LAW

Do you remember the saga of Bernhard Goetz? He was a self-employed New Yorker who shot four black men on a subway express train who were trying to rob him. All four of the men survived, but one became a paraplegic as a result of the incident. Two of the four went on to commit further crimes, including rape and other muggings. These four, who had attempted to effect a redistribution of wealth, claimed that they were only panhandling. Goetz had been mugged twice before, and at one of the muggings had been severely beaten. At his trial he argued that he was trying to save his life. Goetz walked. About a decade later, one of those shot had Goetz tried in a civil court (like the way that the Goldman family sued OJ) and was awarded 42 million dollars. Goetz then declared bankruptcy, and never paid a cent.

So the redistribution of wealth never took place.

Does law then work only to keep such redistribution of wealth from going into effect?

The other night I watched parts of BATMAN BEGINS, in which Bruce Wayne's rise toward vigilante justice in Gotham City (NYC) is shown in its larger context in which Wayne's parents have been killed by criminal leaders. Wayne goes to Asia to learn martial arts. He returns to wreak vengeance. I couldn't watch it. I don't like vigilante justice. I feel that all justice must remain within the system of approved law.

When Hurricane Katrina broke in New Orleans, many elements of the city turned lawless. Even within shelters, there were rapes, robberies, and a criminal mentality prevailed. What happened was blamed on the president, who wasn't there. W. had not raped or burglarized anyone.

"The starry heavens above, the moral law within." Kant's epitaph.

A population is only as wealthy as its understanding of the moral law. The Amish haven't accepted industrial advances over the last two hundred years but yet they remain wealthy because they live at the forefront of morality. The outbreak of crime that happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina would never have happened in an Amish community.

Redistribution of wealth won't work, because what's needed is resdistribution of moral law. Wealth is based on morality. Not only is it the Protestant work ethic, but the sense that you respect your parents, don't steal, don't lie, don't kill anybody, and you do unto others (the Golden Rule). Immoral communities where mother and father are not honored, where God has never been known, where envy for others' goods allows one to steal and cheat and lie in order to get them, will never prosper. Where hedonism is the only rule, ironically, there will never be any pleasures.

Law is the most important ingredient to a prosperous community. But in a way I think that Obama's election might actually help in this regard. For far too long, blacks have had the perception that they are not covered by the law. Now they have a president who is black. They can no longer deny that this country includes them. And therefore all blacks will change their minds, at least a little teeny tiny bit. Obama's election might usher in a new era of hope. Obama is himself a lawyer, who understands the law, and who backs Cosby's notion that the black community needs to begin to police itself: to be worthy fathers, and worthy mothers, who will then merit the honor they are due.

I watched a news program the other morning set in Syracuse, in which a white boy had been struck by a truck, and a young black man had taken off his coat to help the little boy, and told him to lie still until the ambulance came. There was a different tone in the interview. I felt like something huge had changed. That the young man felt included in America, and felt that therefore he should do his part.

Might doesn't make right, and wealth cannot be redistributed. The Romans attempted to steal wealth from around the world, but they were not righteous, and they fell. The Jews never fell. The Nazis attempted to steal the wealth from the Jews, and used every last ounce of might at their command. But the Jews are still here, and still wealthy, and still righteous. While all the crummy countries of the world rise and fall, the Jews will prosper because they are a people of law.

Law is a mystery. Religious folks argue it comes from heaven, as a gift. Secular folks say it's just a bunch of things we agree on. But we have to agree that without it we cannot have a community together. It's the most precious of the ties that bind all elements of a community.

Olympics as a Metaphor for World Politics

There have been constant attempts over the last 200 years to initiate redistribution schemes based on racial identity. The Nazis were probably the most offensive, in their appropriation of the goods of the Jews while consigning them to gas chambers.

The notion that one factional identity is somehow morally superior to another is also what animated the issues in the former Yugoslavia, in which Croatians and Serbs tried to commit genocide against one another and then against the Bosnian Muslims.

In Cambodia, everyone who could read was consigned to the killing fields in an attempt to reconstruct a racially pure Cambodian society. (The control of reading, and of what can be said, is a sign of all Marxist societies.)

Not all feminists are committing the same blunder, but many feminists make the argument that women's work has been appropriated for centuries, and that now there should be payback.

A similar thing has been set forth in the notions of reparations currently afoot in certain African American circles. That there should be payment for four hundred years of slavery.

Now even the banks want in on the redistribution of wealth. Heavy industry wants a bailout.

Every tiny faction wants a department that will proselytize for their faction on university campuses. So we have Chicana studies, and Asian Studies, and Native American Studies, and so on. Everybody wants a bailout.

Each group legitimates themselves by pointing to their victimization.

Against these groups you still have nascent Nazi parties who want to destroy all gays, blacks, Jews, etc., and take all their stuff.

Now there is talk of reverse discrimination, as an attempt to present white males as victims, and thus to initiate another bailout.

It's quite an amazing situation where everyone is playing at Victim, in order to create a monopoly, or at least a niche for themselves in the new commercial landscape.

It's important to point out that this is what's going on, because it's a sick strange game. We want to change the rules.

It is clear that identity is at the bottom of the notion of nationalism. But how is identity formed? Is it on the basis of race, gender, and class? Or should it be on the basis of religion, or something else? The surrealists argued in the forties that nationalism was the basis of the problem, and many of them backed the notion of world government put forth by Garry Davis. Philippe Soupault continued to argue against nationalist fervor into his dotage.

Is the abolition of nationalism the answer? We don't think so. Because people, like pigs, will always band together. We are a communal species, and we tend to form groups under flags, and then to assault other groups. This seems to be part of our hardwiring. I don't think it is something we can live without. It is utopian to think otherwise. So let's deal with it as a given.

Humans will always create borders, in order to create order, and to create laws. This is a good thing, as it also creates energy within those borders, and keeps that energy from escaping (like putting a lid on a boiling pot, you can use it to create steam, which then drives the economy).

There is an energy created by nationalist fervor (you can see a glimpse of it still in the lead-up to the Olympics where states parade in their native dress and where medal counts are made according to nation). Nations are like factions, but then there are also factions within nations.

It seems best at this point to simply let them all compete, and to make sure that the rules are fair for each group to fairly compete, so that in wrestling, for instance, no one group has to wrestle with one arm behind their back. Competition is a good thing, and it brings out the best in people. Just as in sports where one rugby scrum competes with another, or in wrestling one tries to pin another, there is a certain joy to it.

What worries me is when you see one nation trying to subjugate all others, as when Agamemnon attempted to subject Troy as a subsidiary state and ultimately brought the city to ruin enslaving its women and killing the men. We want to leave our competitors standing. We don't want to wipe anybody out. We enjoy argument too much, and the agonistic chance to learn from new wrestling moves offered by others, even if we are occasionally pinned in the process.

The Nazis attempted to destroy the competition in WWII. Homogeneity of thought comes at a steep price: the goosestep of boredom.

We instead want to promote a friendly rivalry among factions.

We like the Catholics, we like the anarchists, we like the secularists, (we are a little afraid of the mounting territorial ambitions of the Marxists to destroy all their rivals and to use the universities as the equivalent of gas chambers to snuff out all countervalent thinking). Would international sporting contests like the Olympics be the new model that Lutheran Surrealism proposes for world peace?

We do not wish to destroy other groups or to erase them. We resent it when others do this, for instance, we resent the Chinese ambition to destroy Tibet.

We like Tibetans. When will a Tibetan win a ski-jump contest under the national flag of Tibet, edging out the Chinese candidate?

SCIENCE AND POETRY, CONTINUED

We are a species. And there are laws of nature, that we have to respect. Many of the people of the sixties thought that everything was "socially constructed" and that there was no reality outside of our wish fulfillment.

SdB was already arguing for this in the 40s -- that women were the same as men, and that gender was a social construction. LANGUAGE itself -- as a poetic movement -- was on the side of social construction, and was an attempt to investigate the ways in which language constructed reality -- the fascination with Jacques Lacan was part of that denial of biological reality and part of the interest in "the imaginary." Lacan argued that the imaginary was everything. Nothing at all fell outside of this domain. Even the psychiatric hour was flexible, so that if he got his work done in a few seconds, the patient went home. Time held not objective reality to Lacan, in spite of his many references to Kant -- who argued that place and time do exist for humanity.

I tend to see immutable laws that lie outside of us as very real. I see time as real, and clocks as measuring something that we have in common, and I think a mountain is a mountain and not a social construct.

I didn't mind Larry Summers bringing up the possibility that there is a gender difference in regards to the ability to learn math. I don't think that women have less ability in that area. Perhaps there is less interest. That could still be a social construction. There are social constructions, but not everything is a social construction.

Strict social constructionists argued implicitly that gender difference or race difference is a taboo that can't be looked into -- Summers lost his job the way Galileo was shut down for looking at the sun incorrectly and displacing humanity as the center of God's creation.

There are all kinds of hilarious shibboliths in the new secularism.

They take the notion that all humans are created equally as a biological statement, rather than a legal statement, which raises interesting questions.

Biological reality is something that can't be socially reconstructed -- death for instance, has a biological aspect that the children of the sixties haven't been able to wish away -- AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, and other diseases have not boded well for the sexual revolution. We remember Erica Jong and her Fear of Flying, and the notion of the zipless F. An F that would just happen, without any preliminaries, or any sense of responsibility. Viral opportunists loved the sixties.

It turns out that there is an objective reality. What then is the role for poetry, or religion?

Midgley writes that some proponents of positivism attempted to oust anything unscientific "as a way of cutting out the metaphysical extravagances of religion. The only question then was how to spell out these simplifying, reductive explanations in detail across the full range of the humanities -- across, for instance, geography, history, logic, law, musicology, linguistics and ethics as well as nascent social sciences" (116-117).

"early in the twentieth century, then, serious supporters of the reductive project turned from imperialistic conquest to isolationism. Rather than try to turn history, poetry, ethics and the rest into parts of science, they worked to restore scientific purity by shutting these strangers out. Finally, following Popper, they narrowed the definition of science so far that it excluded, not just Marx and Spengler and Freud, but much of the social sciences as well. (By an unlucky oversight they also shut out Darwinian evolutionary theory, which had to be brought back as an awkward exception" (117).

"On the one hand, they hold that science is the only reputable form of thought, everything else being either religion or 'pseudo-science.' On the other hand, they now define science so narrowly that this story cannot possibly be true" (117).

All quotes from Poetry and Science, pp. 116-117, by Mary Midgley.

Along with the rise of science as the only valid form of thinking, there has been a renewed emphasis on what she calls "moral minimalism" (159). Concern for those outside of our social contract are difficult to articulate. Our responsibility to the Iraqi people, for instance, is thought to be almost impossible to articulate by many on the left. One feels that we ought to care about animals, but on what basis? The notion of St. Francis preaching to the birds, and talking to them of God's creation, and having them as a respectful audience, would seem laughable to a bunch of men in white coats, who would probably put St. Francis in the nut bin.

"Contract thinking sought to abolish the ideas towards anyone or anything outside that society. Of course the more subtle contract theorists, such as Kant and John Rawls, have not treated these duties simply as flowing from self-interest, as Hobbes did. But the original point of the model was to limit the scope of the duties within a definite society, not to enlarge that scope... The real target of contract thinking was a distorted notion of duties towards God, and towards earthly rulers who claimed to be God's regent. But this move had an unintended side-effect. It now makes it quite hard for us to make sense of our responsibility towards humans outside of our own society, and almost impossible to explain our responsibilities toward non-human nature" (Midgley 159).

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

It's probably not worth reading literary criticism written by almost any American academic today. For at least the last thirty years they have been trained to see almost everything from within the narrow prism of race, gender, class. Victim studies has as its basic paradigm that poverty is always the fault of the white male Protestant west, and that to change that there is going to have to be a massive redistribution of wealth, which has been expropriated. I've never agreed with this assessment, and think it's foolhardy, but it has permeated almost every kind of literary criticism over the last thirty years. Very few any longer even think of excellence, or attempt to promote it. It's not in anyone's interest to do so. You would never find a job in the humanities if you did.

Outside of English departments, there are some few who agree with me that the prevalent notions of the various Victim Studies are not accurate, and who even advance theses that are quite like my own. However, David Landes has spent fifty years working on his thesis as to why the west is best. He teaches at Harvard where he specializes in economic history. Over the next few weeks, I'll be reading his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations to see what I can glean from it. It was mentioned in passing by my dean (an economics professor) over lunch, and I have now acquired it, and will read it through over the Thanksgiving break. For now, I have opened it and read through the index, and pored through about twenty pages on some of my hobbyhorse topics.

Landes argues that freedom of inquiry is the central criterion for a wealthy nation. Against the stultification of the Catholic countries, in which only a few were permitted to read, and what they were allowed to read was strictly controlled,

"The Protestant Reformation ... changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure. The reaction in the Hapsburg dominions, which included the Low Countries, followed hard on the heels of Luther's denunciation. ... A rain of interdictions followed (from 1521 on), not only of publishing but of reading heresy, in any language. The Spanish authorities, both lay and clerical, viewed Lutherans (all Protestants were then seen as Lutherans), not as dissenters, but as non-Christians, like Jews and Muslims enemies of the faith... In 1558, the death penalty was introduced for importing foreign books without permission and for unlicenced printing. Universities reduced to centers of indoctrination..." (179-180).

Books were banned simply because the author was Protestant.

Spaniards were not permitted to attend foreign universities.

Bathing itself was seen as a cause for suspicion, and was brought to the notice of the highest authorities, who responded with the Inquisition.

"Intolerance can harm the persecutor more than the victim" (180).

The fate of Catholic Europe was sealed not so much by Protestantism itself, but by the Catholic reaction to Protestantism, Landes argues.

Today, something similar is happening in the humanities in which an exclusive Marxist paradigm is used to understand all phenomena. Greatness is reduced to expropriation, as a single-minded fanaticism pursues all excellence and seeks to destroy it. Art itself is accused of being an upper-class phenomenon. Race, gender and class are the only prisms through which to study writing (even poetry). Anyone who falls outside of this reading paradigm will find it difficult to get a job unless they manage to dissemble that interest until they attain tenure.

Fortunately, the closure of the humanities to realistic thinking has not been paralleled in the domain of economics. In economics, Marxist thought is studied as a historical branch of thought, something like the way Lamarck continues to exercise an interest for historians of evolution.

Landes in particular praises the Protestant Revolution as the workhorse of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the west. Max Weber argued this in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

"Indeed, it is fair to say that most historians today would look upon the Weber thesis as implausible and unacceptable: it had its moment and it is gone. I do not agree. Not on the empirical level, where records show that Protestant merchants and manufacturers played a leading role in trade, banking, and industry. ... In England, which by the end of the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly Protestant, the Dissenters (read Calvinists) were disproportionately active and influential in the factories and forges of the nascent Industrial Revolution" (178).

Protestants "were expected to read the holy scriptures for themselves" (178), whereas in Catholic countries "they were explicitly discouraged from reading the Bible" (178).

The greater literacy of Protestant areas created a pool of literacy, literacy not only in the Bible, but also in literary and scientific matters, and out of this new pool of knowledge and freedom of inquiry, new wealth was created.

"Intolerance, superstition, ignorance -- these are easier to acquire and cultivate than to uproot. The same iniquities and vices, perpetrated long ago by foreign (Spanish) rulers, have contributed to this day to Sicily's persistent backwardness" (185).

The French remained almost as backwards as the Spanish. After the Second World War, there were whole departments, such as the Lozere, that had few if any bathtubs -- there were three in the entirety of the department Lozere (468).

Far worse than this of course were the bizarre conditions obtaining in communist countries with which a great number of humanities scholars remain enamored.

"The dream appealed to the critics and victims of capitalism, admittedly a most imperfect system -- but as it turned out, far better than the alternatives. Hence the Marxist economies long enjoyed a willfully credulous favor among radicals, liberals, and progressives in the advanced industrial nations" (495).

There are still great numbers of these people who continue to cling to their resentment of capitalism, and to Marx as their savior. Let us pray that our new president is not one of them.

The Pygmy Tarsier

Ann Althouse found an article about the Pygmy Tarsier which was thought to be extinct. Usually her blog posts get tremendous activity but this one went by with only 13 comments. I think therefore that the animal might do better on this blog. They are really something, and I think we should think about replacing the Slow Loris with the Pygmy Tarsier. Among other things, Lutheran Surrealists were thought to be extinct, and we are a tiny movement, largely nocturnal!

Also, one of Corso's most interesting poems is set in the Malaysian rain forest, and features the tarsier:

Active Night

A tarsier bewrays the end of an epical rain
Burying beetles ponderously lug a dead rat
A moth, just a few seconds old, tumbles down fern
Bats are drinking flowers
The lonely tapir walks the river bottom
And up comes a manatee with a sea-anemone
on its nose

The poem appears on p. 114 of Corso's Mind Field, Selected Poems.

Corso first wrote it in the late 1950s. There is no known source material. All the creatures named live in the Malaysian rain forest (a tapir is a tiny rhino, rather shy, and nocturnal). Did he see a documentary, or visit the zoo?

The word "bewrays" means to prophesy -- the appearance of the tarsier seems to promise the end of a monsoon, is the general meaning of the first line. The moths are tumbling out of a cocoon, I think. Burying beetles bury the recently deceased carcasses of small mammals and then plant their larvae in the rotting flesh.

Corso was interested in the animal realm long before it became so popular that we have whole channels like Animal Planet.

He lived with a ferret.

The last line with the manatee's nose with a sea-anemone makes it sound like a tiny circus.

I want to be the Maxwell Smart of Christ's disciples.

Poetry Vs. Science, Continued

This morning I was going over the poems of Gregory Corso. I have the students in freshman composition write on Corso. This is partially because I know all the writings about Corso so there's no way to plagiarize and get away with it, but it's also because I simply love Corso's writing and love to go over it and like to hear what they have to say, too. Their readings often expand mine. We stumbled across a little-visited gem called "A Difference of Zoos," and read it through.

The poem reads in part,

"I sang Ave Maria

for the Heap, for Groot,

for the mugwump, for Thoth,

the centaur, Pan;

....

Every monster imaginable

And sang and sang Ave Maria!"

Most of us knew the music for Ave Maria -- (Hail Mary), but one of the students asked me who was Groot? Groot appears in two of Corso's poems (the other one is called "Halloween"). He is a giant tree monster that comes from Planet X to do a medical investigation on human beings. He is the king of Planet X, and is enormous and virtually invincible (impervious to fire). He also can command all trees to do his bidding, and at one point calls on trees to march against a city. He's stopped by a scientist who sics mutant termites on him. He survives as a sprig, and regenerates himself to wreak further havoc in other episodes.

Groot first appears in Tales to Astonish, #13, drawings by Jack Kirby, first published in November, 1960.

Going over it, I wondered what Dawkins would think of the tree monster Groot. Would he say, but wait, there is no such tree monster! No such creature can possibly exist, and therefore, it is wrong to publish such a poem? Trees do not have a conscious feeling for vengeance, and therefore, this poem is scientifically incorrect? Thoth, centaurs, Pan, Brownies, the griffin, the Sphinx, gargoyles, Medusa, and the bogeyman, also appear in the poem. Manticores appear in other of Corso's poems (head of a man, body of a lion, tail of a scorpion).

The surrealists in general are very sympathetic toward these synthetic creatures. One of the early surrealist journals was called Melusine, who became a kind of muse. She was a beautiful young woman who was half-fish and lived under a dread curse.

But such monsters are not objectively in existence, the scientist might moan. Please, Don't discuss them! They will only confuse us!

Could it be that there is a Procrustean side to Richard Dawkins? At least he's a relatively clear writer. This is one of the reasons that Mary Midgley tolerates him. But he's so intolerant of anything that doesn't come out of science. It's another form of bigotry, or so it seems to me.

http://www.origenmusic.com/ave-maria-lyrics.html

HAZARD ADAMS ON POETRY AGAINST SCIENCE

One of the great dichotomies that Carl Jung drew in his book on personality types (which is retained in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is that between feeling and thinking. Feelers are interested in human relationships, while thinkers are more interested in the objective world.

Feelers are more interested in the humanities, while thinkers are more interested in the sciences.

Richard Dawkins mounted a savage attack against poetry in his book UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW, in which one sees a scientific thinker in all his colonialist arrogance toward the feeling realm.

"My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view towards the opposite conclusion. Science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry " (x).

If poetry is not scientifically sound, it has no right to exist, is the unfortunate second-order implication of Dawkin's argument. A poem about a rainbow that is not about it as prismatic colors has no right to exist, and is considered as a nuisance to the scientific world, and is therefore to be dismissed. Dawkins doesn't really understand why any inquiry that is not scientifically based should ever take place.

"Science progresses by correcting its mistakes, and makes no secret of what it still does not understand" (Dawkins 31).

Because poetry is not falsifiable, it shouldn't exist.

Dawkins thinks that poetry's one superiority to science is that it's beautifully written. He admits that he doesn't write beautifully. But he argues that poets could use poetry as the basis of their thinking, and just add a better style. Dawkins goes on to manhandle DH Lawrence for his limited understanding of geology, and attacks the X-Files for presenting scientific fallacies. Poetry, soaps and even science fiction have no right to exist on their own terms. They should exist simply to illustrate the latest scientific theories. However, there is still a place for poets, Dawkins generously allows, if poets could study science, and then make excellent rhymes with their enhanced knowledge.

Does poetry have a ground that is separate from science? Can it exist on its own terms? Hazard Adams' book ACADEMIC CHILD approaches the world from the opposite end of the spectrum, from the more subtle dimension of feeling:

"Many scholars used to think that myths were primitive forms of science, that is, crude attempts to interpret the natural world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many theories of this sort advanced.... However, it became clear to some that it made more sense to see myth not as an attempt to explain or interpret an external world, but rather an attempt to assert the RELATION of human beings to the world and each other. This effort, in its essence, resists the opposition of a so-called perceiving human subject to an object and expresses itself in a language of identity, taking its metaphors and other figures of speech seriously as conveying relation rather than alienation. The mythical, then, acts to bind the community together and the community to nature" (52).

Adams' explanation of how the literary acts out of the "relation" of humans to one another and to nature puts it on a different footing than Dawkins' notion that poetry is ill-informed science with a rhyming bounce. Poetry is about the affective side of human life rather than the effective side so prized by science (and its close ally, business).

It is the F as opposed to the T in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that is expressed by Adams. Adams' book articulates the values of the F-world and how it can retain its truth against the alienating ugliness of science and business.

Dawkins wants poetry to be science. But what can science say about a love affair, or a lifelong marriage? Dawkins attempts to explain love as a bar code in the blood that seeks to appropriate another viable pair of genes in order to produce offspring.

To allow words to make love as poetry reinvests the world with feeling is not something that a scientist would understand as a valid effort, or worthy of the public purse. Adams, a poet, in addition to a scholar, sees the world from the other end of the spectrum, and sees mathematics and science as crude attempts at poetry:

"But the mathematical model that seems to dominate so many academic disciplines, often at the expense of a desirable degree of literacy, is a rather naive or simple one, as in the effort to establish objectivity by verbal means; and it goes against the fundamental nature of language, which is why the language of so much social science and educational theory is subject to parody. Literary theory in some of its less life-giving forms is by no means exempt from this criticism and has less excuse. An important question is whether mathematics is not a special and brilliant case of imaginative projection from myth. A fractal looks to me as if it is based firmly on the trope of synechdoche, part for whole. One might also note that it's a term, along with quark, that would have done Lewis Carroll, who was a mathematician, proud" (58).

Adams and Dawkins duking it out over the primacy of thinking or feeling are not merely a matter of preference. Dawkins is openly jealous of the capture by the humanities of the imagination of the young, and openly resents that his discipline is not considered "cool" and that scientists are seen as dorky by women. But he also wants a larger share of the public's purse at the university. Adams' response to science equally has its eye on the public purse, the market share for the humanities he sees as shrinking due to the overreaching of science. Interestingly, the two share a strong love for W.B. Yeats -- a poet on whom Adams has published several books, and who Dawkins admits to loving as his favorite poet (26) but who Dawkins argues would have been far better off as a scientist blessed with his "cold eye" (26).

Of these two books, one by a scientist and defending the values of science, one by a literary scholar and defending the humanities, the book by Dawkins is likely to remain the better known, which is to be regretted, because at least in terms of style and even in substance, the literary scholar's dwarfs the scientist's. I'll remember Adams' book. If I remember Dawkins' book, it's only because it made me so mad I nearly needed an exorcist to keep my head from spinning on its axis.

Of course, as an F on the MBTI, I am partial and biased toward literary scholarship, for which Adams' book provides the most powerful justification I have seen. Perhaps the two books could be read together in a course that deals with C.P. Snow's TWO CULTURES, and "teaches the conflicts" as educator Gerald Graff has put it. For me, the notion that the humanities deals with the "relationships" of humanity -- marks it off as an area where the sciences cannot presume to venture. Relationships are important to all and will always remain an important area of inquiry -- (now unfortunately beset by the pseudo-science of Marxism with its graceless tropes that feature a mindless zero-sum competition between races, genders, and classes, ignoring the natural affections arising between them).

Science and pseudo-science alike have territorialized the humanities. Adams provides a profound and far-reaching justification for why poetry as an antithetical discipline retains a right to funding that is equal to or greater than than that of the ugmo disciplines populated by dorks with their sliderules.

Capitalism Vs. Communism: Questions of Animal Symbolism

Capitalism is symbolized by the eagle. The eagle is a raptor. It has its eyes in front, is singular, and aggressive.

Communism is symbolized by the sheep. It is prey. Its eyes are on the side. It belongs in a group and is passive. (Cyclops' cave is the symbol of the communist society -- an ogre without perspective dominates the others, cares for them, but also eats them -- eating men, just as it eats sheep.)

Human beings are of course neither raptor nor herd animals. They are more like monkeys: eyes in front, but also members of a social group. They are neither all aggression, nor are they generally prey.

The symbol of the eagle as that of capitalism -- fierce and unrelenting.

The symbol of the sheep as that of communism -- turning one's life over to a Cyclops.

The symbol of the monkey (ludic surrealism -- !)

Traditional Christianity does use the image of the sheep, and the notion of a pastor! Therefore it is somewhat communist -- Christ himself as pastor, as good shepherd.

Do human beings benefit from this image of themselves as sheep, when it is all too often another man -- a human being -- who is the pastor? In some cases the pastor is also a predator -- as we have discovered in the Catholic churches.

Humanity I see as more of a barrel of monkeys, I'd put monkeys on the money, if it wasn't so laughable.

Ben Franklin wanted the TURKEY to be the image of America, but the EAGLE ended up on the dollar.

Shouldn't it be the monkey, or perhaps even -- the Slow Loris?

In the Lutheran Surrealist societies to come, the money will feature Slow Lorises. The Slow Loris has its eyes in the front, like a predator, but perhaps symbolizes a society of readers, pensive, and nocturnal, slow to grasp much of anything, even the branch in front of it. A society based on curiosity and fleeting aesthetic sensations, (the asperity of a persimmon) as well as odd knowledge (as opposed to the TV show Dallas and its star, JR, we posit quite a different human universe altogether).

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

The private sphere intruded on by the public
A power line from my brain on out
A gargantuan foot squashes the house

SOCIALISM!

More on Hazard Adams's Book Academic Child

Hazard Adams' Academic Child: A Memoir

Hazard Adams was a kind of eminence grise at the University of Washington when I attended there from 1990-1995. He's now retired, and writing wonderful books. His most recent is from McFarland Press in North Carolina, entitled Academic Child: A Memoir (Mcfarland 2008). I got it a week ago, and haven't stopped looking into it since I got it, reading giant swathes of it at a time, and then rereading, and rereading. It's packed with witty, erudite histories of English departments that he's worked in since the 1950s. Adams knew Derrida, Frye, Harry K. Ransom, Roger Shattuck, and hundreds of other top people, and met T.S. Eliot, and many others. Best known for his work as a Blake scholar, and as the editor of an impressive anthology of literary theory that is still in wide use, Adams is also the author of a book of poems, and several novels set in academia (I loved his novel called Home -- about the political moralism of a bunch of jerks trying to hire a feminist professor in an English department and the quibbles over whether she was their kind of feminist).

The major institutions that Adams worked in were Cornell U., University of Texas at Austin, University of California at Irvine, and the University of Washington, where he still occasionally teaches a class on Blake.

Adams has a large view of the profession, but he also gives minute details. He taught three composition classes per semester at Cornell, where he began, for an annual salary of $4500. I may discuss some of this in subsequent posts -- the pranksters and the pricks, that Adams encountered, (the pricks are legion), and he often gives as much as one would want to know in a single sentence.

But it's the growing political moralism of the academy that most worries Adams.

From the beginning, Adams writes (the 18th century), "Literary study, in addition to historical and philological scholarship, divided into two distinctive branches: I shall name them, for convenience, the moralistic and the artistic. As the linguistic phase waned, both tended to disappear into the prior problem of interpretation or hermeneutics -- to the extent that one could seldom find anyone in a literature department who was interested in artistic evaluation ... or even called himself or herself a critic. Nearly everyone became a theorist" (242).

Adams' anthology of Critical Theory tried to bring back LITERARY theory, but, he writes, there is a much stronger tradition now in the humanities.

"The other definition of 'critical theory' really belongs to social thought. It was formulated by the Frankfurt School, generally grounded on Marxism. One of the ironies of recent intellectual history is that, as Marxism became almost universally discredited in practice, it reasserted itself... partly as a result of the generation of students of the 1960s gaining, with age but possibly not wisdom, positions of power in the academy" (242).

Adams goes on to lament that much of English department questioning has been reduced to "the domination of a single question in all discourse," having to do with what Foucault calls "power circulation" delivered by single-minded lecturers who might well pass as "fanatical zealots" (243).

Adams sees this as a terrible thing to impose on students. One wonders if there is an answer. The answer is probably to build alternative institutions, and to defund those at present, or to simply go around them and let the current ones fall into disuse.

Adams continues to be a Democrat, as his forebears were in Ohio members of the Democratic party. He also continues to believe in state universities, and in their mission, and to work from within to critique them and make them better (he hasn't given up). It's interesting to see his life arc, with all manner of details, from his early sporting career (particularly in baseball) to the meeting with his wife, up through his progressive disgust with the academy, and in particular with the UW Romance Language department's messy goings-on which Adams was called in to clean up in the 1990s (I'll write about this Augean stable tomorrow).

Adams sees the best part of the humanities as offering a tradition that is "antithetical" to whatever is going on at any given moment, and to the standard ideas trotted out on CBS and NBC. But he understands what is at stake.

"The public has little interest in literary scholarship, and often sees it as trivial" nevertheless, he says, "...the intellectual gadfly has always been a necessity, and will continue to be, though with greater pressures from forces already mentioned. Whether, in the future, humanities professors will be allowed to be gadflies depends to a great extent on their finding ways to support history, philosophy, literature and the arts in ways that the public can understand and respect. The most radical political critique has usually been tolerated by the academy with occasional grumbling ... if it is not carried on in adolescent ways, does not in itself suppress opposition, and is not taken into the classroom in a propagandistic way" (253).

Adams believes that it is imperative that the academy build bridges with the broader public. He himself visited high schools and gave talks, and also tried to talk with members of his community. There are commencement addresses in the book that Adams has given, and he gives us a context for understanding them.

The front cover has a photograph of Adams as a little boy walking on what appears to be a country road with a baseball cap. Adams' career in the military is covered. The bulk of the book is about his experiences as an administrator and writer, but he sandwiches into this his experiences building his summer house on Harstine Island (in Puget Sound) and building other things (he struggles more in the physical world than he does in the intellectual world).

"At Harstine in the early stages I managed to do the reverse of making a boat in the basement by ordering a spiral staircase that I thought would be screwed through the front door... I had neglected to consider the bracket that was to support a beam" (226).

If I ever write an academic memoir, I will base mine on this one. Adams gets it just right: lots of tiny telling details, without ever losing sight of the big picture.

Was Rorty Mentally Competent?

Almost finished with Rorty's collection of articles entitled, Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin 1999).

I'm not certain that Rorty is mentally competent. He may have been a flatliner. But he writes clearly, and is amusing, if you like watching a cow with mad cow disease stagger back and forth.

Shortly after asking whether "human rights" are a social construction influenced by Christian doctrines of the brotherhood of man (85), Rorty argues:

"Of course they are social constructions. So are atoms, and so is everything else" (85).

Like gravity, for instance (ask Sokal).

Rorty doesn't think that laws matter, what matters is brotherly feeling (nevermind how we got there -- it's just a social construction).

"Fraternity is an inclination of the heart, one that produces shame at having much when others have little. It is not the sort of thing that anybody can have a theory about or that people can be argued into having"(248).

Although it is a social construction, it is also something that is either there or else it isn't.

Can it really be both things?

In another spot, Rorty argues that childrearing is what develops the heart.

"Freud helped us to see that we get psychopaths -- people whose self-conception involves no relations to others -- only when parental love, and the truth which such love creates in the child, are absent" (78).

I think that Rorty means sociopaths, but I give him credit in this passage, because it appears to be the only discussion of children in the book.

But a sociopathic state -- a perpetual basketcase of a nation like Haiti? Is it the case that there just wasn't any motherly love in the country? Or is the problem a lack of laws and fairness based on the creation and equal enforcement of those laws, and the kind of brotherly love promulgated by centuries and centuries of Voodoo rather than Christianity, and the laws that have come with it?

Elsewhere, Rorty argues that most of the world has gone bad. This is not entirely true, it's just that most of the world hasn't been influenced by Christianity. Rorty privileges Europe, and thinks of it as the light of the world, but not because it's Christian. He doesn't know why it's the case that the only country in E. Asia that functions at a very high level is Australia, but he does say that aside from Australia, most of Eastern Asia appears to be a basket case (he includes Red China).

Could it be that this is because the majority of citizens in Australia are European, and that Europe has had Christianity, while all the other countries in that part of the world (Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, China, etc.) are crummy because they don't have the ten commandments, and the laws that these commands have brought with them? Could it be because they don't have freedom of inquiry -- which is named as a human right by Martin Luther?

Rorty finishes his dopey book by saying, "The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record" (277).

The utopian social hope of nineteenth century Europe that gave us Stalin, and Ceausescu, and Honekker, do you mean?

Rorty's so wrong that he's actually a kind of mad cow. I'd fear for anyone who drank his milk and thought it would build strong bones. This guy makes no sense, and anyone who took him seriously would end up half-crazy!

The noblest imaginative creation is that of Luther -- obviously! The societies that stick to his principles actually function. Lutheranism functions, and has provided milk for generations of children.

What we are getting from the left is a horrific mad cow disease that must be expunged from the earth if we are to have any mental hygiene whatsoever. We don't have to treat the children of the sixties with disdain or with anger, but they must be removed, if America is to return to its Christian roots, and to sanity based on the ten commandments.

Is Rorty a Bigot?

Bigot n. A person who is utterly intolerant of any creed, belief, or race that is not his own.

Bigotry n. stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own 2. actions, beliefs, prejudices, etc., of a bigot.

Term derives from Old French. Synonyms: dogmatist, zealot, fanatic.

(All quotes from Random House College Dictionary, 1975)

It occurred to me while reading Rorty that he is a bigot. This will strike many as odd, because Christians are supposed to be bigots, while the progressive left is not. And again, this will remind some of the famous distinction drawn by Spike Lee that white people can be racist, but black people can not.

Is it possible for people other than the white race to be racist? If so, is it possible for leftists to be bigots?

If the definition of bigotry stands on the notion that the refusal to accept any position other than their own as having any value is valid, then I think that many leftists are actually just as bigoted, if not more so, than many rightists.

The appropriation of the high road by the left, especially within academia, has meant that no one is permitted to answer back to them. Partially this is because the left doesn't espouse any principles. They have ethics, or so they think, but they don't have any principles. You can't find any. Therefore, there is no common set of rules or laws to which everyone can refer to when arguing with them. They are simply right. And you are either with them, or you are against them.

Rorty sees himself as a decent humanitarian liberal and anyone who doesn't think like him is a Nazi.

He makes occasional exceptions for the likes of the super-talented such as Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was only a Nazi by chance, Rorty says. Rorty happens to like Heidegger, and so he whimsically grants him approbation, in spite of the fact that he was a real, and seemingly unrepentant, Nazi.

What we have with Rorty is the ascent of a matriarchal thinking (zero principles) in which "if it feels good, it's true," is the active ingredient.

"We humanistic intellectuals find ourselves in a position analogous to that of the 'social-gospel' or 'liberation-theology' clergy, the priests and ministers who think of themselves as working to build the kingdom of God on earth. Their opponents describe their activity as leftist political action. The clergy, they say, are paid to relay God's word, but are instead meddling in politics. We are accused of being paid to contribute to and communicate knowledge, while instead 'politicizing the humanities.' Yet we cannot take the idea of unpoliticized humanities any more seriously than our opposite numbers in the clergy can take seriously the idea of a depoliticized church" (Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 128).

It's the inability to "take seriously" any viewpoint other than his own that makes Rorty a bigot.

The dogmatic and fanatic zealotry of his position is one that cannot be argued with. He would dismiss anything to the contrary. And yet Rorty is probably one of the most intelligent and open-minded members of his generation. He's like one of the Imams in Iran who is considered open-minded because he was not too fiery when he put the death sentence on Salman Rushdie.

That's perhaps all I can say in Rorty's favor at least on the bigotry question. On some other questions: his clarity, his curiosity, his deep learning, I could say more, and probably will say more. He's worth reading, mostly as a phenomenal example of his generation's lack of principles. He's also filling in an area of my reading that I have neglected: the American pragmatic response to postmodernism. I'm learning a lot but am also appalled at the stunning scapegoating of the Christian thought-world.

One of the things I found most appalling about the early surrealists was their stunning lack of principles. They were bigots toward Christians and toward people who found in family life a basic sense of meaningfulness. Benjamin Peret spit into the face of a Catholic priest. Andre Breton spit on a mother who was pushing a baby carriage. The only polite member of the surrealists was Philippe Soupault (which is one of the reasons why he has always been my favorite). Soupault made himself useful at tea parties by pouring tea. He was likable. He had some basic Christian principles such as "do unto others." Soupault knew the Golden Rule.

One of the reasons I like Lutherans (all of whom know the Golden Rule) is that they aren't so sure of their positions. There is a sense also that there are two kingdoms. That this world doesn't have to correspond exactly with the divine kingdom, and in fact, there is a sense that since we are fallen, the two can never exactly coincide. It is wrong to think we are ever doing God's will. It is much more likely that we are doing our own thing, or God help us, Satan's. It is the fanatical notion that we can make God's kingdom on earth (all by ourselves) that seems to be behind the bigot.

To patiently inch a line through that kingdom, like a caterpillar inching along in the sand, to create a green silence, and to argue instead for a necessary separation of ourselves from God (that we are not God, that we will never be saintly, that we are a bunch of caterpillars who at most have heard about God, and have probably misunderstood what we heard, and probably what we have heard is from the devil, and even if it isn't, we probably won't be able to communicate it any way, or to embody it in any form, even if we did we would stretch or exaggerate it, and goof it up, and therefore should be extremely careful and shy and hesitant about announcing it) that is our favorite thing about Lutheranism. We at best are caterpillars inching along in the sand through a greeny silence. We will never be butterflies except when we are dreaming of ourselves in our heroic Walter Mitty seances).

We think principles should be out in the open for everyone to refer to, and to openly discuss. We do not think we can unilaterally judge and decide just because God is on our side. The common ground is one of mutual ignorance. That's the genuine Socratic principle. Of course, in practice, Socrates rarely honored that principle. He thought he knew best, as did Rorty. Lutheran Surrealism holds to the better Socratic principle that we don't know anything, but hey, there's those Ten Commandments, and it seems to me that they aren't that bad, and um, um, that's where I stand.

Who Were the Nazis?

While reading Richard Rorty, it became clear to me that he has only one group that holds together his world view: Nazis.



But what is a Nazi for Rorty? For Rorty, American fundamentalist Christians are Nazis. For Rorty, there are three groups involved in the Culture Wars. Two of them are good, and one of them isn't. That group that isn't gives him a clear pole of negativity, which orients his positives.



"I see the "orthodox" (the people who think hounding gays out of the military promotes traditional family values) as the same honest, blinkered, disastrous people who voted for Hitler in 1933. I see the "progressivists" as defining the only America I care about" (Philosophy and Social Hope, 17).



He thus goes on to finish his autobiographical sketch, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," by wishing for a "fully secular community" (20).



All Christians are "orthodox" who are blocking the arrival of Rorty's "fully secular" utopia, and thus, part of his job as a teacher and a writer is to destroy the faith of Christians:

"It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

It couldn't be more clear that he considers his religious fundamentalist students to be Nazis who need to be swiftly cult-cracked for his vision of a fully secular utopia to come to fruition.

But how accurate is Rorty's version of what it is to be a Christian? Lutheran churches in Germany were among the only institutions to stand against Nazis in the 1940s. For this reason they were left intact when the Stalinists took over. And forty years later, the Lutheran churches of East Germany were prominent in the crumbling of Stalinism. The revolutions of 1989 throughout the East Bloc were Lutheran revolutions -- from the epicenter in Bach's church in East Germany to the uprising in Timisoara -- all of these began in Lutheran churches. How accurate is Rorty's notion of Nazis and Christians being identical?

The Nazis wanted to ban the Bible, and close the churches, as it is made clear in William Shirer's books. Every church would have copies of Mein Kampf in the place of the Bible.

Rorty's strange notion that Christians are Nazis doesn't seem to hold up on even the most elementary basis.

Rorty's parents were old Trotskyites, and he was raised among such people. His apple didn't fall too far from the tree.

From a Christian standpoint, we can see that socialism is actually closer to National Socialism. (Goebbels' novel Michael is very socialist).

Perhaps the most grounding factor for German militarism under the National Socialists was the military defeat of WWI and the subsequent humiliation forced on them by the Treaty of Versailles. American Christian fundamentalists are coming out of a completely different history which Rorty glides glibly past.

At his most intellectually intense, Rorty does have the sense to argue that there is a "fundamentalist" Christian that he is against, but Rorty is not very precise about who he includes among the "fundamentalists." There are 1200 denominations of Christianity in America. Which does he include under his nomiker? I think in fact he includes every group that is not secularist, so he includes them all. Because only those groups which are "progressivist": constituting either Dewey's pragmatists, or French postmodernists, are decent; all others are "orthodox" by default. Rorty imagines himself as a member of a small enlightened minority surrounded by hundreds of millions of Nazis. His job as a professor is to clean this Augean stable, making America more like his own decent self.

Rorty's excessively sloppy self-righteous narrative is far from coherent or accurate, even on its own terms. After making the case that all Christians are Nazis because they are "orthodox," he goes on to claim "my politics were pretty much those of Hubert Humphrey" (18). Doesn't he know that Humphrey was a Lutheran -- which makes him on Rorty's terms -- a Nazi?

Flying by the seat of his pants, Rorty doesn't believe that one can arrive at a great synthetic idea by which to navigate. In his Enlightened view, Humphrey Dumphrey has fallen and cracked, and all the king's soldiers, and all the king's men, cannot put it back together again. But one point remains clear for him: them Nazis are bad. But who exactly is a Nazi, remains a confusing although central idea for him.

All we have is the vague sense that anybody who is acting like a "Nazi" is bad, and Nazi is defined as anybody who is Christian. Nevermind that Hitler was not a Christian, and openly glorified paganism. That would be too confusing to the overall idea, so it is rarely broached. Rorty's defining notion of evil can only be looked at from a distance, and only through the most general terms.

Nazis were racists, and so therefore, anybody who is a racist is a Nazi, too.

Now we can suddenly try to apply Rorty's "thinking" to the recent electoral events. Barack Obama, the loopy leftist logic goes, is African-American, and therefore, to elect him, means, that we, are not, RACISTS! Therefore, we are good. The question of Obama's ethnicity notwithstanding (he was half-white, raised by white grandparents, and never once had anything to do with his Kenyan father), the logic is nevertheless: we voted an African-American into office! Therefore, Americans are not Nazis. Hallelujah! This means we are a decent people. Let's mindlessly congratulate ourselves.

And yet Obama is also a Christian. Doesn't that mean that he is also a Nazi? Somehow the rallies in Chicago and elsewhere over the last six months are suddenly reminiscent of the enthusiasm of the Nuremberg Rallies.

The ideas of the left about who is a Nazi seem to revolve around the sole remaining point on which the whole left agrees. There is one thing that is evil: Nazis.

But are Nazis really Nazis? Not when they are Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was only a Nazi by chance, Rorty argues on p. 196. He could have been one of us. Therefore, he is one of us. Same goes for Paul DeMan (18).

Rorty is supposedly one of the left's Goliaths: a giant of contemporary thought. Easy to read, he's also easy to knock off.

Perhaps suspiciously easy. I suspect that part of the reason is that the secularist herd is too easy on its own -- no longer facing any real competition for existence in the secularist groupthink that the universities have become. Let them go up against a few Christians. It will make these Philistines think a little.

LUTHERAN SURREALISM CONCEDES

In spite of our late announcement that we would run for the presidency, many at LS felt we still stood a solid chance.

It was with general astonishment therefore that we watched last night's returns. Not a single state went LS. Not a single city or town. In fact, we didn't get even a single vote (that we know of). Even I couldn't bring myself to vote for myself, as I was too shy to ask how to write in a vote when it might have meant that I slowed somebody else up in the line.

And so we were cheated: again!

Had we won, we would have done nothing at all for four years, as that is our policy. If you do absolutely nothing, you find inner stillness, like a Slow Loris on a branch at night thinking about thinking.

Congratulations to Barack Obama and to all those who received actual votes. We hope in the four years to come to continue to be an enigma wrapped in the great cloud of unknowing, believing in the utility of emotion, and the nullity of motion.

Congratulations to all Americans who voted, and especially to the winner, Barack Obama. We will now turn all our hopes to him, get behind him, wish him well, and hope that the better angels of human nature guide him as they guide America.

ELECTION DAY

No matter who wins today, Lutheran Surrealism will continue to pray for America, for the winners as well as for the losers, of all lawful parties, and to hope that we secure a better union, and a more glorious future, founded in Democracy, and in the American way. Best to all of you who read this and who continue to believe in the experiment of Democracy, and in all those who are brave enough to run for office in what has become an increasingly negative gauntlet. At the end of the day, we are all still Americans, and I, at least, am proud of it. Peace and Grace!

Richard Rorty's Thinking

I've run into Richard Rorty's writings before in various leftist blogs, but yesterday picked up his book Philosophy and Social Hope from a Border's Books in Middletown, NY in order to break down the thinking.

This is a collection of brief essays.

In an essay entitled, "Religion as Conversation Stopper," Rorty writes, "These days intellectuals divide up into those who think that something new and important called 'the postmodern' is happening, and those who, like Habermas, think we are (or should be) still plugging away at the familiar tasks set for us by the Enlightenment. The ones who, like me, agree with Habermas typically see the secularization of public life as the Enlightenment's central achievement, and see our job as the same as our predecessors': getting our fellow citizens to rely less on tradition, and to be more willing to experiment with new customs and institutions" (168).

This is exactly what I don't want.

Thinking can only be done within established paradigms. First, you have to have a hypothesis, in order to begin to think. As in geometry, you need axioms. How do you derive axioms, except through faith? I don't think there is any other way.

Rorty believes that you can think without an established paradigm, bumbling along in the dark, as those in the Enlightenment believed.

What this means is that you have in fact a de facto paradigm of faith, but you aren't aware of it. For the left, as for Habermas, Rorty, and many others, this faith paradigm is Marxism.

Marxism posits a number of bizarre fictions. One is that there are two classes. One class owns the means of production, the other has only its labor to sell. But is this fiction adequate to reality?

If you just think about yourself, it isn't true. We belong to both classes. I am for instance a writer, and I am the means of producing the writing. It's true that I need publishers, and when I publish a book, I make a contract with a publisher. But that doesn't mean that self-publishing would be better, or taking over a publishing house, that I would improve my profits. It's a demented idea.

The idea that equality would come when the workers own the means of production is poppycock. Not only does it not come (there remains a boss, he or she is just no longer responsive to the bottom line, he or she is now responsive only to the political line). Moreover, I don't see why anyone is even interested in equality. We should be interested instead in quality. If I publish a book, I don't want it to be equal to all the other books. I want it to be better. I want it to shine.

I think those who write better books should reap the profits whether those be in esteem or in actual money. (Some books provide a bigger kick than mine -- Tom Clancy comes to mind. More nitwits want to take his ride than want to take the ride offered by my novel, Temping. So be it. I think it's ok to write for a minority.)

Rorty wants to destroy religion because it occupies a privileged position in discourse, and seeks to drive out that which doesn't stem from religious authority.

In that sense, he is not very far from being a Lutheran. Luther, too, wanted to disinvest the Pope, and this could be said to be the beginning of the long deconstruction of the Papacy (which is far from over, and I am now dubious as to whether it is even a valid project). Authority has to come from somewhere, and better the Pope than the Black Pope of Marxism, with its demonic dictators whose authority is based on the workers who are not even entitled to speak.

What's best is to allow a mix of speakers in the polis: religious, irreligious, and quasi-religious.

Rorty's meta-narrative is that we should be working toward greater equality. And yet, we will never have equality of beauty, brains, or charisma. They tried to attain equality of looks in Red China by making everyone wear the same uniform. And everyone had to think the same way, so having a brain was a handicap. In Cambodia, equality meant that no one could know more than anyone else. Reading was banned. Readers were shot.

I would rather work toward quality: the Aristotelean notion of excellence, which is also the Thomist notion, and in some form, perhaps, even that of the pagan, who celebrated excellence every four years in the Olympics.

The beautiful in sports, as in literature, as in life, has to at least partially to be based on quality, rather than on equality. Quality is elitist, but it gives us a work ethic: something to work for. It appeals to our ludic sense, since it becomes a game to try to be the best in a sport or in an art.

Rorty's notion of equality is a mistake. As I read this book, I'm hoping to discover more of the contours as well as the history of his mistake. I will bet right now that the root of the mistake is in Marx: the Procrustean fellow who switched the track of the Enlightenment, cut its brakes, and had it descend at a horrifying rate into the Gulags, the Killing Fields, and the Orwellian nightmare of Big Brother (Satan).

Obama believes in equality (Satan).

McCain believes in quality (God).

777

666 is divisible by three, which ought to mean something. Every night as I'm putting my two little boys to sleep, after we talk about the day, say our prayers, and tell stories, I count by threes until they are asleep. It always spooks me to pass 666. But last night due to the Halloween excitement, they were still awake, and I got to 777. I was very surprised that 777 was divisible by 3.

How can you check to see if a number is really divisible by 3? (Sometimes I goof up as I'm counting and get off the three track.) What you do is add together the single digits, and if that number is divisible by 3, then the number is divisible by three. 666 for instance equals 18, and 18 divided by 3 equals six. 777 equals 21, and 21 divided by 3 is 7.

If I was really crazy I would try to find some symbolism in how the Trinity can divide and conquer 666, or how the number 777 represents something or another, and how its divisibility means something BIGGER.

I play with these thoughts, but I think numbers don't necessarily contain a philosophy or a theology that can be deduced in the way that people parse Biblical texts, or look through the excited ravings of Nostradamus for a key to the future, or rather, I think that doing this is just another method of building a bridge to nowhere. Poems and stories have a representational ability, but numbers on their own, just refer to other numbers, at least at the level of their divisibility.

To me it's just very odd that 777 is such a gorgeous number. It shone like gold last night as I passed it, and saw that my two boys were sound asleep. I tucked them in, and went downstairs to watch the News -- jumping from Fox to CNN to Headline News, straying through local news stations (local boys' soccer team may go all the way to the state finals?), and then was stunned.

One of the commentators said that the bailout would come to 777 billion dollars.