Location of Disagreement

Alan Jacobs, on his tumblog, posted these thoughts that tie in to something that I think about often.

Watching a Twitter conversation unfold today, I was reminded for the hundredth time that debates about same-sex marriage tend to be so fruitless because SSM doesn’t really mark the point of disagreement. There are already preceding disagreements about what marriage itself is and is for, but even those are not foundational. People disagree about all these things because they disagree about what human flourishing (eudaimonia) is, about what kind of life is generally speaking best for human beings to live.

So, it is not the SSM part of that comment that I think about often, it is the "where is the locus of disagreement" part of it that is fascinating to me, but even more interesting than the fact of the disagreement at deeper levels is the "why?" of that fact.  How do we come to disagree at those points?  How do we come to the conclusions, often tacit and even unconscious to our own understanding, that we hold so strongly.  Strongly enough to make major life decisions upon them and even (historically) come to verbal or physical blows with others over.  

"How do we come to our own epistemology heurmenuetic?" is one of the most interesting questions I have ever come across and wrestled with. 

Citation: Jacobs, Alan at <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/46879051145/on-core-beliefs> Accessed 3/2/13.

Alan Jacobs, once again, ROCKS!

Alan Jacobs is one of my favorite thinkers and writers.  His essays (on such diverse topics as Harry Potter, the editing of children's bibles, and commentary on the poetry of W.H. Auden, to name just a tiny fraction of his scope) have stimulated my thinking as much as almost anyone else's writing I can think of. (Okay, I am going to bring him into that list after Lewis, Ken Myers and Tim Keller.  Something like that.) His book on the bio of Lewis was incredibly stimulating.  Of course, the bio was on Lewis, so it would be hard to not be mentally stimulating with that material, but his writing is just darn well put together.

I have followed his blogging essays and reposts for a few years now, and again: challenging, formidable, refreshing.  His refusal to accept too-simple responses to things that may seem simple but are actually more complex than they seem has been uncomfortably confrontational to my own way of thinking, which typically is satisfied with a good-enough answer that doesn't, in the end, take into account all the facts.

So, when I read on his tumblog a series of questions he was asking about a variety of Christian responses to the onset of World War II, my pulse quickened.  He didn't give any answers.  Just a set of questions.  By the time I was done reading his comments and questions, I was wishing I had the time to research the answers.  THEN he said he was writing a book to attempt to address those very questions.

*******The (interior) crowd goes wild******

I am excited about his upcoming book.  Have to wait until 2015 is the downside.  Dang.  Three Cheers for AJ.

You can find the blog post I am referring to here: <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/45675950491/christian-humanism-and-total-war>. Accessed 3/18/13.

Why I like Alan Jacobs' way of thinking about things

Alan Jacob's thinking and writing often refreshes me. He ably rejects generalization in favor of a deeper look at specifics in a way that is instructive.  Here is just one example.

"I would say that all our experience is indeed mediated, but mediated in a wide range of ways. Perception itself, neural activity itself, is a mediating activity. I often think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”

So we really don’t have a choice between mediated and unmediated experience. The choices are always among various forms of mediation. I don’t think Heidegger fully realized this, which is why he could speak of writing with a pen as something you do with your hand but typewriting as something alienated from the hand — never acknowledging that we type with our hands too.

Now, if someone wants to argue that the mediation of the pen involves our body in more intimate ways than the mediation of the typewriter, in that (for instance) in writing with a pen we shape the individual letters instead of just striking keys with a uniform motion, I’m ready to listen — as long as it’s okay to point out that writing with my finger on an iPad screen is more intimate still!

Analogically, consider Walker Percy’s great essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he points out that our cultural formation makes it impossible for anyone actually to see the Grand Canyon: only some immense dislocation of our expectations can make is truly visible to us. It is at least possible that some technological mediations could help us achieve that valuable dislocation.

In short, we need fewer binary distinctions and more attention to the detailed phenomenology of particular technologies and their interactions with the mediating powers of our perceptual apparatus."

Citation: a comment Alan Jacobs made at this site, <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/01/responding-to-carrs-digital-dualism/> accessed 3/9/13.

W. H. Auden's incite into my problems

I am afraid that I have succumbed to the temptation that W.H. Auden suggests here is the consequence of easily accessible books.  I primarily blame The Friends of the Library Bookstore for this, due to their incredibly cheap books and convenient location.

“We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper.”

Citation: <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/44495998930/again-while-it-is-a-great-blessing-that-a-man-no. Accessed 3/7/13> from W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967).

Brass-Tacks Repentance with C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis posted this helpful comment in a letter to a fretful soul.  Clarifying.

"(1) Remember what St John said 'If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.' The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn't, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can't help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ear or any other irrational nuisance. 

(2) Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said 'If you knew that all was well, what wd. you, today, do, or stop doing?' When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. 'Details, please' is the answer.--"

Citation: The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy(Cambridge University Press, 2007), 962

C.S. Lewis on Why Myth?

In  a review The Lord of The Rings in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature C.S. Lewis writes this about myth's place in our reading and thinking:

" 'But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?"

"The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity."

"We do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves... By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly."

In  Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton explains that he believes in fairy tales.  By the end of that book, I realized that I did too.  If we go through this life without the very real sense that the world around us has the characteristics of a myth, then we are missing the point, perhaps.  The fact that we are "used to it" doesn't make it any less astonishing.  As Lewis says in a letter to a Mrs. Johnson, "The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination.  Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less heaven." And the same is true of all of our existence.

This is why I read myth and fantasy.  To remind me of the truth.

Citation: Quotes from Lewis' review of Tolkien found here <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis> Accessed 1/26/2013

Modeling repentance for the next generation

This quote, from an essay attempting to understand Luther's pithy but curious injunction, “Sin boldly. But believe even more boldly in Christ, and rejoice", concluded with a strong and important admonition to me as a parent. Worth pondering.

"I think it is literally a temptation: It would be a parental sin, a sin of the foolish variety, to launch my children into adulthood armed with nothing but the advice not to sin. What they really need is the knowledge of how to deal with sin and guilt as they all-too-predictablyh acquire it. I don’t want them to be blindsided by the fact that they are sinners, or uninformed about what to do with consciences that rightly condemn them. They need to learn the Christian skill of taking it to God, of walking in the light, of believing Christ boldly, rejoicing, and praying boldly."

Citation: <http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scriptorium/2009/08/sin-boldly/>. Accessed 1/24/13.