maphet's posterous

It is part of Martin's appeal to say out loud, without apology, that our world is pain and death and unfulfilled desire; this gives his books the affection of honesty. Though I despise them for the same reason. They reflect my worst, unspoken impulses more than they inspire my noble ones. They tell a kind of truth, but it has no love. These books tell the truth of the devil's power and the corruption of the human spirit. They tell the truth of Holy Saturday without Easter Sunday, of Good Friday without resurrection.

Pope Benedict, in Caritas in Veritate, demurs. Truth without love, without hope and resurrection, is not cold truth. It is not the facts. It is not realism. It's a lie. Truth is always full of love, always driving us to worship and gratitude: "Truth, and the love which it reveals, cannot be produced: it can only be received as a gift." G. K. Chesterton would agree. Fairy tales, he says, don't tell children dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

Very far from Martin's chilling realism.

Book of Thrones is engrossing. But even Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' had hope.

So just what can be proved about people by the close observation of their brains? We can be conceptualised in two ways: as organisms and as objects of personal interaction. The first way employs the concept ‘human being’, and derives our behaviour from a biological science of man. The second way employs the concept ‘person’, which is not the concept of a natural kind, but of an entity that relates to others in a familiar but complex way that we know intuitively but find hard to describe. Through the concept of the person, and the associated notions of freedom, responsibility, reason for action, right, duty, justice and guilt, we gain the description under which human beings are seen, by those who respond to them as they truly are. When we endeavour to understand persons through the half-formed theories of neuroscience we are tempted to pass over their distinctive features in silence, or else to attribute them to some brain-shaped homunculus inside. For we understand people by facing them, by arguing with them, by understanding their reasons, aspirations and plans. All of that involves another language, and another conceptual scheme, from those deployed in the biological sciences. We do not understand brains by facing them, for they have no face.

We should recognise that not all coherent questions about human nature and conduct are scientific questions, concerning the laws governing cause and effect. Most of our questions about persons and their doings are about interpretation: what did he mean by that? What did her words imply? What is signified by the hand of Michelangelo’s David? Those are real questions, which invite disciplined answers. And there are disciplines that attempt to answer them. The law is one such. It involves making reasoned attributions of liability and responsibility, using methods that are not reducible to any explanatory science, and not replaceable by neuroscience, however many advances that science might make. The invention of ‘neurolaw’ is, it seems to me, profoundly dangerous, since it cannot fail to abolish freedom and accountability — not because those things don’t exist, but because they will never crop up in a brain scan.

I've been advocating for this for years.

Another lesson to be found in Hippies is a warning against naive perceptions of science as objective and value-free. Science is an incorrigibly human endeavor. The story of the hippie physicists is a reminder, at once funny and poignant, that entire persons—their worldviews included—shape science, for better and for worse. We cannot fail to acknowledge the existence of such influences, and yet to uphold science as purely objective is to do just that.

To close on a methodological note, the events recounted in this book serve as a warning against an especially American tendency to veer towards what Kaiser terms "hyperpragmatism." The old "shut up and calculate" method of doing science has long dominated our classrooms and laboratories in place of more theoretical, historical, and philosophical approaches espoused in countries like Germany, France, and England. Though focus on application has certainly contributed to our country's prowess in science and technology, such success can fool us into adopting a utility-trumps-all attitude that has weighty consequences. Good science becomes equated with useful science, which tends to skew funding allocation (e.g., grant writers are forced to come up with all manner of "applications" for their proposed projects), and that in turn squelches research for research's sake. Kaiser's analysis of the effects of Cold War hyperpragmatism is especially pertinent in times of pressing economic concern like the present, when resources (financial and otherwise) for the arts and humanities as well as "pure" sciences are slashed drastically in favor of more practical, economy-building pursuits. Though Kaiser rightly notes that adopting less traditional methods for conceiving of and practicing science does not in any way guarantee profound results, a world that refuses to allow for the possibility of pushing and prodding (or sometimes punching and kicking) the boundaries of science—as the hippies did—would be a dark and dull place indeed.

It’s easy to see the shift from Wilson’s old-media conversation to Breitbart’s new-media circus — from public intellectuals to talking heads, from social science to showmanship, from The Public Interest and Commentary to blogs and tweets and gossip — as a straightforward story of cultural decline. Certainly there is more noise in Breitbart’s world, more polarization and hysteria. It’s a climate in which the best often seem to lack a platform commensurate to their gifts, while the passionate intensity of the worst finds a wide and growing audience.

But what looks like decline is also in some sense a return to normalcy for the United States. What we think of as the “old media” era — the years from the 1950s through the 1980s, when Wilson came of age and made his most important mark — was really an unusual and inevitably fleeting period in American culture. For a few decades, the consolidation of the newspaper business and the outsize power of the big television networks combined to create a genuine media establishment, capable of setting standards, policing debates and keeping troublemakers and provocateurs on the outside looking in.

Catching up briefly on my reading

Yes, "morbid curiosity" can certainly lead us astray. But it can't be reduced to its worst manifestations. What is it about death that reconnects us to the body? Even if we shy away from the violent "train wrecks" of popular culture, Wilson notes that an attention to the morbid can be driven by "a spiritual yearning, a hunger to penetrate the most profound mysteries of existence." The resurrection of Christ, and the Eucharist itself, embody this yearning: take, eat of this body, broken to death; drink of the blood, an offering of life.

This is what Wilson seeks—a way to sustain belief, to see his curiosity as purposeful, not isolating or perverse. And as he scaffolds his experiences with his inquiry, he is brought to understand his fascination with the morbid as a kind of via negativa. By knowing what life is not, Wilson experiences what life actually is: his daughter, his wife, days lived above the bipolar depression that kindled such silent despair.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

About that slippery slope ...

Here’s my take: the artist’s impulse to improve and correct its parents (or hold on to them in some cases) is connected both to what is godlike in Man as well as what is human. Our heavenly “imago dei” yearns to make perfect art. And we will; but not yet. Now, our broken humanity can’t lift itself out of its coffin, so to speak, in order to see with the clarity our souls crave. We thus always overcompensate in our diagnosing our elders’ ills. As a result, the history of human art, and of culture, is like a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. Craving-Decrying-Correcting-Enshrining. Repeat.

The Christian exit from this intellectual carnival ride is Jesus.

From economist Deirdre McCloskey's "If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise" (1990):

The expert as expert, a bookish sort consulting what is already known, cannot by his nature learn anything new, because then he wouldn't be an expert. He would be an entrepreneur, a statesman, or an Artist with a capital A. The expert critic can make these non-expert entrepreneurs more wise, perhaps, by telling them about the past. But he must settle for low wages. Smartness of the expert's sort cannot proceed to riches.