People of Chronos

 One of the somewhat chilling things one learns if one ever looks into the matter is that the human race is an infanticidal species; we kill our young quite regularly. Infanticide is almost universal, and some people estimate that in most cultures anywhere from ten to forty percent of otherwise surviving infants are deliberately killed. One hears, of course, of Carthage -- both the Jews and the Romans attest to the Carthaginian practice of sacrificing children to some sort of deity (Moloch in the Bible, Baal according to most of the Romans). Most cultures considered ritual sacrifice of children to be barbaric, but that's not the same as frowning at infanticide itself. The Greeks and Romans (and many other cultures) practiced exposure of infants, a practice that keeps coming up if you read their myths. We know from Aristotle that in some places there were restrictions on this, but they seem to have been relatively slight. But the evidence for widespread killing of newborn infants is quite extensive, and it is almost a constant across cultures.

Almost. All of the major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism) have attempted to stamp out the practice, and have usually had some success, although in all cases the progress was slow and the degree of success varied from culture to culture. Nonetheless, there is an argument that monotheism has saved more infants than anything else in history; part of the reason is that all the major monotheistic religions are big institution-builders and therefore they didn't just oppose infanticide but built institutions that partly reduced the temptation. Nonetheless monotheistic religion, while perhaps the most successful, is not the only thing that historically has opposed infanticide.  The Qin and Han dynasties tried to make it illegal in China -- for population reasons, I think -- but they seem to have had considerable difficulty enforcing the laws. The religion of the ancient Egyptians also opposed infanticide, and in fact the ancient Greeks were often surprised at the sheer commitment of the Egyptians in saving infants from exposure -- people of Egyptian culture would save infants from hillsides and trash heaps and raise them as their own (although sometimes as household slaves). How the Egyptians managed to get so many of their own people on the same page is a bit of a mystery; the Egyptian view of children is not otherwise noticeably different from that of their neighbors. The Egyptians are almost unique. While we have much less certainty about them, the Etruscans are also said by some to have opposed infanticide, although we don't know for sure. Both of these seem to be religiously driven, but there seem also to have been cases of philosophical opposition to the practice; both Musonius Rufus and Epictetus are firmly opposed to it, although this doesn't seem to have been universal among Stoics. This might not be significant as a social matter, but on the other hand, if there was Stoic opposition, this might be one of the reasons for the fact that the late Roman Empire sees a slow rise in legal restrictions of the practice. But it's hard to say.

And, of course, this is all out-and-out infanticide. When one includes abortion, the practice of killing children is even more extensive. The monotheistic religions tend again to be major barriers, although Christianity stands out as having a history of much stronger and less qualified prohibitions against the practice than is usually the case; unequivocal opposition to abortion is found in some of the earliest Christian writings on morals that we have, like the Didache.

Beyond all this, you have individuals here and there who come to similar oppositions on philosophical grounds, but not much more. Left to themselves, human beings drift quickly toward abortion and, more slowly, but nonetheless definitely, toward infanticide. Only religion and reason usually ever stand in the way, and both have varying degrees of success in doing so, when they even do so.

Abyss & Sea 15

 14

Not long after Adven's visit, Sosan, their chamberlain died in his sleep. He had served long, having begun his tenure of office as a young man early in the reign of Rezan, Disan's father.  Disan and Baia attended his funerary rites in his home village. After they were done, Baia returned to Neyat Sor before Disan, who wished to consult with a famous goldsmith in another village nearby. 

Having consulted with the goldsmith and ordered a set of gifts, Disan and his guard began their ride home. One stretch of the road went through a very thick wood, the trees on each side rising like a many-layered wall. Before a bend in the way, they suddenly heard a great deal of shouting; Disan spurred his horse immediately and his guard followed after. The shouting came from two old men, just past the bend in the road, who were in the process of being set upon by a gang of four young men, who were beating and kicking them. They had been intent enough on this action that they were caught off guard by the group of armed men suddenly riding in upon them, and soon rounded up.

According to the old men, they had been traveling to see a friend, down this road that they had traveled many times before, when the four youths had ambushed from the wood, demanding all their gold and silver. As both men traveled very lightly, they did not have enough to satisfy the young men, who had responded by beating them and, when they fell to the ground, kicking them. Disan sent them on their way with a bodyguard.

Disan, dismounting, surveyed the four young men, who seemed in all respects like any other Sorean youths. "What do you have to say for yourselves?" he demanded, but they said nothing.

He drew himself up to his full height, and being tall even by Sorean standards, the king made an imposing impression, since they all quailed before him. "Speak!" he said sharply, "What do you have to say for yourselves? Why were you doing this? Do you have no respect for your elders?"

"What do I care about some old men?" said one sulkily. "They are useless."

There are times in which a part of us winds up very tightly, for whatever reason, and sometimes in the course of a conversation that tightly wound bit will snap like overstrained wire. Disan experienced exactly this at this moment. No doubt some of the winding was from the general stress of kingship, and some from the particular responsibilities he bore; it may be thought that his recurring nightmares perhaps contributed as well. Disan, too, had been raised from his earliest age in the Sorean tradition of respect and friendship toward one's elders. Regardless of the reason, at that moment the wire snapped. What he felt was not rage, exactly; it was not blinding or blind. There was not heated anger to it. It was not hot at all. It was as if a piercing icy cold, a burning cold, began flooding up inside him and at that moment he drew his sword and hit the young man in the face with the flat of the orikhalh blade, forcefully enough to knock the youth sprawling, and surely forcefully enough to bruise. It was the first time in his life that Disan had struck anyone with a weapon outside of battle or weapons practice, and he did not regret it. He slowly and deliberately re-sheathed the sword.

"Those who will not honor their elders," he said coldly, "have chosen to walk the way of the beasts. So that is what they shall do. Tie them by their chests and hands to walk behind us; we will take them to Neyat Sor, where they can spend some time in a dungeon contemplating how useful it is to be civilized people who care about old men."

And so it was. The young men were made to trot along behind, and sometimes were dragged behind, the horses, who went at an ambling gait slightly faster than the comfortable walking speed of a human being, for the hour it took to reach Neyat Sor, and when the party arrived, the young men were summarily thrown into the little-used dungeons, to be tried at some point later in the week.

His explanation to Baia was very short, but later, as they drank a lotus tea in the time between first and second sleep, they talked about it at some length.

Finally, Disan said, "It is what we are told from our very earliest childhood. Civilized life consists simply in this: that kings act like kings, putting the good of their people above their own; that ministers act like ministers, loyal in all things; that parents act like parents, raising their children in right ways; that children act like children, honoring their elders without fail. And everywhere around us, what do we see? Kings do not act like kings; they leave behind the ways of their people. Ministers do not act like ministers; every court is filled with spies. Parents do not act like parents, because their children run wild like beasts. Children do not honor their elders but beat them on the highways. The Orikhalh Tablets are ignored. The pacts and the covenants are not honored. The things no one does are done."

"Yes," said Baia. "Sometimes I feel powerless; it seems to come from all sides. It is as if something has gone wrong in the very fabric of things, and I do not know how to repair it."

"Yes," said Disan. But neither knew what more to say, and after a sigh and a lapse into silence, they turned their discussion to preparations for the upcoming Great Council, and then went to sleep.

Three Poem Drafts

Between grading and some kind of weird sickness or allergy that left me with massive sinus headaches, the past week has been a bit rough, although things are improving greatly, so I should be back on schedule with Abyss & Sea this next week. In the meantime, here are a few poem drafts. It is perhaps worth noting that the real Laodicea was originally called Diospolis, the City of God, and was eventually renamed Laodicea, the Righteousness of the People; which is perhaps in part what is in view in the letter to the church at Laodicea in the book of Revelation.

A Church in Laodicea

I went to a church in the city,
a blocking of piles of blocks;
it grew like a shrub to the heavens,
a knobbing of rock upon rock.
The angles were angled with caution
and everything laid out with thought,
for they had the very best parking,
all painted in rows on the lot.
Like a theater thrown up by a college,
an island above waves of cars,
it squatted on asphalted landscape
with the charm of a jail lacking bars.
But the windows! They shone in bright colors
like neons of oranges and reds
and depicted the very parishioners
for which, they say, Christ suffered and bled.
To look at them, you'd never know it,
as the windows depicted their sins,
but given a shine like the holy
in light that burst out from within,
as their hands, not in prayer, all pointed
to their faces with gesture of 'me',
and in all their splendor and glory
not a sign of a cross could I see.
The bishops were especially vivid
as they stabbed at the sheep with their knives
and blathered in endless committee
and to Christ gave some words, not their lives.
And within there was piled the givings
of gifts that were worth not one cent,
tokens embossed, "I am righteous,"
stamped from packaging soiled and spent.
The guitars were all lazily strumming
as they sang of how just they must be,
trying to convince God they were devoted
with something like a desperate plea.
And before they got to their offering,
they joined in a grand kiss of peace
with the joy of their ancestor Judas
and kissed their foes not the least.
Then as the priest spoke in dull mumbles
the altar became the High Throne
and the Lamb poured Himself out from heaven,
Christ on the Cross all alone.
And His enemies came to partake Him,
the God who for them had died,
to those who said, "The Blood," and, "The Body,"
"Amen," they all said, and thus lied,
for they knew not the glorious offering,
only symbols like bread and like wine,
and they sought not the Lamb on the altar
but of their own justice a sign.
As it was on the pathway of sorrow,
so it was on that hill of the skull,
no Temple, but another Golgotha,
and a sky veiled in vestments grown dull.
But the Lamb was there on the altar
though the people had lost faith and love;
the Christ into hell was descending
in the midst of the flame-golden Dove.

The Bethlehem-Star

See the Bethlehem-star arise
between the dawn and the night:
a glory walks which had not walked
since sudden loss of light.

Your little wire fences failed
to barricade His way;
no border guard can bid Him halt,
no power say Him nay.

The work of Babel is undone;
no language bars like wall
the Eden-place of charity
where throng the nations all.

 

Blodeuwedd

I made a goddess of flowers;
a rose was at her heart,
fresh with clear spring breezes
and dripping with the dew,
wreathed with anemones and asters,
lilies and springing violets,
as clever as a daisy,
an orchid at her lips;

I made a maiden of flowers,
a meadow of perfection,
of oak and broom and meadowsweet,
of firewheels and touch-me-nots,
and chrysanthemum-kindness;

I made a lady of flowers,
of petals like a snowstorm,
a splendor of flashing color,
and the wind blew her beauty away.

Music on My Mind

 

Clamavi De Profundis, "De Profundis".

Dashed Off XXV

 "As God He was the motivating principle (kinetikos) of His own humanity, and as man He was the revelatory principle (ekphantikos) of His own divinity." Maximus Confessor

No virtue can be had without some kind of contemplation of good.

rationalization vs pretextualization

"We can love evil things but not as evil, finite things but not as finite, so love as such is of an infinite good." James Chastek

Possession is natural to the human being; property as a jural concept is instrumental to this.

being (ousia) : creation :: motion (kinesis) : providence :: difference (diaphora) : judgment/distribution [Maximus Confessor]

The human body is hierarchical by nature; and thus skill in using it is experienced as hierarchical, the higher illuminating the lower.

the importance of posterity as a concept in constitutional jurisprudence

Consequentialism inevitably corrupts all scientific inquiry because there are always good and bad consequences that can interfere with the integrity of inquiry, and force manipulation of the inquiry in a supposed good cause.

aion as "time deprived of motion, whereas time is the aion measured by motion" (Maximus)

persons as self-symbolizing

Pharaoh is always setting the Israelites to make bricks without straw; it is the structure of all oppression and persecution, religious or otherwise. People are kept down by demanding impossible tasks and punishing those who fail them. Honest people may punish failures or by accident set impossible tasks, but the one who demands the impossible and, rather than apologizing for it, punishes you when you fail to reach it, is your enemy.

Divine truth both is given to us and must be sought.

Doctrines are usually proposed by the individual and proven by the Church.

The Creeds are capable of being both professions and protests.

The idea that one may only use in argument evidence and reasons the interlocutor would accept, inevitably favors those with the most restrictive and unyielding account of evidence and reasons, regardless of whether those restrictions are reasonable or the lack of yielding mere obstinacy.

The Thirty-Nine Articles are articles of surrender, even if they are called 'articles of peace'.

In the long run, only the Catholic Church will preserve even Protestant things.

Faith is the divine gift to the individual soul, but not merely such, for faith is also a confidelity given to the Church.

Animal loyalty is not the greatest thing, nor even always a great thing at all, but it has kept many people from any number of depravities and corruptions, and it has ameliorated many situations in which it has survived such depravities and corruptions.

principle, content, nexus triads

power, wisdom, goodness // miracles, doctrine, saints (grace)

Philosophical topics are only as boring as you are stupid enough to make them.

Formal arguments shortens processes by which one understands, as medicine does the physical processes of healing.

traces & vestiges : God :: relics : saints

Analytic philosophy is a philosophy of 'here's an idea'; its rigor is of trying to be precise, not a rigor of reasoning itself; even its formalized arguments are cases of just trying to be clear about what they are rather than full reasoning.

Any theory of meaning has to allow for 'close enough' meaning, like when we call an unknown kind of animal by the closest known kind of name, perhaps with a clarificatory qualification ('red dog' for fox, 'striped horse' for zebra), and are wholly understood.

misindication vs misrepresentation

To identify something as a benefit or harm is an appeal to teleology.

selected-effect functions vs selected-structure functions

Freedom is the human form of order.

the search for truth as the structure of moral probation

death as the unfinishing of business
-- but note the 'It is finished'

Consistency is more powerful a test of truth than it seems in the abstract because everyone believes at least some truths on good grounds.

If we respect Christian truth, we must respect things analogous to it, not in blurring the boundaries but in caution, lest disrespect of the analogues might start carrying over to truths to which they are analogous. If we respect the Church, we must respect things that are like it, not in conflation, but to prevent our disrespect of the mere analogues from bleeding back into the aspects of the Church to which they are analogous. What counts as respect enough in such cases will, of course, depend on circumstances.

real memory vs abstract & notional memory
(remembering it vs remembering that we experienced it)

regarding the world
(1) qua simple present (sense)
(2) qua qualified/ampliated present (memory)
(3) qua absent (imagination)
-- experiencing, having experienced, supposing the experience to be such
-- note that this does not always match to common classification (e.g., hallucination is not imagination but sensing what should be imagined)

If Descartes draws everything from doubt, Malebranche draws everything from attention.

'nothingness has no properties' and the existence of substances

The difference between Mass and televised Mass shows that what we do in communion is something involving place and time, co-location and contemporality with the present Christ.

our sense of the resistance of ideas (Malebranche, DMR 1.8)
-- note that Malebranche takes the sense of intelligible resistance to differ from the sense of physical resistance in that the latter is confused and unreliable, but the former clear and reliable.

the danger of attempting to splice a deontological account of liberty to a consequentialist account of equality

three ways to perceive a circle (Malebranche DRM 1.10): conceive, imagine, see

Consumerism reverses the appropriate relationship between desire and enjoyment.

As It Will Be in the Future, It Was at the Birth of Man

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling 

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. 

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. 

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. 

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. 

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." 

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." 

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." 

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. 

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man;
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; 

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Like Burns's "Address to the Unco Guid", this seems perpetual wisdom.

Professional Obligations

 One of the baffling quirks of academia as a profession is that academics have a tendency to manufacture professional obligations. All professions have obligations that go beyond contractual requirements; that's one of the things that makes them professions rather than ordinary occupations. But academics are the only professionals I know who seem to make up completely fictional professional obligations and treat them as if they were real. Three cases that I have come across just in the past few months on Twitter, when I do my meanders on Twitter to try to find reading recommendations:

* There was a philosophy professor who got into some kind of argument with some other philosophy professor, and as a disparaging remark he noted that the other had no publications; to which he snidely commented something like 'You have an obligation to publish.'

* There was a physics professor who, in response to a complaint about the heavy dependence of so many job searches on letters of recommendation, said something like 'Faculty, stop complaining about writing letters of recommendation; it's your job.'

* There was an economics professor (I think he was in economics, at least) who said graduate students should not turn down requests for them to review papers without a 'reasonable explanation'.

All three of these supposed obligations are nonexistent, and what is more, they are obviously so. (The third one is very obviously not an obligation of graduate students, who don't fully have professional obligations yet, but it's not even an obligation of full-time professors.) You can refuse to do any of these things perfectly well, and still be an academic and, indeed, even a very effective one, fulfilling your professional obligations. An academic, as a professional, has a general obligation to the profession, to contribute to its research, its teaching, and its functioning. You could do that by publishing (a very popular route), you could do that by writing letters of recommendation, you could do that by refereeing papers, you could do that in a lot of ways. But here's the thing: as a professional, it's a matter of your judgment. You could, of course, have contractual obligations on top of these general obligations, arising from your institutions, and even when not an obligation at all, you might want to do something like publishing in order (for instance) to get a job at certain institutions because that is part of their requirements for whether they will hire. But the particular form the fulfillment of your professional obligations takes is a matter of your own professional judgment. You can in fact be bold and decide whether it is appropriate or worthwhile.

I wonder, sometimes, if many of the problems that plague academia are aggravated by precisely this tendency to make up fictional professional obligations, which leads to academics not taking responsibility for the judgments that structure their professional careers. Academics complain about all sorts of things in academic life. Some of these things they are required to do by contract. But for a great many of them, the question arises as to why anyone needs to put up with them at all. Many of the recognized ills of academic publishing for philosophy, for instance, arise from the fact that philosophers keep doing things that sustain them. You don't actually have to judge job candidates on their publications; you could, for instance, actually take the trouble of investing in young scholars rather than trying to poach those who have already been invested in by other people. You don't actually have to keep giving away material free or at a pittance to academic publishers who then turn around and charge libraries and independent scholars exorbitant amounts; you could just stop doing that, and confine yourself to open-access publishers or in-house journals of philosophical societies, even if that meant less publishing, or you could even just not publish except when you judge the occasion to be right and appropriate. I could increase the list quite a bit. For a lot of things, you could just not do them. Unless you've signed a contract that requires them, or they are required to comply with some kind of law, or you are trying to get a kind of position that requires them, you can in fact exercise your own professional judgment as to whether it is a good use of your time, talent, and effort.

Some such things might still be valuable for you to do, of course; that's something you might judge to be the case. But academics often seem not to think that they have any room for professional judgment about the form taken by their professional activities at all, and keep doing things because they think they somehow have to do so. I don't know what the reason for this is.