The Shakespearean Cat

Thinking again about my earlier post on atoms vs cat, I found this passage in E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed:

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. The truth is that the peculiar combination of letters is nothing but a property of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The French or German versions of the play "own" different combinations of letters.

This analogy captures perfectly the approach I suggested in my earlier post.

[E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper, 1977), 19.]

Moose or Monk?

My daughter reads the New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism for school. It's a great book, with clear, crisp statements of dogma offering rich fodder for thought for years to come. Most of the time. But recently, my daughter came to the lesson on states of life, and to these three dyptichs, with left side labeled "THIS IS GOOD" and the right side "THIS IS BETTER":

First, a graphic explanation of the vow of obedience. On the left we have the lay vocation: as the family sits around the breakfast table, someone remarks, "I want to spend the day the way I think best." On the right we have the religious vocation, with a monkish looking fellow who says, "I want to spend the day the way God prefers." This ridiculous panel has become an inside joke in my family: every time I have to stop cooking to change a poopy diaper while talking with my boss on the telephone about the job that just can't wait, I comment to my wife, "I want to spend the day the way I think best!" And every time she scrubs vomit off the floor while keeping a toddler at bay with one foot before heading upstairs to wash dishes yet again, she says to me in her best infomercial voice, "I want to spend the day the way I think best!"

So here's the skinny: yes, the lay life brings more day-to-day responsibility for how you spend your day. No, a lay person is not free to spend the day in whatever selfish way he wants. Yes, a lay person can spend the day the way God would prefer him to spend it--in fact, a lay person may think that the best way to spend his day!

Next we have a graphic illustration of the vow of chastity. On the left we see a bride and a groom in church, and one of them says, "I want to marry the person of my choice." On the right we see a nun in the chapel, and she says, "I choose Christ as my spouse." Here's the problem: both the lay woman and the nun married the person of their choice! The right hand picture does show what is better, but freedom to choose whom you will marry is not the difference!

Finally, my favorite: a graphic explanation of the vow of poverty. On the left, under the heading "THIS IS GOOD", a little boy points to a sporting goods store and says, "I want an air rifle. I want a car. I want jewels. I want pretty clothes." On the right, under the heading, "THIS IS BETTER", St. Francis of Assissi says, "You can have all that. I want Christ."

Reality check, folks: this left-hand scene is NOT good. It is self-centered materialism, and it does NOT represent the ideal of the lay Christian life. If that little boy were mine, I would dock his allowance!

In all three dyptichs, the religious life is depicted fairly well, but each time the difference between the lay and the religious life is made out to be the difference between self-centeredness and Christian maturity: I want to spend my day doing what I want! I want to marry the one I want! I want to have all the stuff I want! I want what I want! Me, me, ME-E-E!" So the Baltimore Catechism elevates the religious life by denigrating the lay state.

The problem with this approach is that it implies that lay people can be selfish and that's OK. Christian maturity is for other people. Take that route, and not only will you have a lackadaisical laity, but few Catholic children will really understand the nature and attraction of the religious life. Why be good, when being bad is one of my legitimate options? But if sanctity is the goal for everyone, then the religious life will take on its real and almost irresistable attraction.

Gaaaah!

I'm finally recovering from the trip last weekend. While at the conference, I and a reader of this blog saw a man struggling to address the audience without a microphone; when a working microphone was thrust in front of his face and his voice suddenly filled the room, we both burst out laughing--as quietly as we could manage, of course. "Did you see him grow bigger?", I asked. "Yes", my friend replied. "Did you see how he suddenly felt bigger to himself?"

Just today, a lector at Mass struggled for a couple of minutes to get the microphone turned on, but could not. Finally he resigned himself to projecting his voice, but almost as soon as he raised his voice the microphone clicked on. Gaaah! MegaLector takes the podium! Remarkable.

Talking about this with my friend in Florida, I remembered a time years ago when I went to Easter vigil with my wife and then three-year-old daughter. Standing amidst all the adults, she could not see what was happening, but she heard the booming voice that floated down from the rafters. She gazed up in awe, her perceptions untroubled by any sight of the podium. "Papa", she asked, "...is that God?"

Technoplace

Lurking in the background of my last post is the issue of technology. While we live in the heavens by looking at the sky, we can extend our range even further with the telescope; while we create space by speaking, we can create an enormous space (of a qualitatively different sort) with a microphone and loudspeaker. All the powers by which we engage the world have a tool that can channel and magnify them.

As I come up on a business trip, my mind is especially on the cell phone. That little instrument makes me present both by hearing and by voice far, far away around the world. It’s a tenuous presence, admittedly, but at the touch of a few buttons—hey presto!—my wife is conjured up, is present to me; we speak and we hear. One of the oddest sensations is to talk on a cell phone in the middle of a group of people: one conversation continues around me, but at the same time I am far away, not only present in another place but vaguely imagining that place and myself speaking into it.

“Bilocation” might imply that I am equally present in both places, but it’s a weird sensation.

Even weirder is listening to the radio in my car. Here I am on the city street, now, in this familiar place, but suddenly as I hear the live voices over the waves I imagine myself transported far, far away. Strangely, I never hear the radio as voices speaking in my place but as voices speaking in their place, into which they draw me. Stranger still, I usually have no idea where the voices really are. While my speech into a cell phone puts me mentally into another place, into which I imagine myself speaking and from which my wife speaks to me, the radio whirls me out into an entirely indeterminate place. It is like reading a fairy tale in which the time and place are not specified: one thinks not of this place and this time, but of indeterminate time and indeterminate place. So the radio always makes me feel like I have personally been made present to indeterminate place—I am in the fairy tale.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t listen to the radio much anymore.

The microphone is much worse than the radio. Right away, by the fact that it magnifies the voice so, it makes the speaker seem huge. I remember being at a Mass when the microphone was off through the first reading and half of the gospel; when it suddenly came on during the gospel, the priest seemed to grow before my eyes! In a Q&A situation, the speaker enjoys an immediate rhetorical advantage because he seems huge in comparison to his tenuous inquisitors—not to mention the fact that he can drown out their voices. At the same time, and for the same reason, the microphone does not create a communal place for many persons: it creates a monarchical place of one person with many subjects. This is one reason I don’t like it at Mass: even though I don’t usually want anyone speaking but the priest, at the same time I want the place of the Mass to be the place of the people praying, not the place of the SuperPriest and his auditors. The quality of the air is wrong. (As a side note, the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite was impossible before the invention of the microphone. That little detail gets left out of a lot of the hot air exchanges on liturgical subjects.)

But another factor comes in with the microphone. I have spoken of our senses of hearing and sight, but there also another sense, the “common” sense, which integrates all of our senses into one experience. The sugar cube is not a sweet thing over here and a white thing over there, but a single sweet and white thing; sight and taste are integrated into once perception of the sugar cube. Similarly, when I see and hear a speaker, both senses come together into a single perception of him or her. But the microphone disrupts that by making the audible speaker many times bigger than the visible speaker and in a different place. When the microphone kicked in at Mass that one time, the priest’s megavoice floated down from the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, he seemed to be an enormous person floating somewhere above my head; if I opened my eyes, he shrunk somewhat and remained located at the podium, but I could feel the stress of a non-integrated sensory experience. My common sense was reeling.

All these technologies are important and useful. I’m not so much of a curmudgeon as to deny it. But it is also important to notice their effects and use them appropriately. They greatly magnify the scope and power of our presence; they also spread us out and change the quality of our places.

Hearing and the sense of place

I want to pick up an idea from my earlier post, Living In Our Houses, and tug at it. In that post, I described how we live not just within the confines of our bodies but in the space around us. Although my argument had to do with the senses as such, my examples were taken from the sense of sight: when I look up in the heavens, I am—as Augustine would put it—living in the heavens.

But something similar is true of the sense of hearing. Even though my ability to locate an object by sound alone is notoriously inferior to a bat’s, nonetheless the area within which I hear creates a kind of space around me in which I live. You have probably had the same experience I have. I remember being engrossed in a conversation with a small group of people, and when the conversation died and silence fell then suddenly I was aware of the vast sky opening above me and of the great reaches of space on either side of me. It was as though I had been in a bubble, a tiny enclosure, while the conversation lasted. My sense of hearing was pulled in, focused in one place.

Now for clarity’s sake, I should say again that my sense of hearing does not change the air; there is nothing in the air by which it has a real relation to me, but there is something in me by which I have a real relation to the audible area around me. While it is truer to say that we live in the air around us, because this is true we can also make the air the grammatical subject of the sentence: the air in this place is full of people.

Now let me turn it around: sometimes I not only listen, but speak.

Up to this point I have spoken of the way in which the knower is present to the thing known, but, following the same article from Aquinas cited previously, we can also speak of a cause being present by its effect. Aquinas gives the example of a king who is said to be present everywhere in the kingdom because of his power to act everywhere in the kingdom. This is obviously a weaker sense of “presence” than the presence of God Aquinas means to explain, because God acts everywhere immediately while the king acts only through many intermediaries, but the act of speaking seems to fall between the two. To speak into a place is more direct than the king’s action through ministers but still involves the medium of the air. I am present in the area where I speak.

One sometimes sees an instinctive recognition of this idea in city traffic. Amidst the hubbub, where one can usually only hear a few feet away, suddenly a selfish punk cruises by in his pick-up or sports car blaring music over his speaker system as loudly as he can. He is using the speakers as an extension of himself to shout, so to speak, over all the noises around him; it makes him feel big; as a cause, he spreads his presence over a large area, coercing his fellow motorists into hearing him, being with him, and in a way being under him. He takes what should be a commons, the place around us, and turns it into his private yard. It is the audible version of puffing the chest.

But a beautiful version of the same truth comes out when a speaker addresses a small group without a microphone. The human voice “creates a place”, to borrow Ivan Illich’s phrase; the speaker is present in the place of his voice, and his willing auditors focus in on him, thus living in the same place, and speaker and audience blend their presences in one part of this world of ours.

Perhaps a more striking version comes out in the medieval custom of ringing church bells during a storm. True, the bell was a sacramental and was believed to have some virtue of dispersing a storm by the prayer of its sound, but at the same time the vast reach of the bell’s tone created a place around the entire town. Because it was the church bell, the entire town was brought with the ambit of the church; while all the people and houses could not fit in the church building at once, the church itself could be extended, audibly, over all the people and houses. Where else would you want to be during a storm but praying in the house of God? Conversely, in one dramatic ceremony dating from sometime after the eleventh century, a person who had been excommunicated was condemned to live beyond hearing of the church bells.

Restored Beauties of the English Language

In view of the appalling number of words dropping from the English language every year, the Duck has urged that we all adopt a word. Besides the sheer number of words lost, which the adopt-a-word activists rightfully stress, one can also notice the kind of words lost: the latest Oxford Junior Dictionary, for example, has dropped all manner of religious words like "nun" and "priest" on the argument that kids today don't need to know those kinds of words. The same tome has dropped hundreds of nature related words; it has an entry for "Blackberry", the electronic communications device, but has no entry for "blackberry", the delectable edible of the fields of my youth.

The crisis reminds me of a pastime I used to enjoy, namely refurbishing words. Long ago, words such as "wonderful" and "terrible" lost their power through overuse, so in my writing I would try to recover the original beauty of the word by a simple rearrangement: the mountains were full of wonder, and the dark storm a thing of terror.

Along a similar vein, I enjoyed finding English words that had actually fallen from use and using them again, confident that the reader would know from context and from the feel of the word itself the meaning of the unfamiliar--but somehow strangely familiar--word. In honor of the Duck's call to action, therefore, I would like to resurrect on this blog a custom that fell away, namely the daily Lost Beauty. It won't really be daily, of course, but as often as I can get to it.

Today's lost beauty:

Toitish: "Ill-tempered, snappy." The old exclamation hoity-toity! expressed surprised at seeing someone in such a fit of temper.

The Moose wants our children

One of my old teachers, Dr. Michael Waldstein, recently gave a terrific speech in Mexico City at the 6th World Meeting of Families. Since it is so anti-Moose, I have posted it below:

* * *

In his letter to the World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope Benedict wrote, "Today more than ever, the Christian family has a very noble mission that it cannot shirk: the transmission of the faith, which involves the gift of self to Jesus Christ who died and rose, and insertion into the Ecclesial Community. Parents are the first evangelizers of children, a precious gift from the Creator (cf. Gaudium et spes, n. 50), and begin by teaching them to say their first prayers. In this way a moral universe is built up, rooted in the will of God, where the child grows in the human and Christian values that give life its full meaning."

The vision of this statement is clear and strong. Do families in the United States and Canada live up to it? Do they introduce their children to the sincere gift of self to Christ? Do they help them become mature members of the Ecclesial Community? The positive side needs to be mentioned first. Many families do follow their mission with admirable strength and devotion.

At the same time one must admit that many families fall short of their mission. The United States and Canada built up extensive systems of Catholic schools. Catholic parents have traditionally delegated much of their responsibility as educators to these schools and they are still delegating it. The schools, however, have changed. Like all academic institutions, they have become increasingly secularized, which severely compromises the transmission of the faith.

Strong efforts are being made in some places to strengthen the identity and effectiveness of Catholic schools. A few weeks ago, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, published a pastoral letter that is spearheading a renewal of the Catholic school system in his diocese. He sees the urgency of the situation and is calling for broad cooperation in the renewal. Yet this is only one diocese among many.

A more fundamental problem, however, arises from the strong reliance of most parents on the schools. Children spend much time at school and relatively little time with their parents. Only during vacations is the situation different. Since the life they share with their parents is often reduced to a minimum when school is in session, it is not easy to build up such a life during vacations. Parents and children often do not know what to do with each other during vacations.

There is another major force that is taking much of education out of the hands of the family, namely, the global youth culture. It is important to realize that this youth culture is a new phenomenon. It only began after the Second World War.

Two forces are perhaps the most formative in this youth culture. One of them is the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution is a child of the dominant utilitarian and consumerist adult culture after the Second World War. Utilitarianism and consumerism inevitably destroy the link between sex and love, between sex and procreation by reducing the other person in erotic experience to a means for pleasure. In the formation of the teenager, the piercing sexual passions of adolescent children were suddenly released into destructive premature relationships. Instead of being introduced into a culture of love, children were and are abandoned to a culture of the use of each other for pleasure or, to use their own preferred word, fun.

The second major force, intimately connected with the first, is the rise of a new music produced specifically for adolescent children. It is a music tailor-made for the absence of deeper personal formation of sexual passion by authentic love. This music and its cultural trappings could not have achieved the power it achieved without a large economic muscle behind it. American and European adolescents after the Second World War were perhaps the first generation of children who constituted a strong market by themselves in distinction from the adult world, because they got large amounts of discretionary money from their parents. The parents were happy enough to let the children do what they wanted while they themselves pursued their professional lives. The removal of women from the home and their induction into the work force increased the cultural vacuum in which children lived. It also increased the economic power of this vacuum. The entertainment industry exploded, aided by technological progress, especially by the invention of the radio and the television. Music turned out to be the single most important article of trade in this exploding market. It is a music that consistently conquers market share by preying on the most intense and most immature passions of adolescents, above all on erotic passion and on anger. The hearts of children were simply abandoned to the formative power of this music.

What should we do in this difficult situation? Many parents feel completely helpless. They see their children taken out of their hands and increasingly formed by another culture. Sociologists call this phenomenon the "generation gap." History as a whole shows that the generation gap is not a normal developmental phase. The normal situation is for children to grow in the culture of their parents and their society. The generation gap is without precedent. Children in Jewish communities grew up Jewish; in Catholic communities they grew up Catholic; in Buddhist communities they grew up Buddhist. Now Jewish, Catholic and Buddhist children grow to be one and the same thing: they become copies of their peers in the global youth culture.

We parents must wake up and take action! We must recall that it is our inalienable duty and therefore also our inalienable right to educate our children. In his encyclical Divini illius magistri of 1929 Pius XI writes, "The family ... holds directly from the Creator the mission (munus) and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to a strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the state, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth" (Divini illius magistri, 59, DS 3690). Following Vatican II, John Paul II insists on the same point. "The task of giving education is rooted in the primary vocation of married couples to participate in God's creative activity: by begetting in love and for love a new person who has within himself or herself the vocation to growth and development, parents by that very fact take on the task of helping that person effectively to live a fully human life. As the Second Vatican Council recalled, 'since parents have conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obligation to educate their offspring. Hence, parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children. Their role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it. For it devolves on parents to create a family atmosphere so animated with love and reverence for God and others that a well-rounded personal and social development will be fostered among the children.'... (Vatican II, Gravissimum educationis, 3). The right and duty of parents to give education is [1-] essential since it is connected with the transmission of human life; [2-] it is original and primary with regard to the educational role of others, on account of the uniqueness of the loving relationship between parents and children; [3-] and it is irreplaceable and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others" (John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, 36).
The first and most important step is for us parents to embrace our duty and our right. We must defend this right as indeed inalienable. The second most important step is to spend time with our children, to build up a shared life. Only in a loving shared life can we transmit to our children what is dearest to us. The third most important step is to become involved in the education of our children. Archbishop Wuerl is calling on parents in his diocese to become involved in helping to renew the Catholic school system. For the majority of Catholic parents, such involvement in the children's schooling is the form this third most important step will take.

In describing the situation of the United States and Canada, however, I must also point to a more radical way in which parents are becoming involved in the education of their children, namely, homeschooling. According to recent credible estimates, there are about two million families in the United States that educate their children at home. My wife and I have eight children. We have been and are educating them from first grade all the way up to the end of high school. Four of them have already entered universities. The main reason why we began home schooling was the report we heard from close friends about the effect of home schooling on their family. The children, they said, became more friends with each other, because they shared the same experience of schooling in the home. The parents also became more friends with their children, because they shared more of their life. Like many other homeschoolers, we have seen that the global youth culture is not an irresistible force. It is possible to pass on our own Christian culture. The generation gap is not inevitable.

Last thought on the power of language

Just a nugget that didn’t fit into the last post. I mentioned that the goal of language is the creation of society; I also described how the individual’s life as a rational creature is brought into being by language. To say it again: the individual’s good comes into being as a step towards the creation of society.

I think this would make a wonderful starting point for a lecture on the common good and the individual good.

The Power of Babel revisited

Not long ago I wrote in praise of John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel. He demonstrates that language of itself changes constantly, like the random mutations of living creatures according to the theory of evolution—hence the subtitle of the book, A Natural History of Language.

After a great many examples illustrating his fundamental premises, McWhorter concludes:

One thing that follows simply and ineluctably from this is that, despite the almost irresistible pull of the sociologically based evaluations that attach to dialects, there is no such thing as human being speaking ‘bad grammar.’ There are no dialects in any way analyzable as ‘decayed’ versions of the standard or of anything else.

Any theory that just so happens to promote what Obama has called “the virtue of tolerance” prompts my eyebrows to seek a spot just a bit further from sea level. I will point out just two problems with McWhorter’s thesis, but I invite you to sound off in the combox.

First, McWhorter contrasts merely “sociologically based evaluations” with an objective view of language as good or bad. But keep in mind that language has a natural purpose, namely to cause communication between people; in other words, the creation and maintenance of society is what language is about. Language itself is sociological. To evaluate grammar based on where it places one in society is perfectly in accord with the nature of the thing.

Second, we have to recall that language exists first of all within the individual speaker: before the spoken word comes the imagined word. Although language is made for communication between people, before it can do that it must transform the interior life of each person. It operates right at the juncture between immaterial and material, between intellect and imagination, and it organizes the imagination in such a way that reason can effectively operate; kids who never learn language never become fully rational. Now it is hard to see why one would say that any old language creates the interior life of the human person as well as any other. Given that language organizes the imagination, it seems clear right away that the imagination can be organized better and worse, and that some tools for organizing it will do better than others. In other words, language is not just sets of sounds, but has a real nature—and yes, some languages are better and some are decayed.

Thing brings us back to McWhorter’s comparison of language development with evolution. From the fact that animals change from one species into another by a large number of tiny and random changes evolutionists commonly conclude that one species is pretty much the same as another, just happening to fit a different ecological niche; as McWhorter paraphrases it, “Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.” In the same way, he argues, language changes are not geared toward improvement: “Instead, languages change like the lava clump in a lava lamp: always different but at no point differentiable in any qualitative sense from the earlier stage.”

For you Aristotle buffs, let me put the issue succinctly. Modern scientists deny purpose and nature in things, admitting only material and efficient causality; McWhorter denies purpose and nature in language, admitting only arrangements of sounds (babel/babble) and forces of change. But things like humans do have purpose and nature, and so consequently does human language. Orangutans are closer to God than bacteria, and some humans do speak bad grammar.

Moose mouth muffled

After so much negotiating about the non-negotiables, this was music to my ears:

The Congregation [for the Doctrine of the Faith] said that Father Haight, a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, should be barred from teaching Catholic theology.

Note that the Jesuit in question is a former president of the CTSA--which is about all I have to say about the CTSA. It's also nice to see that at least a few American Catholic theologians agree with the Vatican:

At a 1999 discussion of Haight’s book organized by the Catholic Theological Society of America, for example, William Loewe of the Catholic University of America suggested that by treating the second and third persons of the Trinity as “symbols,” Haight ends up with “a Unitarian God and a merely human Jesus.” Notre Dame theologian John Cavadini, a consulter to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, wrote in Commonweal in the same year that “there is a difference between rendering Christian faith intelligible to a culture, and reducing its central theological claim to a statement that even an atheist can affirm.” Haight’s fellow Jesuit Fr. Gerald O’Collins, widely considered among the church’s most eminent Christologists, told NCR in 2005, “I wouldn’t give my life for Roger Haight’s Jesus. It’s a triumph of relevance over orthodoxy.”

If you can't recall what Roger Haight thinks, just listen to Barack Obama for a while: one is the Moose and the other is the mouth.

Final random thought: what an odd last name for a man who promotes tolerance!

The Power of Babel

All of my readers, or perhaps I should say both of my readers, would enjoy John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. McWhorter presents a compelling picture of why and how languages change over time, but all three hundred pages of his argument are contained in five principles:

1. Sound Change. Everyone everywhere tends to pronounce accented syllables more clearly and unaccented syllables less clearly. If the first generation brings the unaccented syllable in a word from a clarity of level ten to a clarity of level eight, then eight is now the new standard of clarity for the second generation; the second generation then brings it from eight to six, and six is now the standard of clarity for the third generation; eventually, the sound just drops off, as did all the case endings of Latin on the way to the formation of the Romance languages. McWhorter convincingly compares this to the erosion of soft rocks in the mountains.

2. Extension. A rule that applies only to a particular grammatical situation is eventually applied everywhere, as people find it easier to use one rule all the time. For example, the English genitive in apostrophe plus “s” was once only one of several possible genitive endings, but was extended to cover every case of possession.

3. The expressiveness cycle. We’re all familiar with this one; C.S. Lewis describes it in his essay, “The Death of Words”. A new phrase or word is introduced as an especially forceful description; the new phrase is so good that it is used again and again; eventually, it looses its force by long use and joins the ranks of “dead words”. “Awesome” originally spoke to an experience of the numinous, of the divine; it was applied to terrestrial things as an expression of extreme force, was used again and again, and now describes the taste of a cheeseburger.

4. Rebracketing. McWhorter tells about his mother’s experience as a girl at church. She was convinced that the congregation sang a song about a bear with an ocular misalignment: the story of “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.” She put “cross-eyed” together from the originally separate “cross I’d”, and created a new title entirely. Another example is the word “nickname”: it began as “an eke-name” (literally “an also-name”), but the “n” moved over so that now we have “a nickname”.

5. Semantic change. This is a kind of catch-all category for the general fact that words change meaning over time. McWhorter gives the example of “silly”, which originally meant “blessed”. Blessedness implies innocence, the innocent are deserving of compassion, those who deserve compassion are generally weak, and the weak are often foolish—and behold, “silly” has gone from “blessed” to “foolish”! This sort of “drift” happens to words all the time as people apply words creatively to new situations.

The important point to note about all five of these principles is that they are independent of changes in culture, location, or government. While a particular language change may relate to a particular event in history, the general phenomenon of language change is independent of any general force in history: language changes constantly by its very nature. McWhorter compares it to a lava lamp, or to cloud formations, always changing but not necessarily changing towards anything in particular: just changing. And in fact, his conclusion seems born out by history.

If this is true, then I can say several other geeky things:

1) Despite what some say, Hebrew was not the language spoken in Eden. Even on a young-earth theory, several thousand years elapsed between the death of the early generations and the first recorded words of Scripture, and so necessarily language had changed dramatically in the meantime.

2) If Adam had not sinned and so death had not entered the world, the original language and its speakers would have continued forever. Aside from the “expressiveness cycle”, each of the five principles of language change seems to depend to some degree on the fact that one generation gives way to another, but this would not have been the case. Once might argue that the expressiveness cycle itself would have been mitigated, because man’s unfallen imagination would not have needed the aid of ever-new linguistic explosions to maintain a vividness of perception. So the intriguing possibility is introduced that the splintering of language is a result of the fall and of death—a fact surely related to the interpretation of the story of Babel, whence McWhorter’s book takes its name. The only factor I can think to the contrary is geographical separation of speakers.

3) It’s fun to apply all of this to The Lord of the Rings, in which men and hobbits die but Elves do not. Hooray for Elvish!

Parental logic

Inspired by Bunthorne's logic puzzles, and by a recent real-life conversation with my kids, I offer the following. One parent (P) tells three children (A, B, and C) to empty the laundry hamper. The following conversation unfolds:

P: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

A: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

B: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

C: I do not know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

P: I now know whether the laundry hamper is emptied.

Rhetorical man

The Duck asked me to write something about how and why people use figures of speech without thinking about them. Of course, most people use figures of speech without knowing anything about rhetoric, and in fact rhetoric itself came about as a codification of what good speakers already did without studying rhetoric.

This touches on a subject of which I am woefully ignorant, namely—but let me unpack it slowly. Language itself is a thing of wonder. It stands at the interface between man’s immaterial and material sides as an artificial specification on the side of the imagination. Man naturally knows the world first through his senses, which inform his interior powers of imagination and memory, which in turn supply material to the powerful light of his immaterial intellect. At the point where the intellect gazes into the phantasm, where immaterial and material must work together, language intervenes as an instrument whereby reason can order the imagination and the imagination can better present itself to reason. Children who learn language undergo a mental revolution; reasoning and art and everything else we think of as special to man comes with language, precisely because language acts at the joint, so to speak, between what is unique to man and what he shares with the animals.

The written word normally signifies a spoken word, but even the spoken word is first the imagined word. Even when we are not speaking to others we often speak to ourselves, and even when we are not “hearing” words inside our heads our language is nonetheless organizing our thoughts. Deaf people can have true language without speech, because the word is in the imagination before it is in speech. But the imagined word itself is first the word understood—the intellectual word. Not only are concepts associated with particular signs, but our way of thinking about a thing then because the way of signifying of the sign; for example, our way of thinking about motion becomes the way of signifying of the verb, and our way of thinking about a substance becomes the way of signifying of a noun. Similarly, and as a result, logical relationships between our thoughts become grammatical relationships between our words, as when a verb takes a noun as its direct object.

All this is remarkable enough. Our words become incarnate, so to speak; the immaterial clothes itself in the material, imposes meaning and order, and by so doing it transforms our material brains in a marvelous and documentable way. But something further happens at the same time.

Beyond what reason imposes, there seems to be already an analogy between material and immaterial things that language can seize onto. Many words that all have similar consonants create a sense of unity about a sentence, and so convey the impression of thoughts that hang together. The balance of parallel phrases persuades us that the thought behind them is beautifully structured. Ending an essay with the same words and phrases that began the essay creates an impression of completion even when no real completion has happened. Just as a straight line really is like “linear” thinking in some analogous way, rhetorically powerful speech really is like powerful thought—again, in some analogous way.

Because language itself occurs at the very interface between immaterial and immaterial, it was inevitable that this analogous relationship between the two would come out in language. Without reflection, grammatical man became rhetorical man—or rather, the two came into being simultaneously as linguistic man—or rather, man came to be man.

That at least is my own reflection on what happens all the time all around us. But as I say, this is a realm of marvels even for the true philosopher, much less for an ignoramus like the present author.

Philistine Perfection

When a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death yesterday by Black Friday deal hunters, the nation was rightly outraged. The crowd, impatient from waiting all night in the parking lot, broke the doors down, flattened several employees in the process, and walked over them until one was dead. When police tried to clear the store, shoppers shouted angrily, "But I waited all night to get in!"--and kept on shopping.

But we should keep in mind that this was not only predictable, but planned. For several generations now Ray Moose has carefully and consciously designed advertisements to bypass reason; with the consent of all parties involved, companies have knowingly worked to cause customers to make decisions without thought, and even to induce a psychological need for their products. This is not a secret plot, but the open strategy one can find in any textbook on effective advertising. We the customers have enjoyed our titillation.

When the art of advertising was in its infancy and working on a previously unaffected populace, the best companies could manage was to induce imprudent purchases of unnecessary items, or an irrational decision in favor of one brand name over another. But now that the art has reached maturity, with the aid of television, Internet, and other media, and now that the populace has grown up already formed by advertisement, we can spark a real state of insanity that lasts for a number of hours. This is not a byproduct, but the goal.

In the dark old days of yesteryear, ignorant barbarians practiced black magic in the woods and sacrificed children for fertile fields. In the gloaming of culture, when barbarity is no longer suffered but sought, the Philistines celebrate Black Friday on the asphalt and sacrifice human life for a Nintendo Wii. There is here a kind of perfection.

The Disenfranchised Among Us

Bunthorne has modestly proposed that folks with children vote not only for themselves, but also for their children. His reasoning is hard to counter: not only are children otherwise unrepresented and thus unable to exert a governmental influence equivalent to their percentage of the population, but adults with children have a greater stake in governmental policy (and how that policy affects the common good) than do adults without children.

To these points, one might add that the choice not to have children is often a selfish one, an attempt to retain all the fun of life for the me-monster. Conversely, the choice to have children is often a selfless one, a choice for generosity. It seems only fitting that the choice most often characterized by self concern have less influence on the common good than the choice that is most often characterized by concern for the common good over self.

Some may object that this would give less voting power to those who wish to have children and cannot. On the one hand, this doesn't touch Bunthorne's original arguments; on the other hand, these people can adopt if they feel the need for more voting power. And if I had three hands, I would add on the third one that those wishing but unable to have children will generally agree on policy with those wishing and able to have children, so Bunthorne's proposal is overall in the favor of all in favor of children.

Ironically, the strongest opponents of Bunthorne's proposal would probably be advocates of children's rights. They would perceive this attempt to give children a vote as a veiled return to the supremacy of parents over children. As the Moose once said to a friend of mine: "Obedience is the root of all evil."

From the Moose's mouth

Yesterday belief.net published the full and unedited text of a famous interview with Barack Obama about his religious beliefs. It's worth reading in full, but the heart of it is here:

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that, particularly as somebody who's now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there's an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

Obama is a straight-laced, orthodox Tolerationist. Anyone teaching through Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance should assign Obama's interview for a class discussion. Come to think of it, anyone discussing Obama's religious views should read Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance, which exposes the roots and the fruits of the tyrrany of tolerance. Under the banner of unity, which you will recall was the rallying cry of Obama's campaign, the "virtue of tolerance" bans the only possible basis of unity: truth.

Obama's take on Jesus Christ is the second most interesting point in the interview. It fits precisely within the boundaries of orthodox Tolerationism, and locates our president-elect within the debate over who is and isn't a real Christian:

FALSANI:

Who's Jesus to you?

(He laughs nervously)

OBAMA:
Right.

Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

Hope is not a program

Just a reminder for all of us out there burnt out and depressed today. As Christians, we believe on faith that things are going to get worse before they get better. God has not assured us that truth and goodness will slowly ascend to victory over time; quite the contrary, Scripture tells us at every turn that evil will win, and win more, and finally reach its hour of triumph before our God intervenes suddenly and supernaturally.

For our children, we hope that the ascendancy of evil will not be in our day. For our neighbors' salvation, we hope that truth will not be discredited in the eyes of all. For ourselves perhaps, we hope that our legacy will be the good we accomplished in our lives.

But as for the course of the world, we do not hope that we will achieve the victory of good. We will fail in every measurable way. The hope that Obama proclaims is not finally our hope; at best he proclaims hope for a time and a season.

Our hope is not a program.

Our hope is in God, the master of history, who has brought Obama to the presidency; our hope is in the root of all being, who turns the heart of the worlds' leaders wherever he wills; our hope is a final hope, that seems so distant but closes around us with each death of someone we loved; our hope is hope not for America, not for prosperity, not for equal rights, not for just wages, but for the attainment of the goal towards which all of history strives. And this hope will be achieved by a force from outside the flow of history.

This just in: Ray Moose elected President!

It would appear to be final, since McCain has made his concession speech. The scary thing is not that Obama is president, but that we live in a country that voted for Obama.

How could it be that a man whose politics are to the left of everyone in the country and whose list of achievements fits on the back of his business card is not only elected, but considered to be the best thing since the i-pod? For my money, it's because we are a TV nation. The television trains viewers not to think seriously about anything, and so leads naturally to modern advertising, wherein a smiling and beautiful woman sitting in a car means that you must buy one (the car, that is). Similarly, a smiling and handsome man with a sonorous voice and an attractive theme about change and hope means you must elect him--serious content would actually be detrimental, distracting, like making arguments in your seventeen seconds of air time.

Just smile and look beautiful. The viewers have been trained not to think.

Think of it this way. If you were a social science researcher and you wanted to find out how Americans have been trained to make decisions by their communication technologies, would it not be your dream to conduct a nation-wide test with participants in every town? Well, the dream has become a reality, and the results are depressing, if predictable: Americans make decisions based on loose poetic associations of images and sound bytes.

The good news is that irrationality bites any hand, whether it holds a bone or not. McCain did well on the campaign trail until America formed the following "syllogism": an economic crisis happened after George Bush had been president for nearly eight years; the president in office is responsible for whatever may happen to the economy; therefore, Republicans have to go. Well, the Democrats gained seats in both the house and the senate, and their boy Ray will sit in the oval office. Every single problem that rears its ugly head in the next four years will land fairly and squarely in the Democratic lap, and Ray may find his nation of well-trained unthinkers turning "red" with anger.

Dum spiro, spero.

A hopeful view of hope

With the election only days away, every blogger, now matter how unqualified, must record his or her thoughts on the candidates. Since an Obama victory seems likely, I would like to offer an optimistic take on what will happen if the candidate of change and hope takes the oval office.

My guess is that he will not lead effectively, because he has no record of leading effectively. In the past, he has been controlled by the far left edge of the Democratic agenda, and that will probably remain true. So he will boldly and prophetically enact any number of hair-raisingly bad laws and policies, aided and indeed directed by his democratic congress. The age of entitlement will begin.

As liberal as Americans are, we are not as a group ready for socialism quite yet, so too much too fast may cause the frog to jump out of the water. Voters will be horrified by the extremism of the far left, and we will get a "swing effect" at the next election, to the benefit--God willing--of someone more insightful than John McCain. This swing effect will be augmented by the fact that the Democrats will controll the entire federal government for four years, and so every problem that arises within the four years will be perceived by voters as the Democrats' fault, whether or not the accusation is fair.

But will damage done by four years of Obama outweight the good of Democratic implosion? That depends almost entirely on the republican candidate four years from now: if we get a dynamic and principled leader, then he will use the momentum of the swing to undo the wreckage and even improve the nation; if we get a politician-at-heart figurehead whose virtue is a lack of vice, then we will be one step further down the road to serfdom.

Prophecy and fulfilment

Look at this and then at that. Five minutes into the future, indeed.