Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Interesting thoughts about arguments

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A fiction author/videogame programmer who goes by Vox Day recently posted a blog wherein he notes the problems with trying to explain oneself in our current culture. First he quoted this guy, saying

Like the mistaking of kindness for weakness that plagues today’s nice guys, there is some element of the human mind that frames lengthy and incessant counter-argument as a position of weakness and insecurity. He who masters pithy, concise (and indirect and ambiguous, I might add) communication commands a stronger image of rhetorical confidence and state control than the bloviating firebrand whose logical appeals may indeed be without equal.

I would say that on the internet as well as in person I’ve had this problem. It’s not just with the young folk either. Even people my age and people forty years my senior seem to take the process of explanation as a sign of weakness. I’ve often in my life, because of certain types of social awkwardness I experienced as a youngster, tried to explain things that made perfect sense to me (because I looked them up, thought them through, and came to an opinion) and was either mocked or ignored. It wasn’t until I learned the art of insulting others and sarcastic retort that I gained some traction socially. But moving on from those moments, I’ve still found myself having this problem in positions wherein I am certain logic and debate are the flavor of the hour (because I’m at a book club, a staff meeting for this or that employer, or in a class discussion in college). 

Day’s observations, however ungrounded in any particular science, track very well with my own observations: 

There is a massive difference in perception between being the recipient of a breathless, circuitous infodump and being the recipient of a long lecture after the lecturer first coldly informs you that this is going to be a long, detailed, and painful experience because you are so woefully ignorant that there is simply no other choice if you are not to be left drowning in the swamp of your stupidity.

Another factor here is that simple binary thinkers tend to view multiple reasons as being somehow contradictory even when they reinforce each other. After all, if reason X is correct, then reason Y is at best unnecessary, and therefore to mention it must be indicative of a weakness in X. This is, of course, profoundly stupid, but has a rational foundation in that people who have no case do tend to take the spaghetti approach and throw out everything they can in the hope that something will stick.

I don’t relish, usually, moments where some horrific wall of human stupidity has to be cracked by the pick-ax of rhetoric rather than surmounted by more agile forms of logic. But, sometimes these things have to be done. The last thing any Christian should want to become is an irascible jerk, but the amount of conversations in and out of church circumstances where simply appeal to evidence or logic leads to mockery, blank stares, or quotes from internet memes which are mistaken for intelligent discourse is astounding. This all goes back to this:

4  Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.
5  Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. (Proverbs 26:4-5 ESV)

Sometimes you need to ignore a fool. Sometimes you need to make one feel the utter weight of his foolishness lest he think he’s right about something silly or dangerous. 

Anyhow, I’ve already fallen back into the folly of over explaining someth…

Meekness and Such

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I think Christians often struggle with the word “meek.” Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.” Paul says that the fruit of Spirit is 1/9th meekness flavoured. The word, in common English usage means “quiet, gentle, and submissive (Concise Oxford English Dictionary).” Christians certainly are to be those things in certain contexts. But, the issue of Christians learning meekness becomes particularly vexing when Jesus says, “Learn of me because (or that) I am meek and humble of heart (Matthew 11:29).” But Jesus is not usually very submissive to others, he’s not always quiet, and sometimes he is not particularly gentle.

But, a bit of research to the rescue, and BDAG (a lexicon of ancient Greek) defines the word which we translate meek below and then gives potential translations of the word: 

Πραυτης – the quality of not being overly impressed by a sense of one’s self-importance, gentleness, humility, courtesy, considerateness, meekness*

So I wonder if Jesus’ meekness and our own is closer to the idea of being unassuming and not self-impressed. The word doesn’t mean flippant or not taking oneself seriously. Jesus was deadly serious, “Learn of me…I will give you rest.” But he did not take personal insults with seriousness except insofar as they infringed upon the truth. He even noted, “Every sin against the Son of Man will be forgiven…” Jesus was willing to associate with anybody who was willing to hear the gospel. That was meekness. His considerateness was not limited to those he considered honorable enough. It was for all. This is how he was meek, yet simultaneously able to be very harsh. Meekness, for the Christian, appears to be the virtue of taking others seriously enough to give them time, tell them the truth, and make amendments to your life to improve their lives. It is, in that respect, one aspect of love. Meekness is not submitting to any and every unjust authority, accepting every insult that is injurious to good causes, and sitting back while evil is done against the weak.

The end.

* Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., & Bauer, W. (2000). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sleep and Adam Clarke

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Pro 20:13 Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread.

This passage of Scripture is important in our culture. We write more about sleep in news and science journals than pretty much any other culture and yet we seem to sleep less. I’m wondering if our love for sleep mixed with a love of not ‘missing out’ on what ever we’re staying up to do has caused us to have less sleep than the compilers and authors of Proverbs assume we need while also causing us to love sleep/idleness to the point of the average individual being unproductive.

Ecclesiastes 5:12 notes that “…sweet is the sleep of a laborer…” but perhaps there’s just not much labor going on. And earlier in Proverbs 3:24 it is noted that whoever has discretion and wisdom will have sweet sleep. So maybe we also do not show discretion with our time.

Adam Clarke noted this in his commentary on the whole Bible:

Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty – Sleep, indescribable in its nature, is an indescribable blessing; but how often is it turned into a curse! It is like food; a certain measure of it restores and invigorates exhausted nature; more than that oppresses and destroys life. A lover of sleep is a paltry, insignificant character.

Is it possible that our fascination with sleep, our love of sleeping in, and our obsession with understanding how to get enough sleep stems from:

  1.  The fact that very few of us actually do very much.
  2.  The lack of discretion used in our culture. 

I should probably do some checks on sleep studies to see if there is a noted correlation in modern research literature, but at least in the Ancient world over sleeping and poor sleeping were often associated with bad decisions and laziness.

Note: I am aware that insomnia can rob one of sleep for no apparent reason. Though I have discovered that using the same relaxing techniques I learned in karate class as a young man have helped me over come my difficulty sleeping. When I was in high school and early college I would often sit up doing nothing until it was time to go to work or school in the morning because I just couldn’t sleep. The point is that insomnia appears to have no moral correlate at all. I hope my post helps those whose sleep struggles are otherwise. 

Thoughts and Observations

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  1. When a leader offers you delicacies, be careful what you eat. You can end up owing a rich man things you could never afford to repay.
  2. When somebody claims to “love science” they almost always do not know what it is, how its done, or anything about its history. In fact if somebody uses the phrase, “My science sense is tingling,” or talks about how they deny some religion, some ethical axiom, or refuse to utilize basic logic in their arguments because “science,” the more likely they know nothing about science at all.
  3. Insulting somebody after you dismantle their argument isn’t ad-hominem it is just good old fashion insulting. Ad-hominem is insulting the person to discredit his ideas. Insulting somebody after demonstrating their ideas to be false is just icing on the rhetorical dessert.
  4. The friends I have most in common with are a Coastie, an Army Ranger, some missionaries, a New Testament scholar, a harrier pilot, an Army Ranger, some engineering majors, nurse, a lawyer, and a couple of pastors. Our commonality is either our sarcasm or the gospel. I hope it is the latter.
  5. My wife wrote a post for young women about refusing to date cads and misanthropes. In my spare time I’ve been studying social-psychology studies about human pair bonding. The science is telling. Women potentially tend to prefer cads and idiots if they do not try to use things like reason or obedience to Christian principles in their sexual/romantic decisions. I may make a post in the future summarizing the findings, but here are some. Please see the studies cited in the articles. The third link is to the study itself. As it turns out, some times women are attracted to men who exhibit appetitive aggression (read as violent tendencies). Note: I typically think that evolutionary psychology is simply silly, but these are studies of traits. You can accept the data without accepting what the authors think it means about ancient human history. Just-so stories are for fairy tales, not academic journals.

Batman, Coheed, and Intertextuality

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Most of my friends know that I really like comic books or at least that I used to. I don’t buy them often or collect them. So I’m not a “nerd” in the technical sense. I’m more a fan. Nevertheless I like them. I also like the band “Coheed and Cambria.” So when, about two years ago, they released a song titled, “Deranged” about the Batman’s conflict with the Joker from the Joker’s point of view I was excited. They did not disappoint. The song is excellent. Claudio Sanchez (the lead singer of Coheed) has a great capacity for singing in the voice of the characters beside himself because of the fact that his whole musical project is a fictional story of quite epic proportions (a novel, a series of comics, back story albums, and seven disks of albums in the main story).

The song captures the idea that the Joker thinks that Bruce Wayne, who often longs to kill the Joker but refuses to do so on principle, in a twisted way, needs the Joker to motivate and justify his crusade against crime in the eyes of less committed people (like the police who fight crime for a pay check).

Here are some of the lines that summarize the Joker’s diagnosis and capture not only the Joker’s interpretation of Bruce Wayne, but Joker’s own sociopathy and psychopathy.
Joker: “There is no me, without you…I will be an afterthought, your make believe, your darkest day, and your friend in need. Who will be your pretty little enemy, when I’m gone? Your world will prove empty. I promise, you will always remember me! The joke’s on you, poisoning. While you clean the streets of misfortune, I pick the innocent from my dirty teeth, we’re one and the same, deranged.”

This song, which was written long after the Dark Knight film, nevertheless gives a potential new perspective to Batman’s interrogation of the Joker. The Batman, Joker notes, wants to be like a police officer, but he isn’t.

The people, Joker replies with a sense of triumph, only do what’s right when it suits them. The Batman sticks to principle. Because of this principled way of life, the people will reject Batman.

The interesting thing that the Coheed song brings up is that the Joker sees the Batman’s righteousness as a malaise that is just as sick as his own. The difference is that the Joker’s point of view is, at least, philosophically coherent. Batman, because he continues to believe in good (which Joker thinks is a non-existent quality), is as deranged as the Joker who sees that goodness is a farce and does evil (which is no different than good) for fun. Everybody else, as I noted above, only acts for the good when it suits them.

In summary, the song allows for a different interpretation of the events of the film. Joker’s pathology is such that he sees that Batman’s principled refusal to do a deal with the devil and kill him as, in reality, a need to have somebody to vilify because the average person will reject Batman himself when Batman destroys the obvious enemies to the good. They will do this because Batman’s own commitment to principle reveals the evil in their own lives.

In conclusion, have a listen:

Aristotle, Feser, Aquinas, and Finality

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Ever since the days of Bacon and Newton philosophers and scientists have bothered themselves with determining the material and efficient causes of various objects and events. They, as a matter of course neglected, ignored, and repudiated the use of the concepts of formal and final causality. That was a brief summary of a truncation of thinking about nature that occurred during the Enlightenment era. This truncation, because of its laser like focus on determining what things are made of (material causes) and what events precede others and lead to them (efficient causes). Edward Feser, in his excellent intro to Aquinas’ thought notes a lame duck critique of final causes (the idea that something either has a function, tendency, or goal in its nature):

Perhaps the most famous criticism of Scholastic metaphysics on the part of the early modern thinkers is the one represented by Molière’s joke about the doctor who claimed to explain why opium causes sleep by saying that it has a “dormitive power.” The reason this is supposed to be funny is that “dormitive power” means “a power to cause sleep,” so that the doctor’s explanation amounts to saying “Opium causes sleep because it has a power to cause sleep.”*

 

This critique of final causality, as a concept, is wrong headed (as Feser himself notes). To claim that a thing has a final cause is to claim that, as a matter of its nature, it tends towards something. So finding the efficient cause (the chemical reaction that takes place in the human physiology) of the sleepiness when an opiate is taken is dependent upon first recognizing that the opiate itself is the cause of the sleepiness. Claiming the opiate has a dormitive power is claiming that the opiate makes somebody sleepy not some combination of factors incidental to taking the opiate. So, though it isn’t saying much, answering the question, “Why am I sleepy when I use opiates?” with “Because opiates, in and of themselves make human bodies feel tired.” is not a tautology. It is answering a question about what the opiates do, in general, to human bodies to the man wondering why the drug affects him specifically. 

Why does this matter? Because the alternative vision of scientific inquiry that only seeks two kinds of causes is approaching a precipice that must be avoided by a change in direction of the collapse of the current system entirely. Aristotle’s system of causes was never refuted (as Feser notes) and as those who study the history of science are aware. I’m not against the science, I just think that even for scientists, a historical prejudice against a more holistic way of thinking (Aristotelian causality) that is implied by your whole job is a silly way to live. 

*Feser, Edward; Edward Feser (2009-09-01). Aquinas (Beginner’s Guides) (Kindle Locations 696-699). Oneworld Publications (academic). Kindle Edition.