Sufficient reason & contradiction, together again.

Meillassoux's readiness to abandon the principle of sufficient reason is not, er, sufficiently remarked. I noted earlier that this step is what validates his argument that "for no reason" is a sufficient response to the "question of being," "why is there anything and not nothing?" I observed then that it is hard to imagine Socrates being satisfied by such a response. To consider this "answer" sufficient requires a revision of the concept of sufficiency. This is what one calls in some circles "re-defining success."

Barfield, to whom I have already contrasted Meillassoux, was (again) here first. He is speaking here of Darwinian evolution, but the point is more broadly applicable:

It was found that the appearances on earth [i.e., of biological life] so much lack the regularity of the appearances in the sky that no systematic hypothesis will fit them. But astronomy and physics had taught men that the business of science is to find hypotheses to save the appearances. By a hypothesis, then, these earthly appearances must be saved, and saved they were by the hypothesis of—chance variation. Now the concept of chance is precisely what a hypothesis is designed to save us from. Chance, in fact, = no hypothesis…. The impressive vocabulary of technological investigation was actually being used to denote its [own] breakdown; as though, because it is something we can do with ourselves in water, drowning should be included as one of the different ways of swimming. (Saving the Appearances p 64)

It would take me far afield to differentiate what is sound and what mistaken in Barfield’s account of evolutionary biology (even if I were assured of my competence). But I am juxtaposing him again to Meillassoux not merely because of his having anticipated the latter’s argument about ancestrality by fifty years (this really is remarkable enough to deserve some comment by bigger enthusiasts of Meillassoux than myself), but also because Meillassoux’s readiness to throw over the principle of sufficient reason is the mirror image and answer to the alleged ease with which, Lévy-Bruhl claims, primitive humanity (rich in the participatory consciousness Barfield unpacks) dispenses with the law of non-contradiction. This, in turn, is the one logical principle upon which Meillassoux builds his edifice, the one he is prepared to stake everything upon.

As is well known, it is these two that Leibniz declared essential to philosophy in the Monadology §§31–32: “Our reasonings are based on two great principles, that of contradiction… [and] that of sufficient reason.”

When I am in an especially Hegelian mood, I find myself thinking that the history of thought unfolds between these two “laws.” In such moments, it takes a considerable effort for me not to construe Meillassoux’s thinking as a kind of dialectical bookend to Barfield’s notion of “original participation.” As if the human race started with a weltanschauung that knew nothing of contradiction, and has ended up apparently ready--at least in speculative realism--to throw over the principle of sufficient reason. Whether this philosophy can be expanded into an entire world-view is another question of course. But hold these two philosophies up and look at them together, especially bearing in mind Meillassoux's campaign against "superstition" (a.k.a. fideism), and it really is as if something has come full-circle. I find myself muttering, "surely some revelation is at hand." However much I remind myself that Meillassoux isn't actually the culmination of any inevitable process (cutting-edge though he may look right now), I am still given pause by this.

The market as metaphysics

Marx told us that a man could "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner." Is Elie Ayache, derivatives trader and philosopher, what he had in mind?

Here are three links to a three-part video of Ayache discussing his book The Blank Swan, his interpretation of the market as exhibit A for seeing contingency as absolute and irreducible, metaphysically speaking; a fundamentally un-modellable set of contingencies to which the notion of probability is only pertinent by analogy.

I've been postponing putting something up on this, thinking I would come up with some really intelligent preamble to introduce it, but between other commitments and being under the weather, I haven't devoted any attention to writing about it at all. But if metaphysics and money have anything to say to each other, this book is more than a precis of the conversation. Is capitalism in practice just a special case of hyper-chaos?

Or could it be an instance of quantum-indeterminacy crystallizing into macro-specificity, as Willliam Orem suggests here?

ways of talking / ways of being

[this is re-posted from the great Science & Metaphysics event that Speculative Heresy hosted last month. I had a good dialogue there with Pete Wolfendale, whose comments will inform some later posts on this, possibly modifying what I say below; but I want to have this here as it originally stood.]

I am telling a story of something that happened to me. “I crossed the street because I could see the bus coming; the light was about to change, and I know from experience it’s a long light—if I didn’t get to the stop, I’d almost certainly miss the bus. I was already in the street when I heard the squealing brakes. Thank God the driver was alert; the car missed me by barely an inch. I dropped the grocery bag; all the fruit was bruised—but only the fruit. The driver was gracious, but I can tell you I was embarrassed! Of course I missed the bus anyway—I couldn’t very well just run away after she’d screeched to a stop. I was picking up the apples when it went by.”

This banal anecdote has something in common with dozens of others we relate every day: a first-person account, it relates something I was there for, my own experience from my own point of view. I could tell it in a million different ways, but the essential quality of the events is that they happen with reference to an experiential, first-person center. In fact, there is no other center possible. If “we” were happy, this is two I’s. The only “direct access” available is first person. (We can quibble about whether even this is possible, but I want to keep things simple for now).

Now if instead I am reading a news story or a police report about a traffic accident, a very different set of discourses comes into play from the first person account I just offered. “The sedan strayed across the median line about halfway up the block, colliding with the oncoming truck at 25 mph. Neither driver was seriously injured but both vehicles required towing. One passerby was cut by broken glass.” These are now third-person reports about particular events. This does not change if I back up and ask broader questions—about, say, the history of traffic in this city, or commerce in this region of the country, or relations between immigrants and indigenous population, or the shaping of the river-valley by glaciers. I am still asking historical questions, about what particulars happened, particulars to which I have only indirect access, whether they happened a million years ago or just now, one or two streets over.

I can focus again. Suppose instead of asking what happened, I want to know what happens. This need not be a purely hypothetical question, but it is no longer about specifics. I may wonder about the likely traffic patterns in the city during the summer months, the laws governing physical bodies in motion, the mechanics of an internal combustion engine, or the neural and physiological events that accompany driving a car. These inquiries can draw upon particulars, which this discourse will call “evidence,” but the questions are not historical but scientific; they do not presuppose any particular actors but only general ones. The subjects of this discourse are the values of variables.

One further step back is possible. It is possible to ask, not about what happens, but about the form of these happenings, these relationships and events. One can imagine a consistent world in which a falling object accelerates at a different rate than 32 feet per second per second; but one cannot factor 32 into anything but two to the fifth power. I need not grant that a dropped apple will fall; but if a dropped apple will fall, and there is a dropped apple, it will fall. Abstracted sufficiently, these considerations take us into a pure mathematics or logic (and, arguably, into metaphysics), in which there is no longer any question of what happened or happens or even “what would happen,” but only of tenseless objects and relationships. Here we are at the furthest point from the need for a “center of experience,” indeed seemingly at a point where there is no need for any experience at all. The square root of four will be two, with or without any mathematician, because 2 and 4 are in such-&-such a relation; number itself has (or is) such a structure.

There are here four possible discourses. We might roughly describe them as: a first person-discourse about immediate experience; a third-person discourse concerning particulars; a third-person discourse concerning abstracts; and a (as it were) zero-person discourse at the most abstract level. This four-way figure has an obvious resemblance to a number of other foursquare schemes, ancient and modern, but it is independent of them, and so far my attempts to wrest it into perfect isomorphism with these have foundered.

It will be noted that in this schematic, scientific assertions and inquiry comprise only one quarter of possible discourse. This is not because the ways of being wrong vastly exceed the ways of being right; indeed, by this latter standard, to say that one quarter of all possible statements were right would be a laughable overstatement. We are not speaking of a (limitless) quantity of possible claims, but of a delimitable taxonomy of claims. The four regions can be arranged concentrically in increasing generality; they can also be treated as four quadrants, an array I will consider more closely below.

One can argue that there are lacunae in this schema; that poetry, ritual, legal pronouncements, and other categories of speech acts are excluded; in particular, prescriptive discourse presents a puzzle. If I say: “I should not have run across the street, I should have been more careful,” or, “the bus driver should have waited,” or, “there should be an extra lane of traffic,” or “the internal combustion engine ought never to have been invented,” all these counterfactual or ethical claims seem to appeal to an order of experience which does not readily map onto the quaternity laid out here. These considerations do not necessarily mean the foursquare account is not exhaustive in its own mode, for it is meant to address claims in the assertoric mode; claims of the form S is [or was] p.

This causes the question to arise: Are there natural kinds, which these four sorts of assertions are about? Is our foursquare map one of discourse alone, or is it of orders of being? Is it a map of human inquiry, or is it an ontology?
This question arises in this specific connection because the sorts of assertions we are treating here are distinguished from such other speech acts (like pronouncing a verdict or reciting a poem) by pointing to (or claim to point to) a reality beyond themselves. “I saw the meteor flash across the sky;” “The debris entered the atmosphere roughly above New Guinea and splashed into the Pacific a few minutes later;” “Friction with the atmospheric gas will tend to heat any incoming fragments to incandescence, and therefore only fragments with masses above a certain critical point will make impact on the surface;” and “Earth could not survive impact with another celestial object of moon-size or greater; the Earth still exists; therefore the Earth has not yet collided with such an object,” are four assertions differing in scope, but all of them claiming relevance beyond their own utterance. The truths they claim to name would also obtain if they were not so named; this is not the case with “I name this lunar crater “Carr-54.”

To put the matter thus is practically to beg for the angel of deconstruction to visit, but for the purposes of this post I am going to raise but not answer the question of the precise relationship between discourse and being. Indeed, as I have thought about these four regions, I have often caught myself sliding between treating “science” as a discourse and “the natural world” or “matter” as an ontological realm. The same happens, willy-nilly, with “history” and “the historical,” or indeed “logic” and “the logical.” My working assumption is that, whatever anthropological considerations attach to these discourses, the realms to which they relate have a status that is independent of that discourse. That is: to the degree that we can separate epistemology from ontology (a significant caveat), it makes sense to claim that there are truths of various orders—historical, scientific, logical, mathematical, and indeed metaphysical—which are independent even of there being minds, let alone language. Indeed, the only (and tautological) exception here is the personal realm.

As mentioned, besides being set out concentrically, the regions can also be arrayed as quadrants, along two axes. One axis divides the general from the specific: first-person and historical discourse both concern specific events, instantiations of the general considerations elaborated in the scientific or logical discourses. (Note that this has nothing to do with whether the assertions are true or not. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system is still a general discourse about what planets do; whereas, a narrative that included Venus and Saturn crossing in such-&-such an astrological house would still be a historical narrative, even though there are no such houses, and indeed even if the story included some other celestial events incompatible with such a conjunction.)

The other axis divides the irrefutable from the refutable. Both first-person intentional accounts and logical abstractions share a certain form of incorrigibility. I cannot be shown that I did not see red, even if I can be persuaded that the physical object I saw was not red. Likewise, while there can be incorrect real-world use or execution of logic (e.g., parasyllogisms), logic itself is its own tribunal. It is not quite true to say that logic has no counterexamples, but these examples are themselves logical (Gödel, Graham Priest).

On the other hand, both the historical and the scientific quarters can be regarded as mutually corrigible. Science can correct or construe an assertion of history: whatever is meant by the Book of Joshua’s account of the sun “standing still,” (Joshua 10:12-13), the Earth cannot be held to have historically ceased turning on its axis. The same relation of corrigibility obtains vice-versa; after all, an experiment is precisely a particular occurrence meant to confirm or refute a general thesis.

However, while a historical claim may refute a scientific formulation, science in general as discourse is dispositive. In general, the dispositive fields of the quaternity are, unsurprisingly, on the side treating of generalities. The true sentences in either metaphysico-logical or scientific realms can be treated as having a constraining function on what counts as intelligible, or true, in the historical and personal realms. Science is dispositive as to whether we believe the first-person accounts of another; logic for whether we even understand them. I might conceivably insist that I had beheld a simultaneously transparent and solid black wall; the canons of logic cannot gainsay this, but can dispute whether I understand my own words, and if I am recalcitrant, will conclude that communication with me on the matter is a lost cause.

Another difference between the quadrants is the role of ignorance in each. In practice, there are many occasions for the cultivation of ignorance, the systematic making-unavailable of certain facts. An audience at a stage magician’s show; a child lost in pretending; a hopeful lover letting him- or herself be seduced; the viewer of Oedipus Rex or King Lear; the members of the firing squad, one of whom has live ammunition; the quantum physicist setting up a two-slit experiment; each of these has a different investment in not knowing something. It is not complete ignorance, but carefully held within certain bounds. Sometimes there is a time limit built in (e.g., Christmas morning); sometimes there is a practical insuperability upon which I rely (it would be possible to discover which gun fired the bullet, but I do not want to and law forbids it). But the ignorance is essential for the sake of an experience. This points to one quarter—the first-person—as the particular region in which ignorance especially pertains. For the individual seeking or safeguarding a particular experience (e.g. the delight in a magician’s trick, the excitement of opening birthday gifts, or the reassuring sense that one might not have fired the executing bullet), ignorance is of the essence.

In general, we may say that neither historian nor scientist can countenance any principled ignorance; there cannot be, for them, a reason to maintain or preserve not knowing. But in logic and mathematics there is, as Gödel showed, a particular sort of ignorance (indemonstrability) that cannot be surmounted, without recourse to the first-person. If I can see that the truth of a given proposition, which cannot be proven within the limits of a certain systematic discourse, this is tantamount to saying that I have outflanked the “ignorance” of that system.

The thematic of ignorance clearly has a certain resonance with psychoanalytic and other discourses in which “the unconscious” figures, a fact which points me towards Schellingian or Hegelian speculation, with its dark Urgrund and the labor of the negative, but this is too big a topic to pursue here. But the suggestion of a “hidden” or unknown side to the realities involved suggests one final trope.

One needs to ask of the foursquare figure as a whole: To what discourse does it belong? If it collapsed into any of its own quadrants, could this only be at the cost of self-referential paradox? On the other hand, if we refuse this reduction, do we thereby claim to escape from the dispositive prescriptions of science and of logic? At the risk of taking a schematic representation too literally, one can speculate: if a consistent account were worked out, the best topology for these discourses and their respective objective realms might be not the quartered plane I have presented, but a hypercube, whose turning 3-d “shadow” gives the impression that each of its “sides” in turn contains the rest. I hasten to add that this is a model, not a geometric proof of a metaphysical position, but I use the figure to illustrate why partisans have been able to claim each of these realms to be exhaustive and fundamental. Of course having recourse to higher-dimensional topologies involves paradoxes of its own, e.g., in what “space” do these realms exist? Metaphysics always presses the question back one stage more.

Waking while sleeping, relating while withdrawing

After Siddhartha Gautama gained his great realization under the Bodhi tree, people asked him what he was—god, demon, Brahmin, sage? He always replied, “I am awake,” Buddha.

Reading an interview between Jeff Greenwald and Sri H. W. L. Poonja, also known as Papaji, the Indian spiritual teacher whose hundredth birthday would have been last week (he died in 1997), I came across this passage:

Papaji: What do you see when you sleep?
Greenwald: Nothing.
P: That is the right answer. Now, why do you reject all the things of the world, things you like so much, merely to offer yourself up to a state of nothingness?
G: I do it because I become tired.
P: To regain energy you go to the reservoir of energy, to that state of nothingness…. If it were not a happy state, no one would be willing to say 'Good night' to their loved ones every evening before going to sleep. No matter how close you are to them, you still say, 'Good night, let me sleep'.
There is something superior, something higher, something more beautiful about being alone. Ask yourself the question: when I wake up, who wakes up?
When you woke up, you did not bring the impression of the happiness that you enjoyed for six or seven hours of dreamless sleep. You can only bring with you impressions of the dances you saw in your dreams…. So, I will ask you again: when you wake up, who wakes up?
G: It is the 'I' that wakes up.
P: OK. The 'I' has woken up. When the 'I' wakes up, the past, the present and the future also wake up. This means that time and space also wake up. Along with time and space the sun wakes up, the moon wakes up, the stars wake up, mountains wake up, rivers wake up, forests wake up, men, birds and animals all wake up. When the 'I' wakes up, everything else wakes up. While this 'I' was sleeping during the sleep state, everything was quiet. If you don't touch the 'I' which woke up, you will experience the happiness of sleep while you are awake. Do it for one single second, half of a single second, a quarter of a single second. Don't touch the 'I'. The 'I' is something that we can well afford to be without. Don't touch the 'I' and tell me if you are not sleeping.
G: That is right. In that instant, everything is like a dream.
P: This is called waking while sleeping and sleeping while awake. You are always in happiness, always awake. This awakening is called Knowledge, Freedom, Truth. Don't touch the names, though. Get rid of all the words that you have so far heard from any quarter. And you will see who you really are.

And on the heels of this, as I was thinking hard over these questions, Jeff Bell posted a talk by Paramahansa Yogananda, on this very question: How to sleep correctly.

When Papaji extols the “being alone” of sleep, I am reminded forcibly of what I said about the “souls” of objects, the withdrawn, eternal objects that (to use Harman’s term) “withdraw” from relations—that such eternal objects are “alone with the alone.” Note that this withdrawal is just what Papaji refers to when he says that we bid our loved ones “goodnight, let me sleep,” in order to touch that reservoir of energy that is—nothing.

This is almost precisely what Timothy Morton has been urging on us regarding Object-Oriented Buddhism: sunyata, emptiness, is withdrawal. I have been very engaged by Morton’s presentation. Although, as a Christian, I can’t be quite content with this—I am committed to an ontology of persons (and persons are inherently, I think, in relation)—I do think Morton does make a very striking case for a close fit between at least certain strains of Buddhism and a coherent development of object-oriented ontology. (I've alluded before to my belief that at least some versions of Christianity and Buddhism are compatible by virtue of having to do with different things--though as Amod Lele notes, this view might be vulnerable to a critique similar to that of non-overlapping magisteria.)

But there is a sticking point with this sort of object-oriented account of enlightenment (I think). When Papaji speaks of being able to sleep while awake, this in Harman’s terms would mean being able to be dormant while relating, and even perhaps a kind of dormancy as relating.

The name for an object that exists without relating, exists without perceiving, is a sleeping entity, or a dormant one, to use the lovely term our language has stolen from the French. Dormant objects are those which are real, but currently without psyche. Each night we make ourselves as dormant as we can, stripping away the accidental accretions of the day and gathering ourselves once more in the essential life where we are untouched by external relations.

I don’t see how this can be squared with the claims of being able to have a conscious experience of “aloneness.” Harman’s image in his paper is one that rejects, quite explicitly, the image of the whole—even as it slyly alludes to a traditional image for this experience of wholeness, the image of the ocean. The “dormant” object, Harman says, is like a drop of water on the surface of a bottomless sea. In such an imaginary ocean, some water drops at any moment have no neighbors above. All objects have parts all the time, but not all objects are parts, and those that are not, are dormant.

[A]nything that relates must perceive. Only by becoming a piece of a larger object, only by entering into the interior of a larger one, does an entity have anything like a psyche. This means that entities have psyches accidentally, not in their own right. For our model allows for entities to exist apart from all relations. This makes it not just conceivable, but also necessary, that there be entities at any moment that are at the very top of their chains of parts, so that they relate to nothing further. For various reasons it is good to think of an infinite regress downward in the world, with no tiniest layer of microparticle bringing an end to the chain of beings. But the same does not hold in reverse. The idea of a universe as a whole actually seems like a fruitless abstraction, and there is some autonomy for the various different parts of the cosmos, all of which require work to be interwoven together, which proves that they are not already interwoven.

But this work is precisely the method of perception, a technique which can be learned—though, as I have said before, such a technique cannot by itself grant the experience but only make one open to it. This experience seems to me ruled out by some hyperbolic claims concerning withdrawal.

A great deal of this tension, it seems to me, hinges on the paradox involved in the pairing of Harman's "dormant" (sleeping) objects (construing this dormancy as sunyata, emptiness), and the Buddha's self-given title, Awake. Of course, it is easily said: we do not know sleep from sleep, but from waking. But this does not get us to the bottom of the paradox here (if indeed anything does), because what is at issue is precisely "waking while sleeping, sleeping while being awake," to quote Papaji (who, it must be acknowledged, is not a Buddhist and did not claim to be).

Morton quotes the Buddha’s words which he spoke after his awakening:

“I've discovered a dharma that is sparkling, nectar-sweet, uncompounded and simple. But since no one will believe me if I try to speak about it, I shall remain silent.”

Morton comments:

In OOO, “dharma” means “object.” “Uncompounded” means “not made of other things” and “simple” means “not caused by other things.” So this object is NON-RELATIONAL.

I know that Buddhists and object-oriented thinkers will be debating Morton's mini-glossary. As an outsider who has only done nominal zazen, I don't really have a right to opine. There are, however, two words Morton does not unpack here, and these I think are important. (I hope it is clear that this is not a move in a cheap game of philosophical gotcha.) The first is “discovered.” To discover is an experience, and this entails an encounter. So in some fashion, this withdrawn, this sunya, has yet been “seen.”

The other word is, of course, the word “I.”

Friends and in-crowds

Regarding the question of political over-polarization, Among the Poseidonians recently commented:

our political culture has not only become permeated with hysteria and the de-legitimizing of one’s political opposition, but with an “ends justify the means” mentality which violates not only my sense of political morality, but long-term political prudence (which are intimately connected in my mind).

This articulates very clearly part of my concern over the acrimonious and distorting nature of political "debate" at present. The more one polarizes the debate, the greater the license for radical, what-you-can-get-away-with tactics. (This is nicely illustrated, e.g., by John A.'s example of the GOP cutting minority membership in committees; and, credit where it's due, in this case the Democrats restored the balance even when it hurt them; this is also Poseidonian's point regarding the Justice Department's defense of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy's legality even as the Obama administration detests the law.)

As I mentioned in response to John, I sometimes meet a kind of shrugging, so-what, aren’t-we-among-friends incomprehension when I object to the demonizing of rank-&-file republicans (or tea-partiers) by my democratic acquaintances. What I take Poseidonian to be saying is that there’s a link between the end justifying the means, and the stark polarization of political life. After all, there is a referee in a boxing ring or a fencing match, but in a scratch-your-eyes-out brawl to the death, there are no rules of engagement.

In this midst of thinking this over, I stumbled on Grad Student's blog post ruminating on the guilty pleasures of counting oneself right. " 'Demagoguery...jihad...rabidly anti-Islam...incendiary libel...' I’m beginning to suspect," Grad Stdent wrote,

that political rhetoric like this isn’t very good for my psyche. It breeds in me a repulsive sense of smug superiority and anger that I would like to avoid. What’s the antidote? I suppose wishing my enemies well would help.

I think I recognize what Grad Stdent's talking about. Even back in my sign-waving days when I stood outside the Nevada Test Site calling for a ban on nuclear weapons testing, indignation seemed always (to me) the least attractive or compelling feature of any political argument. I have noticed, too, that I have an aversion to my own smugness -- once I've noticed it -- even stronger than my dislike of others'; and my distaste for the smugness of those who agree with me is stronger than my dislike of it in my opponents.

I can extend this to a suspicion of all self-congratulatory, mutually-admiring in-crowds. This is not a horror of joining a group per se, a kind of rugged individualism run amok, but specifically a distaste for the lure of jargon, the secret smiles at each other over the bewildered heads of the others in the room, the nudge-wink, "we know what we mean" question-begging. And yet. And yet, the pleasures of friendship are so close to these, that I have to wonder if there is something of a bad puritan conscience in my recoil? (Simone Weil says someplace that the pleasure in sharing an opinion with one's friend sullies the friendship). I am a high-church Anglican, a lover of Nabokov, a nerd for progressive rock music, and on and on -- all highly idiosyncratic tastes (and more than "tastes") the sharing of which has given me some of the great pleasures of my life. We all know, too, how the little meaningless in-jokes one comes to share with ones best friends, one's lover, and so on, become the subtext of one's life after a while. I don't want to gainsay this. But there’s something that makes me shudder, about the sly way fellow-hobbyists shake their heads over the lost ones -- the ones on the outside, bereft of their meaning-bestowing enthusiasms.

This can only get worse when combined with politics. (In religion, it's positively deadly, and, in Christianity, all the more hard to uproot, as it is very close to -- and crucially different from -- something authentically and legitimately Christian... but that's the matter for another post entirely).

But are there not urgent matters for which indignation and rallying are the only decent responses, where "keeping a cool head" is an indecency? I want to answer Yes to this. And yet... Perhaps at least some of my distaste for indignation comes from thinking this line is in a different place from where others think it.

The difference, as far as I can tell, is that between friendship and something pseudo-, something that imitates it.

In the former, either both of you are looking at some third thing, and it endlessly opens up to you without exhaustion (or even 'withdrawing'), becoming a token of the mystery of the whole world somehow, but never losing its absolute specificity (the Sherlock Holmes stories you both love never turn into red wine or antique Tiffany lamps or even into “the mystery of the world”); or you are yourselves revealed to each other -- the wonder and miracle of another person, shining next to you as if in a pillar of light. This is what love is.

In the latter, there's something else -- something less. Something that comes about by virtue of not being the benighted others who don't get it, in which the miracle that occasions your camaraderie is cheapened by being pressed into service of making you feel better than them .

Certainly, I do also know a kind of reactive appalled-ness at the one who just doesn't see it, who seems to not grasp what is at stake. I long ago despaired over trying to open my parents’ ears to the thrill of certain music, or certain friends’ to the obvious allure of the mind. What refreshment, after so long among philistines, to meet someone who getsMark Rothko, or Led Zeppelin, or Le Morte d’Arthur, or ornithology. The soul exclaims “You too?!” And can one begrudge us if, after this "you too!", we share a moment of relief, or dismissal of everyone else besides we the initiated, as the accumulated exasperation of years is finally expressed?

I know well such moments. I will say, unequivocally, yes, I’d be a better person without them. Pace Nietzsche, there is a difference between pity and compassion, and (at the risk of an almost absurd overwroughtness) one can feel compassion for the one who lacks one's thrill at the sight of a landscape or the fascination of your favorite city, or (slightly less ridiculously) who just doesn't see the obviousness of your politics, without any condescending pity. I also try to nurture a degree of compassion for myself, in feeling these silly all-too-human moments of breathing, "God! Those idiots!", when I've finally found a sympathetic ear. Such lapses of decorum and decency are forgivable. But lapses they are, and I certainly don’t want to mistake them for friendship, just because someone is there to agree with me.

This is the case, even if the listening ear, the kindred-spirit, who occasions this relief and recrimination is my friend. But in politics, all too often, they're only the enemy of my enemy.

My pedagogical priorities

Elisa asks:
how do you cope with performance-oriented students and parents? How do you answer to reproaches such as that your person-to-person approach takes time out of frontal teaching and the like?

This is a really good question. It arose, as can be seen by a glance at the post Elisa comments on, in the context of a discussion of teen suicide, where I was sketchily referring to my pedagogical approach. I do not claim any special knowledge about suicide in general or how to prevent (or cope!) with it, but I do maintain that as a teacher my first and almost only priority is the cultivation of honest relationships with the youth I work with; not their grades, not whether they know their ABCs or their periodic table or Aristotle's categories. Any of these can come naturally enough in the course of a genuine relationship in which neither party tries to impose their private enthusiasms as the agenda for the friendship as a whole. I can share any amount of "knowledge" I may have if I am genuinely excited about it; the moment I try to give it to someone as something they "need," the reek of disingenuousness overpowers the room.

I do get raised eyebrows, and more. One fellow teacher opined that I "keep those kids on a very long leash." (Some remarks one can only allow to pass by in silence.) One mother has told me expressly that my job was not "to be her son's buddy," but to enforce his completing his homework. I have faced adults who were indignant that I would countenance the playing of video games. Happily, I can report that (so far) these are an anomalous and tiny percentage of adult responses.

Since I am employed not by the school system itself, but by a before/after-school program, I am not the one deemed primarily responsible for making sure the kids I work with memorize all the capitols of the 50 states, or even their multiplication tables. Nonetheless, I do get a good share of expectation that kids will finish their homework and so on. When this happens, I am very up-front with my students. I am frank with them about the expectations others have of me and how this gets passed on to them. They are still aware that they can opt out -- it is not their job to spare me their parents' frustration (misguided though I may consider it)-- but usually we realize that we are both faced with something that is easier got through together. There is no demonizing of "unreasonable" parents, though I am full of sympathy for kids who know very well that homework is a waste of time.

The most difficult thing for me is not the fielding of adult questions -- in those encounters, I am very frank about my respect of children's autonomy, and usually I at least get a break as a quaint liberal eccentric -- but the more insidious sense I have of being monitored and evaluated by criteria that is foreign to my own values. The challenge here is to be conscious of it, because it makes an unmistakable impact on my expectations of my students. I would just as soon trust the kids to make any decision that they can; but at the back of my head is always the awareness that someone can ask, Why is he letting them do that? The effect of this is to turn me in to a policeman or an overseer; I pass the feeling of being monitored on to them. Combating this in myself is the reason I am (as soon as I notice it) as honest as I can be with my students about where my own expectations come from -- whether they are genuinely mine, or whether they are something I feel obliged to impose because of others' expectations of me. Still, the snuck glances towards me, the way conversation drops to a whisper when I pass, testifies that I cannot overcome the surveillance to which children are accustomed. (Of course, they could also just be talking about how strange I am.) The contrast between this and the Clearwater School (where I volunteer one to two time a week for a half-day), is so stark as to make one wonder if the cultivation of the sense of being watched and checked up on -- which is not the same as being cared for -- is (whether intentionally or not) a primary function of ordinary school.

To be sure I have answered Elisa's question:

A "performance-oriented student" presents no problem at all; I am interested in what it's like to be them, and if they want my help with homework, I am ready and able. Whatever I can do with that kid, I will do.

When I get an objection from a parent, my response is that my priority is not to be liked by the child, but to have an honest relationship with them. So I can honestly say to them, "your parent wants this homework done, and I will help you do it." In other words, I can usually be true to my own values and still deliver the content-specific work that is expected of me. If I have to make a choice, I will choose respecting the autonomy of a child over getting an assignment done every time. This does not, by the way, mean no student is ever angry or frustrated at me (or vice versa); but they are (I hope) never merely cowed.

And, as I claimed to Elisa, while it is no guarantee of being spared pain, I believe that the more genuine the relationship with a student, the more natural (which does not always mean easier) it is to broach the very, very hard subjects.

A politics of targeted ads

Pursuant to the conversation w/ John A about my post "Left, right, and wrong," I was giving thought to the question of how I see political polarization. This is tricky. On the one hand, I share Ronald Dworkin’s concern, articulated in his popular book Is Democracy Possible Here?, that political polemic has become so divisive and partisan that each side has come to perceive the other as not just an opponent but an enemy. On the other hand, one needs only tilt the kaleidoscope ever so slightly to see Democrats and Republicans as sharing (and, importantly, excluding) a remarkable amount in common, and not in some just-folks, we’re-all-Americans way. (A frequent charge, from critics from Ralph Nader to Ron Paul, is that the problem with both major parties is precisely what they have in common.)

On Dworkin’s account, debate is starting to be impossible because the parties do not recognize each other as legitimate opponents; thus no serious engagement about issues happens, because the encounter never moves past throwing hostility back and forth. Of course, Dworkin contends that the two major parties do share a tremendous amount in common, and if they could remind themselves of this, civility might be restored and public discourse elevated. On George Farah's view, on the other hand, debate never happens because the two apparently opposing views are really too close. Farah is the founder of Open Debates, an organization seeking to broaden the available spectrum of living options and in particular to reform the political debate system. According to Farah, in a debate between candidates (we're speaking now about an actual event, not just a disagreement), what we see is a canned rehearsal of anticipated moves, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in a WWF match, but no hard questions (from the audience or even from each other). Huge swathes of political tradition -- and public opinion -- are excluded by ideological fiat. A Naderian critique would have it that the ostensible animosity between the left and right wings of the ruling class masks their mutual complicity, and the distraction provided by their foofaraw suits them well. They don't want the elevated discourse Dworkin imagines; they want targeted ads. Farah traces at least some of this shameful dumbshow to the 1988 coup d'etat in which the League of Women Voters was replaced by the newfangled Commission on Presidential Debates.

How seriously, then, ought we to take ostensible differences?

Recently I read a remark by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, decrying feminism that allows itself to be distracted over whether men or women do the dishes or the laundry, while women in Somalia or Pakistan or elsewhere are having their genitals mutilated or being stoned or strangled in honor killings. Against such a background, debates over housework might be characterized as (to put it mildly) confused regarding priorities; one could justifiably argue that whatever the differences between the parties, these are dwarfed by what they have in common, and in this case, they are being distracted from that common ground -- mutual concern for women’s lives -- to concentrate instead on minutiae.

There is a danger of scoring cheap points here, points all the cheaper considering the real suffering they exploit. The point is not to belittle feminism, nor to wave away the stresses of our lives, which are real, however trivial they seem by comparison with a gun in the face. But the case remains that a pressing concern up close does not always loom so large from a distance. In my comment to John A., I compared the question to the differences between Marxist factions in the late 19th and early 20th century. The most obvious of these might be Lenin’s polemic with Kautsky (the specific instance I mentioned), but the period was rife with these disputes, some on fine points of theory, some more substantive, and the parties went at it hammer and tongs. Some of them -- quite a number -- wound up dead, which is certainly a difference that makes a difference, at least to them. From a century’s distance, what do we see? Simply that every one of the parties was on the wrong side? Or is there something more?

And can I really mean that Glenn Beck and Harry Reid are as close and as far apart as Lenin and Kautsky? Is there a danger of the comparison being not false but just meaningless?

Analogy and pedagogy

Philosophy is originally a pedagogy, and indeed a counter-pedagogy. It is not separable from the drive to communicate, foster, teach; but it is a very specific sort of teaching, a teaching which is almost a non-teaching. (A “letting-learn,” Heidegger said.) It arises from mystery-religions and rites of passage, from initiations and secrets. It is no profanation of the mysteries, not a tearing-open of the curtain, nor yet a mere substitution of one set of mysteries for another set that has worn thin, but a re-institution of mystery per se in the face of a set of pseudo-mysteries. It is not a reaction against the critique of mystery, but is in fact a re-institution by means of critique. It clashes with this other set of mysteries, a set of norms of homage to family, cult, polis; above all, with the apologists for that order who will shrug off objections. In The Clouds, Aristophanes’ caricature depicts Socrates’ students as mouthing off to their parents under Socrates’ tutelage. As if in response, Xenophon preserves a teaching of Socrates to his own son about respecting his mother, and Plato shows us Socrates attempting to dissuade Euthyphro from prosecuting his father in court. Thus philosophy intertwines with power well before Philip of Macedon entrusts young Alexander to Aristotle’s care. Philosophy is engaged with power, and so with politics, because it is a teaching.

Philosophy’s primary polemic, however, is with the sophist; even, especially, with (to appropriate a coinage of pop-psychology), one’s “inner sophist.” The teaching of the sophists is, as Badiou notes, a perpetual shadow of philosophy, and it cannot be dealt with once and for all. The philosopher’s uncanny double, the sophist teaches that truth is relative, as indeed it is in the realm of the relative—the realm of the cave.

The besetting danger of teaching is condescension, a casting of oneself as the one who knows; to adopt willy-nilly the relativism of the cave (which confers authority by virtue of arbitrary marks, such as one’s age or social role). This is a danger to ones students, who may idolize too quickly, or conversely refuse to learn; but it is a greater danger to oneself. Socrates continually eschews this picture of himself, as we know, but always ambiguously. Socrates was not just a teacher, but a continual learner, and this learning was a consciousness as well as a passion. It is essential, to be immediately engaged, but this passion by itself remains insufficient, because it is possible to be immediately engaged and still enslaved. The aim of a philosophical education is to live an interested life, an examined life—a life engaged both immediately and consciously, that is, freely.

The matter of participation (in the sense I use the word) in philosophy’s pedagogy is double. On the one hand, philosophy cultivates participation, for this is a synonym for lived interest. On the other hand, philosophy makes use of participation, as a way of instilling interest. Thus philosophy must assume what it aims at. It is an enthymeme, a supreme question-begging; “weak thought” itself, as Vattimo might say. Voegelin was irked at Marx and Comte for their dismissiveness towards those who do not share their premises, and took it as a sure index of their having set up a “second reality” in place of the real world. But Voegelin is only half-right. Marx, Comte and others may have been wrong in dismissing “idle questions,” but their philosophies are gedankenexperiments in just the same way as are poems. All philosophy insofar as it is philosophy is “without consequences” in this sense. It is a continually revisable thought-experiment, with always-shifting premises. “We said, did we not…?” is always Socrates’ refrain. But this is always rescindable in favor of some other guess, another “likely story.” “It’s like this…”

The claim that underneath every “like” must be something that it is is as old as philosophy, is almost synonymous with philosophy; this is philosophy’s continuous peregrination to and from ontology. But allude to it though we may and must, what is proves recalcitrant to every “it is like…,” and each lapse spurs a new likely story. Badiou’s aspiration to be done with interpretation is an impatience, an abrogation of every “it is like,” for the sake of the bare “it is,” which he finds in the mathematical. But here too the “it is like” is found already, like the hedgehog in Montaigne, for the assertion that the “is” is matheme is another likely story, and indeed is supplemented or complemented in Badiou by three others. Nagel is closer when he asks what it is like to be a bat, for “what is it like” is precisely the analogical structure of experience, and as Aquinas taught, analogy is of the essence, or as close as may be.

“It is like” has a further application in the pedagogical field: it is a curative for boredom. Boredom is the unbroken unfolding of the already. It is by no means an incidental discovery of truly egalitarian teaching, that is, teaching which eschews condescension, that the student experiences and wrestles with great expanses of boredom. This boredom is very close to the insomniac hostage which figures at the beginning of more than one of Levinas’ expositions, a consciousness captive to itself. It is an ontological and not a psychological state. It is true that boredom is also encountered in the traditional teaching model, which distinguishes itself precisely in construing boredom as psychological. Contemporary education is an incarceration, and every analysis of incarceration must treat the experience of boredom. (So too every analysis of modernity, which begins with Baudelaire and the demon ennui). Philosophy is original and radical in that is refuses to treat the student as hostage. This is the site, too, of an intersection of philosophy with contemporary (and not only contemporary) politics, as well as a critique of every spirituality that hinges upon the magical interpretation of the sacrificial victim (as Ivan Karamazov saw)—for the victim is a hostage.

The it is like offers a hinge, a fingerhold, a tiny schism in the absolute symmetry of boredom, for the similarity is also a difference, but not an alienating one. The right analogy means a possible way forward. Science has a name for the way analogy functions in its method: the word model. Every scientific experiment seeks a broken symmetry: the one altered parameter that will bring about an altered outcome, out of the desert of invariability. The experiment, in turn, is intimately linked with the model, as its proving ground and crucible. The experiment hones and refines and sometimes breaks the model; the model being simply the ruling analogy, the it is like…

The example of the dialogue with the slave boy in the Meno is (notwithstanding Popper’s anti-Platonic arguments) a good place to start. A boy who knows nothing of geometry is led, step by step, to answer simple questions until he can confidently describe the procedure for doubling a square. One could argue here at length about the frame-story or rhetoric; the implicit approval of slavery, for instance; or the yes-or-no parameters of Socrates’ questions. In fact, it is rare for a real non-coercive dialogue to proceed along merely yes/no lines; real equality between speakers implies an ability for each of them to address questions to the other. And to be sure, Socrates turns out to welcome questions himself, though he disclaims any expertise and always casts himself as a fellow-inquirer.

In general, those who get befuddled in a Platonic dialogue voice some suspicion that Socrates is trying to trick them; that is, they do not trust Socrates. There is good reason for this. They correctly intuit that the Socratic project will entail something they do not want—a choice between changing their conduct or continuing to live as they were but under the inchoate impression of grievous inconsistency. Socrates says that he consistently urges his fellow citizens to concern themselves about what matters most of all: the soul. (If you want a measure of how far our time has diverged from Plato’s, just ask yourself how many of our contemporaries who are called philosophers could, with a straight face, urge concern about the soul). It should be underlined: this matters, for Socrates, most of all, so much that he prefers a death sentence rather than stop publically philosophizing. For Socrates, the stakes in a philosophical dispute are quite explicitly the highest stakes that could be.

And yet, when Socrates disputes, he maintains a dispassion that is nearly infamous. Philosophy is, as it were, an irenic agonism; it readily enters, and even courts, disagreements of all sorts, but its conduct and manner of engagement in every conflict is always impassive.

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful do not comprise the Platonic triumvirate by accident. It is to these three that are all human disputation comes down. Philosophy is an urgent engagement: the unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates maintained; a verdict of considerable ferocity. And yet, Socrates is often seen to laugh, to shrug, to admit defeat over and over, even to fall silent for vast stretches of the dialogues; while his opponents frequently get angry, denounce him, storm off. The paradox is that one cannot contend for the soul in any way except dispassionately; one must know that the stakes are of the utmost gravity, and yet engage as with as light a touch as that of “a child playing draughts.” Philosophy is, and is about, a decision, as Socrates knew, as Heidegger knew, as Gödel and Lonergan and Badiou each say in different ways; and yet that decision, of the gravest significance, is and can only be undertaken in a manner that is lighthearted and even joyous. This is also the secret of philosophy’s patience, and its “scandalous” lack of progress.

The higher the stakes, the more investment in them feels like fear. But Socrates goes to his death unafraid. There is a secret link between this fear and the boredom we spoke of earlier: boredom secretes fear as a kind of attempt at self-cure. One can see this quite clearly in contemporary western culture, which has grown more fearful as it has grown more secure, for the periodic upsettings of security become more traumatic and they leave a viral half-life of unsettling phantoms, traumatic enough to drive one back into the arms of a comfortable boredom, in a terrible cycle. Heidegger and Kierkegaard articulated angst, but they did not discover it. Philosophy is as unavoidably concerned with fear as with ennui, in an effort to break this vicious circle. But its efforts, paradoxical as always, find the exit by entering into the circle more deeply.

One often meets a flippant dismissal of disputes considered “merely philosophical,” to the effect that they have no consequences. But the consequences of a true philosophical contest are the most far-reaching precisely because they allude, because they are indirect; such debates clarify the consequences of ideas already in play. An argument about politics, religion, education, economics, etc., becomes philosophical as it turns both more urgent and more dispassionate. A debate over the status of a discourse—‘science’ versus ‘pseudoscience,’ ‘history’ versus ‘revisionism,’ ‘education’ versus ‘propaganda,’ ‘art’ versus ‘kitsch’ or ‘decadence,’ ‘true religion’ versus ‘heresy,’ ‘realism’ versus ‘ideology’—is at once the most intractable and (potentially) the most fruitful. One is very close to a real breakthrough, if one can slow down enough to discern the values actually in play; for one can then apprehend one’s values as exempla of value and as definition or essence. But of course, once this happens, the status quo is unsettled. It is precisely this unsettling that provokes Socrates’ most intractable foes, who in their defensiveness see the Socratic dispassion as (i.e., project upon it their own) condescension, superiority, game-playing, indifference, or relativism. Philosophy is accused of “leaving everything as it is,” of “merely interpreting the world.” In the Phaedrus, Socrates indeed says he is perfectly willing to provisionally accept the popular wisdom concerning the myths, rather than strive after convoluted reductions to plausibility, since he does not yet understand himself. Likewise, the best teaching always starts with where the student is already engaged—that is where the energy is—and is in no hurry to wrest this into a new direction. This is indeed a kind of “relativism” or even quietism (rather close in fact to the advice of the Delphic oracle regarding how to best please the gods: heed the local customs and be humble). And yet, Socrates acquires the reputation for being a constant arguer and is condemned for not honoring the gods of the city.

Speed is heat, and slowness cools. As I have said, philosophy is a matter of patience. I said there that there are conclusions that work only as conclusions, not as premises, and I might even say that philosophy is the articulating of such conclusions, conclusions that cannot be turned in to axioms and indeed, paradoxically, cannot be reached by any axioms. Philosophy, true to the Red Queen’s maxim, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” is still engaged with Zeno after all these years, for it will not dispense with this running nonetheless.

To think coolly about hot matters, but without cooling them. A very strange alchemy—and perhaps a secret of why or how philosophy and alchemy are related.

left, right, and wrong

Over at None So Blind, Andrew Bard Schmookler has a post underscoring (again) what I think is one of his core insights, to wit, that the difference between Left and Right in the USA is a fundamentally spiritual one. This is a touchy subject to articulate, and I am not always sure Schmookler gets it exactly right, but I'm even less sanguine about my own gropings. This is because the rhetoric in which such "spiritual struggle" is couched is so assumed to tend towards a polarization of us vs.them that it is hard to use it without making even one's allies worry that you are firing up the tanks.

As an aspiring philosopher my commitment is always to find the way to speak in a sober and non-inflammatory way about the most important things. This means: no playing down the import, and no ratcheting up the rhetoric. (Due allowance made for human failings.) We might think that Exhibit A of what "spiritual warfare" means is the suicide bomber ready to send a few infidels to Hell in order to get into Paradise; but the alternative to this is not to deny the spiritual dimension but to redefine the struggle as something other than physical violence. I am absolutely committed to undoing the demonizing of my opponents, but the method of this is not to feign agreement.

I first read Schmookler years ago, back when The Parable of the Tribes was relatively new. I commend this book to anyone. Here I am re-posting, slightly edited, the comment I made on Schmookler's post, which specifically raises the issue of the "enthusiasm gap" between the two major political parties in the US.

When I first encountered NSB, it was this diagnosis that the missing dimension of the political discussion was spiritual which I found most compelling. He argued that the Right had generally tapped into a sense that Evil exists and was capitalizing on the energy this gave them, but that it was a misdirected recognition (they wrongly identified Good and Evil); whereas the Left was foundering because it lacked the ability to call evil Evil. (I hope ABS will correct me if he feels I’ve travestied his position). (And please pardon all the Officious Capital Letters, they are only there for emphasis).

My sense is that (at least some of) the current leadership of the right is cynical enough to exploit the spiritual enthusiasm that the righteous indignation of their base gives them, but I do not really believe that they (the leaders) really en bloc share that indignation except in bad faith.

As to the left: their difficulty is that the moral core of the left is far more left than the Democratic party. The leadership know themselves to be utterly morally compromised, and this can only be demoralizing. They settle for “what can be done” in the art of politics, but they know very well it is not much and not enough.

Schmookler asks, why is it that Obama the candidate could generate so much spiritual enthusiasm, but Obama the president, not so much? To this I answer: it was in part a fluke of the historical moment. Spiritual enthusiasm centers on symbols. There was a great symbolic momentum against not just 8 years of moral cretinism in the White House but the whole history of our country going back to the Missouri Compromise and before. The left was so fired about telling itself Yes We Can that it did not really ask what is was we could and would. Those who remained just a little dispassionate noted even at the time that the sizzle quite overshadowed the steak. At the time, enthusiasts who even heard this critique wrote it off as a necessity of election politics, confident that once in office, we would sort out the details. This might even have happened, but the details sorted us instead.

The symbolic triumph attained was a sugar high. The next rush would be that much harder to get because it would not come with a symbol.

The symbol that had kept the right going for (nearly) 8 years had been the smoking ruins of the WTC. A different symbol displaced that one with Barack Obama’s candidacy.

That symbol was: the coming of the Dream, the end of racism, palpable proof that we had put that behind us. In fact, insofar as we have “put it behind us,” this is shown not by having a black president but by the fact that the president still runs into the same intense difficulties that a white president would — this is how we know humanity, by its limits, not by its superpowers.

The great danger now though is that this same symbol has been seized by the right and combined with the first symbol, thereby inverting it. From the very beginning there have been snide insinuations, carefully never overtly endorsed by the GOP as a whole but nurtured: Obama is “not one of us.” This was not enough to derail the impetus of the candidacy, because that symbolic victory had a greater allure. But now that that sugar-rush has passed, now that we think racism has really been defeated (>snort<), there is only the workaday reality to stand against a new symbolic momentum, this time coming from the other direction, and this "not one of us" is being woven together with hints about who he "is": a Muslim, for instance. And we know what they do….

I hope no one will misunderstand me and think I am reducing Obama’s victory to his being voted for “because he was black.” I am speaking of the force of symbolic power-plays.

The last thing I might mention is that --to generalize again-- the Left has tended (for the same reasons mentioned above) to downplay the spiritual in general. It is thus not such a wonder that it flounders when trying to generate spiritual enthusiasm. For a long while, the spiritual per se (="the religious") has been thought of as the territory of the right, alas. It is not by chance that the last time the religious left took a major role was during the civil rights era — which bequeathed us the great symbol that gave us our last high.

Post up over yonder

My post for Speculative Heresy's Science and Metaphysics event is up today. I won't repost it here for now, in order to keep the conversation (if any) centered in one locale, but go check out it and several other excellent posts that have gone up this week. There will be more coming up, too. 

"No one is good enough."

We all know what Camus said was the "only... serious philosophical question." I've sometimes said that I can't really relate to someone who's made it to adulthood and never considered suicide--of all the ways of dividing the world into "two kinds of people," this one seems to me one of the few real fault-lines.

Of course there is another line, between those who commit suicide, and those who survive them. Today I read a blog post at Among the Poseidonians which drove home the freezing, flailing helplessness of those on the near side of that line, and the uncanniness of despair--despair that can seem almost banal to the onlooker--that pulls people across to the far side, like an undertow.

The only thing I want to say about this is that as a parent, as a teacher, and as a thinker, this has made me think very hard (and not merely think); not about a puzzle to be solved, but about the truth of relationships we live. Other than that, I don't want to smother this in commentary, so I will just say, read this.

Mosque and motive

On the heels of my go-round trying to be the resented moderate voice as regards John Milbank’s alleged wistful harking back to Empire, I stumbled on a post at Gnosis and Noesis which referred me to (and critiqued) the Maverick Philosopher's having weighed in, back in July, about the much-maligned "Mosque at Ground Zero," Cordoba House. Bill Vallicella wrote:

I rather doubt that the Founders had Islam in mind when they ensured the right to the free exercise of religion.

I was nonplussed by this astonishing "doubt," and to his credit Vallicella hastened to confess that he'd been corrected in an addendum two days later. But, he went on,

I do not retract my main point, which is that we ought to give careful thought to the question whether, as I put it above, "Islam counts as a religion in a sufficiently robust sense of the term to justify affording it full First Amendment protection." I am raising this as a question.

Oh! just a question! That's different. Because, you know, for a second I thought Vallicella might have like an opinion about this, which made my liberal knee start to go all jerky. But now I see, he's just innocently raising, you know, a question, somethin' to think about.

I am not used to thinking of the Maverick Philosopher as disingenuous, and perhaps I am being uncharitable. I am relieved that in the face of empirical evidence, Vallicella partially recanted; but I remain frankly appalled that this would have seemed to be an empirical question in the first place. Vallicella offers the argument that Islam is "as much a political ideology as a religion." It is closer to the truth to say that there are political formulations of Islam, some of them quite powerful at present. I admit that there is an element of pedantry in insisting on such distinctions. I am happy to be pedantic in this case.

But something is strange. Why am I appalled by Vallicella's anti-Islamic stance and not by Milbank's? Why do I have two different responses to these two thinkers, both of whom I admire, who rather similarly characterize Islam in ways I think are questionable? I find myself moved to defend Milbank from his severest detractors, but in Vallicella's case I am just blown away by his overstatement.

Part of it is that I see Milbank as more nuanced, yes. Part of it is that Vallicella is taking a stance on a domestic, U.S. issue, and it is one whose subtext I think is very easy to discern. What, exactly, is it about the "Mosque at Ground Zero" that makes it, in Vallicella's terms, "this abomination"? Or even a "needless provocation"?

Milbank, whatever the excesses or even wrongness of any of his stances, regards the Christian-Islamic encounter as, well, a religious encounter. He may be all too ready to blur the line between politics and religion (and in fact the line is blurry), but Vallicella on the other hand is ready to etch it in stone-- for these purposes, anyway.

The question that is to be asked (about this specific domestic issue) is: Assuming one does object to the proposed Islamic Center (which yes, does include a mosque), what exactly is the objection? To this, there can be--almost--only one answer, unless one is just referring to other people's objections, in which case one can appeal to "majority rule."

But if one is answering for oneself, the only answer is: It feels inappropriate, wrong, offensive, whatever, to have an Islamic building so close to this place where Islamic people carried out a terrorist attack. That. Is. It. This is the final, un-further-analyzable attitude at the bottom of people's resistance to the building. And it is unsupportable, unless one grants that Islam=Islamic terrorism, "at least in some people's eyes."

But wait! “According to polls,” as we hear, many who object to the building of the Cordoba House would be fine, just fine, with the construction of a mosque within blocks of their home. It’s the WTC site—well, a certain radius around it—that is somehow sacred and “inappropriate” for Cordoba House. Presumably these folks don’t believe that all Islam = Islamic terror, or they wouldn’t be OK—or say they are OK—with such a mosque near their homes. Are they just being inconsistent? Are they lying?

I can only navigate this contradiction by means of some shameless psychoanalyzing of the motives of strangers (and I'm prepared to be better informed if anyone cares to school me). No, they’re not lying about whether they’d welcome (or at least countenance) a mosque next door. What they’re in bad faith about is their reasons for opposing the building of Cordoba House. They actually don’t see that their reaction boils down to believing that the same enemy who jihadjacked those planes is now preparing to build a 13-story al-Qaeda recruitment center at Ground Zero. Of course in any given case there could be variations on this, including the likelihood that they’re betting no one will call their bluff about a mosque in their own neighborhood, or the obvious psychological truism that human beings respond differently to hypotheticals (an imaginary mosque down their own street) than they do to imminent possibilities (a real mosque 2 blocks from the WTC site).

Presumably one could believe that there is a difference between Islam and Islamic terrorism, but still hold that the construction of the mosque, whoever its backers, would be seen by “our enemies” as a sign of victory. On these premises one reasonable response might be to wish to deny them this satisfaction, perhaps even this tactical advantage. This rationale has the advantage of being, for once, discernibly different from attributing (consciously or not) murderous anti-Americanism to every Muslim in the world. It suffers from being, as far as I know, not actually propounded by any of the actual opponents of Cordoba House.

The same goes for another possible objection, which was my own when I first heard about a "mosque at ground zero," and assumed that "at" meant, you know, at. Namely: I assumed that any projects there would be secular. Once I saw the actual location of Cordoba House (two blocks away and not actually visible from the WTC site) this objection evaporated.

To recapitulate: the possible reasons for opposing the building of the Cordoba House are:

1- They attacked us. Now they want to build a mosque?!

2- Of course they have the "right" to build a mosque, but it's inflammatory and "needlessly provocative." They should be more sensitive to our feelings.

3- I would be fine with a mosque a few blocks from my own home, but that Manhattan real estate is sacred ground.

4- I don't oppose the mosque personally, but nearly 70% of Americans do. Them's the breaks.

4a- Nearly 70% of Americans are bigots, and we'd best not piss them off too much.

5- Of course not all Muslims are our enemy; of course it is a minority who rejoiced at the 9/11 attacks, a small minority who support such efforts, and a tiny minority who actually carry them out. But this minority will see the mosque, no matter who builds it, as a victory for themselves and a sign of weakness on our part.

6- Wtf is a house of worship of any sort doing going up by Ground Zero? Any religious building of any sort is inappropriate. It was a national, not a religious, catastrophe.

(If there are any other rationales, I'd be grateful to have them pointed out.)

Reason 2 collapses into reason 1. So does reason 3, but with the addition of being incoherent. Reason 4 (and 4a) reduces to "nearly 70% of Americans believe in Reason 1, and that's enough."

Reasons 5 and 6 I've not actually heard anyone maintain; I had to make them up in an effort to try to come up with a rationale that did not reduce to Reason 1. Reason 6 fails because in fact there are plenty of houses of worship (including mosques) in NYC (it's well known that a Christian church was damaged on 9/11). As for Reason 5, this is the only one I can imagine being remotely defensible. There remain counterarguments, for instance a question of what message(s) preventing the building of the mosque sends.

But the main point here is that 2/3 of these reasons reduce to an equation of "Muslims" with "our enemy." This is what needs underscoring. These are the de facto grounds for opposing Cordoba House. If one claims to distinguish between Islam in general and an enclave of terrorists who hijack planes and blow up buildings, but one still opposes Cordoba House, the question to be asked is, "Why?" And the response will reveal that either one does oneself actually identify Islam in general as the enemy, or else believes that this equation, being widely (albeit perhaps regrettably) held, should be respected, instead of combated.

I know that in the "art of the possible," one must choose the ditches in which one is willing to die. I can imagine deciding that the erection of building in Manhattan is not the ideal teaching moment to address nearly 70% of Americans who have apparently bought into a stupid and unreflective identification of approximately 1.6 billion Muslims as The Enemy.

This brings me to the last reason to variation 4a. This is that, however it is interpreted by Muslims, the vast majority of Americans will deem this an act of arrogance by Our Great Enemy, and that it will inflame anti-Islamic sentiment stateside.

To this I reply, that ship seems to me to have sailed. But if we assume the argument's validity, the corollary surely follows: if the building is blocked on these grounds, it will be a blot on the American character, not to mention possibly further emboldening the enemies of genuine diversity and toleration.

I do not believe--and I do not want to believe--that 70% of my fellow citizens are bigots and slaves to a reactionary panic. While I do maintain that almost every rationale for opposing the mosque reduces to equating Islam per se with "al Qaeda and its allies," I do not believe that most Americans consciously make this equation, and do not really notice that it is entailed by their logic. I want to believe that they can reflect on the underlying rationale of their reactions, and make a different choice. Otherwise, the whole conception of Cordoba House will remain what it has become: a zero-sum game in which there will be winners and losers, whether construction goes ahead or not. It is, in fine, war in miniature. Which means, whatever the outcome, we will have all already lost. There would be for us only the possibility of our defeat being noble or ignoble.