.

The soil in which the state grows is one of disposition, sentiment, and representation; power in a state is always veiled by signs and feelings, sometimes reaching the point of kitsch.

A political constitution cannot be wholly imposed because it is a shared way of thinking.

Only by interpreting aspects of a theory as causal can we relate the theory to experiment.

Even were there no heaven, one could not get a proper conception of human dignity without conceiving the possibility of heaven for human persons. The human person is that for which one can conceive the possibility of heaven.

adminicular/adminiculary
adminiculum: literally, 'at-hand tool'
-- English adminicle: something that aids/supports, an auxiliary, background ornament on a coin or medal, [in Scots law] corrobrative proof

"...the remarkable manner in which Divine Providence makes use of error itself as a preparation of truth; that is, employing the lighter forms of it in sweeping away those of a more offensive nature." Newman

jobs as social entities
-- offshoots of contracts, and while individual jobs can be created, 'job' as a category has grown organically under pragmatic and ethical pressures

co-communication (coordiation among communicators making them to act as a unified communicator, cf. co-authorship)

Progress must be grown.

One can go far in philosophy with many small and humble techniques.

Human cognition is not merely subject-object; our understanding of the subject-object relation is mediated and facilitated by co-subjects (who are also co-objects).

Every civil society must recognize natural, moral, legal, and spiritual titles and claims.

Every human being is more powerful, more wise, and more good with others than they are alone. Even the worse corruptions we can perform together are worse because they are corruptions of much greater goods, as our mass follies are misdirections of much greater wisdom.

The category of relation is the category of oriented transitives, i.e., the having of (directedness to) an other-term (object) that is properly other.

respicit ad aliquid (respectus) vs se habere ad aliquid (habitudo)

As the sex principia all presuppose relatio, they are capable of inheriting relativity to what only exists in reason.

It is not the same to wear a hat and to wear a crown, not the same to sit on a chair and to sit on a throne, not the same to hold a stick and to hold a scepter.

dominium: right whereby a things is ours
dom. plenum: ownership + usufruct
dom. minus plenum: ownership where usufruct is vested in another

It is immensely naive to think that clergy without temporal power will not be subject to temporal temptations.

A king is not a temporal vicar of God; he is a minister with a limited jurisdiction.

Legal positivism holds that legislation, however it is conceived, works ex opere operato, and not ex opere operantis (whether of legislator or minister or judge or society).

Mathematical systems have to be 'loosened up' by pragmatic and heuristic elements to be of genuine use in most physical and philosophical contexts; they need to be made fit to apply to things that are not purely formal aspects of pure quantities.

Logical systems related to Boolean Algebra tend to be appropriate to situations of combination and elimiantion, its logical operators being appropriate for describing various kinds of filtering of possibilities (as we see with truth tables).

Many of our responsibilities are only had by luck.

'lore' (e.g., 'magic systems') as narrative quasi-art (it's effetively a conceptual art, i.e., a formal quasi-art)

found fantasy (obviously dreams are a significant source, but there is also Chestertonian found fantasy)

le péché de l'angèlisme

Every empiricism, by its nature, has fringes it cannot handle well.

"The end, sought for by morality, is above it and is super-moral." F. H. Bradley

artificial teleology -> unconscious teleology -> natural teleology // artificial selection -> unconscious selection -> natural selection

"The inward reality in the Chrisitan religion is to be found by means of externals." Trethowan

All knowledge aspires to be a stepping stone to the Beatific Vision.

Eucharist & Exodus 24:4-11

Mascall on the Eucharist seems to confuse sacrifice with consecration.

Sacraments are essentially signs of grace, but as efficacious, their causality is of grace, not merely of sign.

Christ's death is not a sacrifice merely by death but by being offered by Christ, which he does both morally and sacerdotally in body and spirit on the Cross, in Session, and in the Eucharist, thereby offering in the most perfect way.

The people who best know how to play victims are always the people who make them.

An economy consists not merely in exchanges but also in a context that gives the exchanges meaning.

All beliefs are arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained in that experience alone.

Liberty of conscience is required by the common interest in public order and security; it is not limited by it, although there is a point beyond which that common interest itself, considered by itself, doe snot *require* further protection for liberty of conscience. This limitation of requirement for the liberty is not the same as limitation of the liberty itself.

PSR: 'If something exists, it is intelligible that it exists, either per se or per alium.'

Gerson's Ur-Platonism
(1) antimaterialism (Some things are neither bodies nor properties of bodies.)
(2) antimechanism (Some necessary explanations are not available to a materialist.)
(3) antinominalims (Some things are not situated individuals.)
(4) antirelativism (Some things are not purely relative to individual or collective cognition.)
(5) antiskepticism (Some knowledge is possible.)

yang : providential causation :: yin : providential permission

It is natural to human nature to be united to the divine nature, but in the Hypostatic Union it is so united beyond any human capacity.

Annales Cambriae puts Badon at 518 and Camlann at 549.

The normative does not in any meaningful way supervene on the natural, not because there are no domains where that supervenience occurs, but because the reverse supervenience and approximate correlation are also both sometimes possible. There is not and has never been any reason to think that every normative difference corresponds to some natural difference; almost everyone treats both as relating more loosely than that. It does not follow from this that there is no connection between the two; supervenience is a very specific and strict relation, and the point is that there is no obvious reason, and has never been an obvious reason, always to privilege it above other relations here, including above other broadly supervenience-like relations.

If I say, "That is cruel," everyone takes this as being a moral claim, but Mackie seems committed to saying that this moral claim describes a 'natural fact' (one he distinguishes from the 'moral fact' of 'That is wrong'.)

No matter how one divides 'natural fact' from 'normative fact', it seems that either the two must have some overlap or the account of one or the other has surprising and unexpected implications.

On chill and starlit winter night,
the tournaments of men afar
in sound and tumult making noise,
a churchyard still with snow is fair ---

History has always been more closely related to poetry than to philosophy.

One of the responsibilities of parents is to train their children for the dignity of dominion.

pratityasamutpada (dependent origination / dependent arising) as characterizing the realm of objects of cognition
-- all objects of cognition, considered only as such, exhibit duhkha (dukkha) (= unease / unsteadiness / standing instability) & anitya (impermanence) & anatman (lack of self-being)
-- dependent arising implies that things cannot be viewed properly if seen only in isolation; those who do not penetrate the principle are mired in overfocus on particular things

The begetting and raising of a child is the generating of an equal.

Peter takes Ps 69:25 to be prophetic of Judas Iscariot; but read as such, it goes on (vv. 27-28) to deny all salvation to Judas.

logical efficacy (Collingwood): the causing of a question to arise

Much of dialectic consists of removing hypotheses from the board.

What is usually called 'event causation' is really dependency between co-effects. The event of swinging the bat and the event of hitting a homerun are co-effects in which the latter is dependent on the former.

infant baptism a sign of the genuinely gratuitous nature of grace

In faith we all become like little children in the receiving of grace.

Music on My Mind

 

Heather Heywood, "My Bonnie Moorhen". This is a folksong that was first collected by James Hogg in his Jacobite Relics in 1819. It's almost universally thought to be an allegorical song with veiled reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie, from the days when support for him had to be concealed. Songs of that sort are not entirely unheard of, but I confess myself skeptical of such precision allegory in a folksong. Nonetheless, the song is very clearly Jacobite, making use of Jacobite imagery, and depicts the Jacobite cause as beautiful but hunted, and yet still hopeful of resurgence.

It is Something to Be Sure of a Desire

 The Great Minimum
by G.K. Chesterton 

 It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched when all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun. 

 It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
It is something to have hungered once as those
Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods. 

 To have seen you and your unforgotten face,
Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,
Pure as white lilies in a watery space,
It were something, though you went from me today. 

 To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky. 

 In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire. 

 Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been. 

Doctor of Controversies

 Today is the feast of St. Roberto Bellarmino, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons on the Eucharist:

...a man's last will and testament should surely be drawn up in the straightforward speech of everyday life. No one but a madman, or one who desired to make trouble after his death, would employ metonymy and metaphor in such a document. When a testator says, 'I leave my house to my son John,' does anybody or will anybody ever understand his words to mean 'I leave to my son John, not my house itself standing four-square, but a nice, painted picture of it.' In the next place, suppose a prince promised one of you a hundred gold pieces, and in fulfilment of his word sent a beautiful sketch of the coins, I wonder what you would think of his liberality. And suppose that when you complained, the donor said, 'Sir, your astonishment is out of place, as the painted crowns you received may very properly be considered true crowns by the figure of speech called metonymy,' would not everybody feel that he was making fun of you and your picture ? Now Our Lord promised to give us His flesh for our food. The bread which I shall give, He said, is my flesh for the life of the world.

[Quoted in James Brodrick, S.J., The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., 1542-1621, Volume I, Burns Oates and Washbourne, Ltd. (London: 1938), p. 84.]

Sibyl of the Rhine

 Today is the feast of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Virgin and Doctor of the Church. From The Book of Divine Works:

God's power is joined to the supreme strength that consists in the perfection of shining justice, for God's power and strength cleave to one another. God's power indeed is rounded by balanced equality, because it lacks beginning and end.... For no mutability, no vicissitude touches God with increase or loss, nor does any unit of time ever divide him; rather, he remains ever without beginning, inviolate and immutable, granting life to all that is and gathering to supreme blessedness those who purely worship him.

[St. Hildegard von Bingen, The Book of the Divine Works, Campbell, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2018), p. 420.]

Verbal Disputes and Facts

 A purely verbal dispute is of course a dispute that arises solely from a misunderstanding about the meaning of words, where there is no difference of view as to facts between the disputants: the sort of dispute which the Scholastics sought to avoid by enforcing the maxim, Initium disputandi, definitio nominis. Logicians have held the most widely divergent views about the extent of such disputes, some maintaining, with Locke, "that the greatest part of the disputes in the world are merely verbal," others, with De Quincey, that "they have never in the whole course of their lives met with such a thing as a merely verbal dispute." The truth lies much nearer the latter extreme than the former, for when different people attach different meanings to the same term the cause of such difference of usage will almost invariably be found to be a difference of view about facts. In fixing the connotation of names, in attaching meanings to terms, people are guided by what they consider to be facts..., and by their interpretation of the latter: and it is just precisely because all do not agree in their admission of alleged facts, and in their interpretations of admitted facts, that differences in connotation and definition -- leading to ambiguity, equivocation, and so-called verbal disputes -- arise.

[ Peter Coffey, The Science of Logic: An Inquiry into the Principles of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method, Volume I: Conception, Judgment, and Inference, Peter Smith (New York: 1938) p. 103.]

Fortnightly Book, September 14

 I'm running behind on this, of course.

Walter Wangerin Jr. (1944-2021) was a Lutheran pastor and a professor of English at the University of Evansville, eventually ending up teaching at Valparaiso University. He was a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction. Most of his works are religious, but perhaps his best-known work is a fantasy novel published in 1978 called The Book of the Dun Cow, which is the new fortnightly book.

Men have not yet come, and animals protect the world from the terrible Wyrm at the center of the earth. Chauntecleer is a rooster, and as such a lord of his domain. But to rule brings grave responsibilities, and there are terrible monsters, not least of which are the evil basilisks who seek to free the Wyrm who will destroy the world....

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas)

Introduction

Opening Passage:

'Then you are so convinced by these new theories that you plan to jettison all the cliches of the modern novel -- adultery, love, ambition -- in order to write a biography of Gilles de Rais!'

After a pause, he contined:

'It is not the obscenity of Naturalism I detest -- the language of the lockup, the doss house and the latrines -- that would be foolish and absurd. Let's face it, some subjects can't be treated any other way -- Zola's L'Assommoir is living proof that works of tremendous vision and power can be constructed out of the linguistic equivalent of pitch and tar. That is not the issue, any more than the fact that I have serious reservations about Naturalism's heavy-handed, slapdash style. No, what I really object to is Naturalism's immorality on the intellectual plain -- the way it has turned literature into the living incarnation of materialism, the way it promotes the idea of art as something democratic!...' (p. 3)

Summary: Durtal is a writer who has been increasingly dissatisfied with the Naturalistic literary style that is in fashion; he was set on a different path by an experience with Matthias Grünewald's Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece. His current project is working through a biography of Gilles de Rais. He often talks about it and related matters with his friend, Des Hermies, who is a doctor who (possibly) has considerable writing talent but has never published anything because he realized that, whatever his ability, he was never going to write anything genuinely original. Through Des Hermies, Durtal meets Carhaix, the last bellringer in Paris; Carhaix, unlike Durtal and Des Hermies, is both Catholic and married, but they forgive him such relatively minor faux pas because Mme Carhaix is delightful and Carhaix is an interesting conversationalist, if a bit obsessed by the dying art of change-ringing. (Carhaix is so obsessed with bells, in fact, that one suspects, despite his obvious commitment to the faith, that he's Catholic in part because it makes it easier to be a bellringer.)The three, I suppose, are misfit artists -- Durtal, the artist who has broken off the fashionable style and is struggling to find his own; Des Hermies, the over-curious and ever-restless failed artist; and Carhaix, devotee of an art that is almost extinct and generally no longer appreciated.

Durtal's work on Gilles de Rais is the unifying thread of the story; as we go, we find out more and more about this man who once was a fellow warrior beside St. Jeanne D'Arc and then became a Satanist executed for raping and murdering children. Des Hermies, who in his capacity as a physician has an extraordinary number of connections and acquaintances, recommends that he consider looking at how Satanists work in present-day France. The most notable Satanist of modern-day is Canon Docre, an unfrocked and excommunicated priest; Des Hermies has never met him, but he knows that the Chantelouves have connections with him. Durtal happens to know the Chantelouves, in a somewhat interesting way, since he and Mme. Chantelouve have been carrying on a correspondence affair. Durtal uses this connection to try to learn more about Satanism and, eventually, a Satanic Black Mass that Canon Docre will be holding when he visits Paris. As the progress of the Gilles de Rais research increases, and we follow Gilles de Rais in his descent into evil, Durtal seems to undergo an opposing transformation, as he increasingly comes to regard his affair as a sordid and repulsive matter and finds the Satanists, and everyone and everything associated with them, off-putting. He doesn't believe any of it, but even he is shocked and made uneasy by the intensely petty sacrilege at the Black Mass and the malice expressed toward the Eucharist; he doesn't really know why, but the sacrilege just seems repugnant. Durtal accepts none of the dogmas, and yet the sacrilege and blasphemy just seems wrong.

That's more or less where it's left. Human beings are myth-makers, and when we speak of the modern age we weave a myth -- a myth of progress, of the banishment of superstition, of clear-eyed regard for reality. And Durtal's brush with Satanism has shown him what he was already beginning to recognize in the very modern style of Literary Naturalism: it's entirely fiction. Many of the things that make the modern age bearable are just slightly new versions of things that have always been, like having a nice meal with friends. The progress of the modern age is sometimes fake -- not always, perhaps, but a lot of it is only surface deep, and some of it is covering losses and deteriorations, like the loss of the art of change-ringing. You're free, of course, to think it's in some way a good trade, and Durtal (although not Carhaix) might not criticize you for it -- but it is a deterioration being spun as progress. But even when genuine, some of the progress is really just the old enduring into the present day -- basic points of chemistry were discovered by Renaissance alchemists, and the beauty of modern Paris is partly built on the Gothic and the Baroque. Nor has the modern age banished superstition. There are astrologers, alchemists, magicians galore. There are Satanic Black Masses going on under the secular age's nose, and a few of its shining lights are closely linked to them, and modern Frenchmen are terrified of Satanic curses. Durtal and his two friends find that there is an entire movement of heretical Catholicism going around, headed by a messianic prophet named Dr. Joannes, that is opposing, with magic, the Satanic curses of people like Canon Docre. It doesn't matter whether any of this is true or not; it is there. It is very obviously not banished, and it all has exactly the same right to be called 'modern' as anything in the myth. Certainly the myth does not let the Middle Ages off for the fact that magic and Satanism were disapproved then, and indeed disapproved more harshly than they are in the modern age; the myth of modernity simply points out that it was all there. And here it is again. It exists in the same calendar year; it is fomented by the same social causes; it interacts with the same cultural context. And far from being clear-eyed about this, people tell themselves fictional stories of how it's all in the past.

An age so self-deceitful cannot be anything but sick. But the story is not pessimistic; there is a sort of hope about the world that comes out of this, although only of a limited sort. If the modern age could not eliminate superstition, maybe there is something to religion. Maybe. If sacrilege and blasphemy still exist, we have not entirely lost a conception of the sacred. Not entirely. If the modern age could not banish Satan, maybe there is something to be said for Catholics worshipping God. Maybe, and maybe something. Durtal doesn't really believe any of it. What he does know is that the myth of the modern age is a lie. Whatever good there might be in modernity, the positivists and the Satanists are cousins, the priests are often blasphemers and the politicians often corrupt, and the world is full of sordid futility and evil. To see that is a sort of progress. Evil is a clue to what really means something. Durtal, however, has not gone farther than the beginning of that. Even Huysmans did not know where it all would lead; it's not even clear that, having published this book, he ever thought he would return to Durtal at all. But even if it all stopped here, it is something to have discovered that something might lead somewhere.

Favorite Passage:

Des Hermies rose and paced the room for a moment.

'That is all very well,' he groaned, 'but this century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we live? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them?'

'They will turn out,' replied Durtal, 'just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.' (pp. 264-265)

Recommendation: Recommended; I would say, 'Highly Recommended', but there are parts of the book that are definitely not for everyone. (The book is in some ways like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but with cleaner and more unified structure, and Satanic blasphemers rather than Templar enthusiasts.)

*****

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas), Hale, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 2001).

Golden Mouth

 Today was the feast of St. John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church. From Discourse 3 on Lazarus:

Do you not notice that workmen in brass, or goldsmiths, or silversmiths, or those who engage in any art whatsoever, preserve carefully all the instruments of their art; and if hunger come, or poverty afflict them, they prefer to endure anything rather than sell for their maintenance any of the tools which they use. It is frequently the case that many thus choose rather to borrow money to maintain their house and family, than part with the least of the instruments of their art. This they do for the best reasons; for they know that when those are sold, all their skill is rendered of no avail, and the entire groundwork of their gain is gone. If those are left, they may be able, by persevering in the exercise of their skill, in time to pay off their debts; but if they, in the meantime, allow the tools to go to others, there is, for the future, no means by which they can contrive any alleviation of their poverty and hunger. We also ought to judge in the same way. As the instruments of their art are the hammer and anvil and pincers, so the instruments of our work are the apostolic and prophetic books, and all the inspired and profitable Scriptures. And as they, by their instruments, shape all the articles they take in hand, so also do we, by our instruments, arm our mind, and strengthen it when relaxed, and renew it when out of condition. 

The Provincials and the Metropole

The conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University while speaking to students at a large public debate event. I know very little about him, beyond recognizing his picture and knowing he was closely connected with TPUSA, but every coldblooded murder under any circumstances is a loss to all of us. The event has led to a massive degradation of relations across all the political parts of social media, with endless accusations and recriminations, and some people, including teachers, who are, as they say, 'too online', have made fools of themselves and put their jobs in jeopardy by speaking positively of the murder. One would think it would just be common sense, regardless of one's political views, not publicly to celebrate a murder on a school campus at a student event if you are a teacher, but I suppose it's not actually difficult to find people without common sense in the teaching profession.

In any case, I was looking through a number of social media accounts this morning in a (futile) attempt to find more scholarly article and website recommendations for my occaional 'links of note' posts, and stumbled upon a debate about a particular case that pulled me up short a bit. It was about some positive comments made by a teacher in a high classroom about the murder of Kirk. That wasn't what made me pause. What caught my attention was that the high school was in Australia.

It's an old story. The provincials chat about affairs in the metropole in order to pretend to be cosmopolitans. What is peculiar about our moment of time is that the provincials deliberately make themselves provincials and treat the United States as the metropole even when there is no reason why they should. It goes far beyond what most people note on this subject, namely, that people pay attention to American politics because of America's global influence. This isn't like the Cuban Missile Crisis or trade wars. Rather, the domestic political issues of the United States are just copied. We saw this with George Floyd, in which you had people in foreign countries protesting a single policing incident in Minnesota, and here we have a teacher in Australia treating a political murder in Utah as if it were local politics. And it's become a joke on X.com and some other social media sites that the accounts most vociferously engaged with American politics always turn out not to be Americans. Half the world have volunteered to be an American colony, and treat themselves like the provinces of a metropole; there is a global tacit agreement for treating the US as the one place that really matters. All other political issues have to be shoehorned into American political disputes, otherwise they are treated as fringe.

It should go without saying, but perhaps doesn't, that this is bad for everyone. Most American domestic politics simply cannot bear that weight; most of it has no global significance at all. What is more, American domestic politics is weird. It does not work like politics in the rest of the world. Part of this is that we are an unusually successful republic, and republican politics always tends to be more paranoid and rough-and-tumble and tolerant of extremes than, say, the politics of parliamentary monarchies. The price of a republic is crazy people being the primary defense against crazy people, checks and balances carried to the point of a universal law, and we've been a prospering republic longer than most. We are also immense. There isn't really a single domestic politics in a population that's about a third of a billion people spread out from sea to shining sea in a federated system. There are lots of different domestic politics with fuzzy borders in a lot of similar-but-different political systems that work like capacitors, building up charge on particular issues that suddenly leap into national prominence; these suddenly-national topics then immediately start mutating on contact with new and different regional politics, in unpredictable ways. Local politics often makes a certain amount of practical sense, but in a system like this, at the national level there's not much rhyme or reason as to why at any given time we all happen to be talking about this topic rather than that. These topics get filtered through international journalistic institutions and arrive, in often highly simplified and distorted form, in other countries, where people naively take them up as a the topic du jour. 

And the discussions are often quite ignorant. One of the things that I discovered very early as an academic is that academics located outside of the United States often have really strange interpretations of American politics; this is not so much their fault as the nature of the thing. It's what happens when your conceptions of an exotic country are built mostly out of secondhand rumors about it. And make no mistake, whatever country you may live in, whatever politics might be like there, in politics the United States is an exotic land of strange customs. It's hard enough to follow and understand US politics when you are an American in America; outside of that, you have little chance at all. What actually happens, of course, is that the American topics get mapped, badly and inconsistently, on the domestic politics of other countries, so that people in other countries think that the disputes are about X when that has never been the point of the dispute at all. Sometimes these confusions bleed back into the United States, to the muddling of everything.

But the whole thing is bad on the other side, as well. There is just no reason why Australians should be treating themselves as a cultural appendage of the United States, with the political events of such a globally significant powerhouse as Orem, Utah having a centrality and importance on a level with things that happen in Melbourne or Sydney. There is no value for Australia, or any other country, in turning themselves into peasants troubled by rumors about intrigues in the royal palace. It doesn't matter how influential American politics is; it's not your own, and it's usually not that valuable or important. This doesn't mean that you can't have an interest in it, of course, nor does it mean that there are never cases of genuine global importance (but they can come from anywhere, not just the United States), but there's no reason why these issues of domestic America should be taking up valuable real estate in another country's political consciousness.

I sometimes wonder, though, if it's deliberate; perhaps people around the world talk American politics so that they don't (directly) have to talk about their own. In any case, it's an impoverishment all around.