Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for September 2018

Two Visions of 2070

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Of the two, neither is good. But both are entertaining:

The first is somewhat controversial, but it’s essentially a guy giving a ted-talk as a ridiculous caricature of certain segments of the college type. For instance, he voices his (not real) support of euthanasia with this line, “In 2070, there won’t be any old or sick people, cause WE’RE JUST GONNA KILL ‘EM.” It’s definitely worth a listen if you like wry humour. 

On the other hand, and I’ve posted it before, there’s Anarchy Road by Carpenter Brut. This vision of 2070 is of a world essentially destroyed by a combination of the managerial state and indiscriminate consumption. 

Hitting the Links 9/10/2018

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Here’s a good Ed Latimore quote:

Passive-aggression is weak. It tries to get the benefits of confrontation at a steeply discounted price.

If you have something on your chest, speak directly and leave no room for misinterpretation.

— Ed Latimore (@EdLatimore) January 6, 2018

Of everything I’ve cooked lately, this is my wife’s favorite: 5 Ingredient Carnitas. Enjoy.

Strength training is an aging prophylactic. And it takes remarkably little time if your goals are modest. If you don’t lift, you having nothing to lose but weakness, get to the gym/garage/push-ups. Also, here’s this 70-year-old lifter.

Bret Contreras, “the glute guy,” recommends five daily practices to improve your health or at least your sense of well being. I especially appreciate deep squat and diaphragmatic breathing. He also has a big fat stack of references at the bottom, but with health practices (that aren’t dangerous) the best evidence is trying it out.

Speaking of diaphragmatic breathing, Wim Hof has his 40 breaths +push-ups exercise up:

Another way to practice Wim’s exercises is to do 30-40 breaths, breathe out and see how long you can wait until your next breath. When I’m not having allergy problems, I can typically over three minutes if I do the exercise (without the push-ups) two or three times in a row.

Nicholas Taleb asks, “was Jesus a non-white refugee?” The question is important because many skip questions of safety, rationality, alternative solutions, and effective altruism in the refugee resettlement debate in order to utilize the “Jesus as a brown refugee and you would reject him out of racism.” And many individuals of sensitive conscience fall for this tactic without considering whether or not the claim is true and whether a nation has a duty of the sort prescribed. I don’t mean to comment on the politics, but just on the rhetoric of this case and whether its foundation is, in fact, fact.

Being a vegan probably isn’t very healthy for your brain.

Pop-eye is stronger than your favorite characters:

 

What is a Spiritual Exercise?

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In What is Ancient Philosohy?, Pierre Hadot argues that ancient philosophers were offering ways of life that eschewed the pull of the passions and instead aimed at optimal human existence (happiness or ευδαιμονια).   In order to accomplish this, philosophers weren’t just offering arguments or proposing ideas just to change people’s ideas, they were trying to help people obtain a vision of ultimate reality and then live their lives in conformity to that reality. And so, the philosophers offered philosophical or spiritual exercises, which Hadot defines as:

By this term [spiritual exercises], I mean practices which could be physical, as in dietary regimes, or discursive, as in dialogue and meditation, or intuitive, as in contemplation, but which were all intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practiced them. The philosophy teacher’s discourse could also assume the form of a spiritual exercise, if the discourse were presented in such a way that the disciple, as auditor, reader, or interlocutor, could make spiritual progress and transform himself within.

Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy?, 6

So when Epictetus offers a version of the argument for God from design, what he means to do is make someone aware, not only of the existence of a mind behind the cosmos, but he means to help them become grateful to God for the universe and their experiences therein. 

The ubiquity of spiritual exercises in the ancient world helps make sense of Jesus’ paradox of public piety. In Matthew 5:14-17, Jesus says to do good deeds publicly. In Matthew 6:1-18, Jesus says to hide your good deeds so thoroughly that they fade from conscious memory (Matthew 25:37-40). Which is it? If we take his first command in sequence to be a piority, Jesus means to say, “My kingdom should be a people of the sort that those who observe their public life wish to worship God.” But on the other hand, there’s a serious moral burden to bear when we are seen and praised for doing good deeds. And so Jesus commends as a spiritual exercise to conceal certain good deeds some or most of the time so that the God who sees what happens in secret will reward the believer rather than the watching public. 

C.S. Lewis, while not relying on Hadot, saw this mode of thought in the writings of the ancients absorbed and reworded it in his book on how to read. In it, he distinguishes between the way the many and the few read. The many use literature for, essentially entertaining themselves or learning new skills. Lewis, on the other hand, sees literature offering a vision of life (so it is to be used) but it can only be “used” insofar as it is attended to and received as and for what the author meant it to be:

The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it. The many behave in this like a man who talks when he should listen or gives when he should take. I do not mean by this that the right spectator is passive. His also is an imaginative activity; but an obedient one. He seems passive at first because he is making sure of his orders. If, when they have been fully grasped, he decides that they are not worth obeying—in other words, that this is a bad picture—he turns away altogether.

C.S. Lewis An Experiment in Criticism III.19b-20a

Literary art is a spiritual exercise proffered to the reader by the artist, and once truly understood, then it is used or not. Of course, this raises all sorts of questions about art that is meant merely to entertain or titillate without any definite end, but even such art is offering a vision of life to be accepted or rejected and which one subtly endorses more and more the more frequently he enjoys artworks of that sort. 

Later authors, like Rene Descartes, employed even geometry as a spiritual exercise. Descartes thought that arts like Geometry and Philosophy existed for self-cultivation by which he meant,

…[D]eveloping the ability to allow the will to recognize and to accept freely the insights of reason, and not just following the passions or memorized patterns of actions. It meant essentially recognizing the limits of reason and willing not to make judgments about things beyond reason’s scope.

Matthew Jones Descartes’ Geometry as a Spiritual Exercise, 53.

As far as I can tell, the utility of the concept of spiritual exercises for understanding education in general, ancient philosophy, and even the Biblical texts cannot be overestimated. 

The Lindy Effect and Classical Education

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Schools purporting to offer a classical education are cropping up around the country. Is this recent trend good or bad? To answer this question, I propose that classical education is Lindy-compatible, and therefore minimally not harmful, but likely helpful.

Here is Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s description of the Lindy effect:

“Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.“

In other words, to be Lindy-compatible is to be an object, idea, or organization whose continued survival is implied by its increased age, whereas to be Lindy-incompatible, is to have your life expectancy decrease as you age.

In the case of classical education, a model of education whose end is individual liberty through self-mastery which is obtained by competence in the skills that most fully capacitate the person, we might say, “If these schools are just now cropping up, then on Lindy principle, classical education is bound for failure.” But, studying the seven liberal arts, gymnasium, and the fine arts to fit the individual for virtue in a free society has only recently been rejected by liberal arts programs in colleges.

In other words, as the public schools and the university system have all but rejected the lost tools of learning contained within this tradition, their reappearance in private high-schools is precisely evidence that classical education is anti-fragile (it evolves in order to thrive in chaotic/disordered circumstances).

If classical education is Lindy-compatible, it, by definition does no harm, for if it did, it would die off as practitioners died off or rejected it. So, while the universities became interested in a combination of government subsidized profit and social-justice initiatives that reject classical education on the basis of its alleged role in systemic racism, other avenues appeared to provide this form of education. A question for another time is, “How do the seven liberal arts prepare the individual for liberty or make them happy?”

The Christian Hope and Homo Prospectus

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The Christian version of the afterlife is unique in two respects. It is so unlike our present existence that the Bible says that it can only be seen dimly and is best expressed in images. But it is very much like our present existence in that our present self will be preserved and will have attributes and levels of flourishing which depend upon our virtue in this life.

In other words, there is the motivation for something far beyond what we presently experience while simultaneously giving meaning to those present experiences. Not only so, but your self is not lost in the Christian afterlife, but enhanced.

The New Testament makes these points frequently, here are two representative examples:

  1. …what we will be has not yet been made known, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him [Christ] for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)
  2. …in the Lord, your labor [good deeds] is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:58)

Below are the observations of a professor of medieval literature, a theologian, and a social scientist about the relationship between the Christian view of hope and earthly eu-civic behavior.

C.S. Lewis

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis comments on the nature of Christian hope and how it leads one to work harder in the here and now because of the height of aspiration it offers as well as the role the present life plays in one’s enjoyment of the next:

“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters.”[1]

David Bentley Hart

In an essay describing American civic religion and religious sentiment in America generally, David Bentley Hart laments the death of Christendom in Europe. In so doing, he makes similarly psychological points about the nature of Christian hope it’s motivating power. I recommend the entire essay, not just these portions:

“A culture–a civilization–is only as great as the religious ideas that animate it; the magnitude of a people’s cultural achievements is determined by the height of its spiritual aspirations. One need only turn one’s gaze back to the frozen mires and fetid marshes of modern Europe, where once the greatest of human civilizations resided, to grasp how devastating and omnivorous a power metaphysical boredom is. The eye of faith presumes to see something miraculous within the ordinariness of the moment, mysterious hints of an intelligible order calling out for translation into artifacts, institutions, ideas, and great deeds, but boredom’s disenchantment renders the imagination inert and desire torpid.”

And two paragraphs later:

“Europe may now be its own mausoleum, but once, under the golden canopy of an infinite aspiration–the God-man–the noblest of human worlds took shape: Hagia Sophia, Chartres, Rouen, and il Duomo; Giotto and Michelangelo; Palestrina and Bach; Dante and Shakespeare; Ronsard and Herbert; institutions that endured, economies that prospered, laws that worked justice, hypocrisies but also a cultural conscience that never forgot to hate them; and the elevation of charity above all other virtues.”[2]

Rodney Stark

Finally, Rodney Stark makes the point that the Christian belief in a God who himself believes in human progress allowed for civilization on a vast scale to envision new vistas of ethics, knowledge, and technology and make them happen by studying the world God had made. The rest of the book is his substantiation of the claims below:

“The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand. Moreover, because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This was the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them the rise of science.”[3]

Conclusion

Of course, what would Christian historians, theologians, and literature professors have to say about the workings of the mind on such a broad scale? Well, more than one might imagine.

For instance, in Homo Prospectus, several psychologists attempt to explain the future orientation of human beings and how that orientation makes us what we are. They use the word prospection to refer to any consideration of future possibilities for present action. In the chapter on collective prospection, Roy Baumeister observes that:

Religion has been a powerful cultural construction, and it served vital functions in facilitating large- scale cooperation, long before law enforcement was up to the task. It enabled people to work together for mutual benefit in large social groups and networks. Sharing a god as a common ancestor or parent, indeed a god who watched people constantly and set rules for morally proper behavior, facilitated the trust needed for such cooperation. It would hardly have been possible without prospection, however. Part of the power of religion was that it could explain the entire time span of the universe, from its origins to its end. Big gods made sure that each individual’s role in that universal saga would involve moral judgment, with immense rewards or punishments awaiting each individual on the basis of how morally virtuous his or her actions were.[4]

In other words, one of the functions of a religion which offers a future hope dependent upon present action is that it provides a future orientation that imbues seemingly mundane and boring daily activities with meaning for an infinite future. Not only so, but the rules for the future judgment provide a singular goal for the thousands of competing goals in a civilization and the dozens of competing goals in the life of a single family. Such a vision of the good life, particularly if based on the God revealed in Jesus Christ, helps one to develop even the most difficult virtues in the face of the most horrifying sufferings:

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18 ESV)

References

[1] C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 2007), 134.

[2] David Bentley Hart, “Religion in America Ancient and Modern,” in In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), 59-60.

[3] Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House of Canada, 2005), 11.

[4] Martin E. P. Seligman, Homo Prospectus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 152.

Links to Read: 9-3-2018

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I stumbled upon Scripture, revelation, and Platonism in C.S. Lewis by Andrew Walker. I finally had time to read it today. The first 15 pages or so are pretty good. In them, he describes Lewis’ six categories of revelation: the numinous, Sehnsucht/desire, conscience, Israel, pagan dreams/myths, and Jesus himself. After that, Walker attempts to critique Lewis’ view of the Incarnation and appears to miss Lewis’ point, at one point evidently critiquing a view Lewis explicitly rejects as Lewis’ own view (29 and 32). But if you want to learn about Lewis’ understanding of divine revelation and perhaps inform your own, it’s still worth a read. 

I recently got the Loeb edition of Xenophon‘s works on Socrates. It’s pretty good, especially because the Greek, despite being old, is readable if you know Koine. I like Xenophon’s Socrates more than Plato’s. 

For book club, we’re reading a story about General Lee during the Civil War called, The Gray Fox. It’s good so far. I’ve been listening to the audiobook on Hoopla. Lee was a man of unironic eloquence and it’s a shame I hadn’t read more about him earlier.

Here’s an interesting Twitter thread about trying to replace animal foods as the caloric staple in the human diet. I’ve read a few of the cited articles over the past few years. It’s an interesting counter-point to the relatively consistent barrage of anti-meat articles and sentiment amount the nutritional academicians: