Death of Turpin

One of my favorite death scenes in all of literature:

When the Archbishop beheld him swoon, Rollant,
Never before such bitter grief he'd had;
Stretching his hand, he took that olifant.
Through Rencesvals a little river ran;
He would go there, fetch water for Rollant.
Went step by step, to stumble soon began,
So feeble he is, no further fare he can,
For too much blood he's lost, and no strength has;
Ere he has crossed an acre of the land,
His heart grows faint, he falls down forwards and
Death comes to him with very cruel pangs.

The count Rollanz wakes from his swoon once more,
Climbs to his feet; his pains are very sore;
Looks down the vale, looks to the hills above;
On the green grass, beyond his companions,
He sees him lie, that noble old baron;
'Tis the Archbishop, whom in His name wrought God;
There he proclaims his sins, and looks above;
Joins his two hands, to Heaven holds them forth,
And Paradise prays God to him to accord.
Dead is Turpin, the warrior of Charlon.
In battles great and very rare sermons
Against pagans ever a champion.
God grant him now His Benediction!

Song of Roland CLXIV-CLXV

There's something very poignant about the death of a man who, despite his own serious wounds, has as his last thought to help another. And it's beautifully written, too -- very dramatic.

Catching Up on Things of Note

* A little late, but always timely: My favorite statement by Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail

* Nicholas Steno, the least adequately appreciated great scientist in history, gets a mention in a recent op-ed on science and religion.

* "The Rhine River" received a well-earned Cliopatria blogging award.

* I thought this discussion at "Uncertain Principles" of the differences between the way mathematicians and physicists approach mathematics to be very interesting.

* There's a review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell at Scientific American.com. I'll eventually get around to reading it at some point, but it doesn't look particularly interesting--old ideas rewarmed, and (as is too often the case) without regard for the real anthropological and historical facts that need explaining. I hope it's better than that, and not a waste of my time like some of Dennett's more recent work has been.

* In Truth and Truth II Miriam Burstein has a good discussion of truth in historical fiction.

* The History Carnival and the Teaching Carnival are worth browsing.

Chesterton on Democracy

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves -- the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter 4

Not-so-dangerous Ideas and Very Dangerous Hyperboles

You may have heard by now of The Edge's Annual Question for 2006 (HT: Mixing Memory):

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

I find this a rather absurd sort of question; a serious look at almost any answer that might be given to a question like this will make clear to the impartial observer that all the ideas are actually fairly tame (and, indeed, in most cases weren't even new), and most of the revolutions are not in the ideas (even assumed true) but in the means of showing that they are, in fact, true. What's dangerous instead is the hyperbole used to make them sound dangerous. One finds this in Dennett, for instance; the theory of natural selection, in its basic scientific formulation, is actually not particularly dangerous to anything. If half the poorly-supported and extreme claims Dennett makes for it were true, it would, indeed, be the 'universal acid' Dennett claimed it was; but, in fact, the claims rest on nothing but Dennett's very vague, purely imaginative, and inadequately analyzed sense of analogy between the theory of natural selection and various metaphysical positions. I have complained of this analogical leap, which is extremely common, before. The answers to The Edge's question serve as a reminder that in matters of science and fundamental questions we should never rest with the vague sense of analogy but demand serious analysis. We would never accept an inference like the following as legitimate:

Bats flap around; fish out of water flap around; therefore bats are fish out of water.

And yet the ability of reasonable people to accept without any critical thought similar inferences (or inferences that would turn out to be similar if anyone bothered to work them out carefully) when science is involved is utterly astounding -- and, needless to say, disturbing. Scientific discoveries should not be ways of avoiding serious rational analysis; they should be sparks inspiring it. But the desire to take shortcuts prevails, and we get the philosophical equivalent of quackery and snake oil. Give people a scientific discovery and they start making wild philosophical claims, without the slightest recognition that they are doing exactly the same thing Eddington did when he claimed that modern physics proved idealism (and more culpably, too, since Eddington was a serious enough thinker that he eventually caught his mistake, whereas many of these never do). The answers to The Edge's question show this in spades. We have Pizarro's answer, which confuses together the positions of moral realism, moral sense theory, and moral infallibilism (one can be a moral realist but not a moral sense theorist, or a moral sense theorist but not a moral realist, or both, or neither; and one can be either without believing that there is a 'royal road to moral truth'); or Anderson's bizarre argument about the probability of God's existence; or Kosslyn's odd talk about God and Supersets; or any number of others. We need rational thought, not mush. (Of course, it's easy to criticize scientists for the trait; but one can hardly expect otherwise. Not every scientist has the philosophical acumen of a Darwin or a Planck. And when ordinary people do it, it is still unfortunate, but it is an entirely understandable mistake. The real shame is when philosophers do it; and it is, alas, no less common there.)

But it must also be said that there's hope, since some of the answers are actually pretty good, given the absurdity of the question. (Like Chris, I really enjoyed Gopnik's, for instance.)

[Incidentally, why is it that everyone thinks that the revolutionary aspect of the Copernican revolution was that it removed the earth from the center of the universe? The real revolution, it has always seemed to me, which was due more to Galileo's Copernicanism than to Copernicus himself, was in demolishing the distinction between terrestrial and celestial matter. With that distinction, something like Aristotelian cosmology is a necessary truth; that distinction gone, Aristotelian cosmology collapses completely. Sir John Herschel, if I remember correctly, recognizes this in his Preliminary Discourse; but it's a point that should be more generally considered. It seems to me that the primary scientific significance of removing the earth from the center was at the time just one of measurement; which is perhaps why instrumentalism about Copernicus's theory was so often considered reasonable. Just a thought.]

Beauvoir on Egalitarianism

It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be resolved; in sexuality will always be materialized the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence. To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles--desire, possession, love, dream, adventure--worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us--giving, conquering, uniting--will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Parshley, tr. Random House (New York: 1989) p. 731.

Expect a few posts on The Second Sex in upcoming days; I had a chance to read it through again while I was away from the web.

Back

I'm back (to blogging, that is; I'm still in Cedar Park, and will probably continue to be for the next several months). I've been away from email as well as this weblog, so things may be a bit slow for the next few days while I work through the backlog of posts and email I haven't read.

On Hiatus

Right now I'm in Austin, Texas (Cedar Park, to be precise).

I don't have easy internet access, but that should change within a week and a half. By the 17th or 18th I should be back to blogging and responding to comments.

Cheers,
Brandon