Acts of Being

Though most of what I write in this essay is applicable to most populations and nations of the West, I don’t pretend to write in a truly general way. It might not be possible to write in such a way without engaging in needless abstractions. Thus it is that I write of the problems of the West from a distinctly American perspective.

We modern men of the West have badly damaged our civilization in part because we’re not really strongly inclined toward civilization, certainly not strongly inclined toward Christian civilization; recent events indicate strongly and sadly that Christianity didn’t really take in Europe or the Americas and we’ll soon be—at most—baptized pagans. I’ll be concerned with matters of civilization in general and leave the specific Christian aspects of Western Civilization to the side though it is arguable that Western Civilization naturally began to decay when we of the West tried to radically secularize most aspects of that Civilization.

The arts and sciences of civilization are what we confront in school and mostly leave behind us when we leave, though some who learn to hate `school subjects’ might retain or acquire in a fresh form a liking for, say, astronomy or even astrophysics at least in the form of better-quality documentaries. If we were less inclined toward equality, this general process of teaching even students of some talent to hate `academic’ learning might end in a class system where aristocrats, or at least surrounding scholars and artists, would cultivate a taste for the finer sorts of music and visual art and knowledge, literary and scientific. As it is, we are inclined toward equality and also inclined to believe that any passing notion which resembles an idea is as good as the ideas of any man, though we do acknowledge the superior technical knowledge of those who design and build airplanes and bridges and skyscrapers and nuclear bombs, if not those who strive to write the deeper sorts of poetry or novels or history books. Einstein pointed out once that we need to generate 99 questionable ideas to produce one of good quality; one way to understand the thinking of Americans is to realize that any one of those 100 ideas, good or questionable, is considered to be the real thing so that we stop thinking and we solidify our opinions as soon as we have any brain activity corresponding roughly to an idea. Americans were perhaps leaders in this process but others in the West have followed us.

We Americans all demand a recognition that our tastes are as good as any who make an effort to cultivate a taste for more demanding sorts of music, not just Beethoven but also, for example, Celtic folk music as found in the hill communities of North Carolina. Anyone who formulates an opinion about Iraq which would be plausible in some possible world think that opinion as good as the opinion of those who learn a little about the histories and cultures of the peoples of Iraq and maybe even the histories and cultures of archaic peoples who left some traces in present times. Though accepting of the gifts of modern technology as we find it in hospitals and at the airport and in the mobile phone stores, we don’t much like the foundational knowledge which can only be gained by disciplined effort and cannot be faked as can knowledge about the motives of Islamic terrorists or the long-standing goals of the Russian rulers from 18th century Tsars through Soviet bureaucrats and on to their semi-capitalistic and authoritarian successors. This is to say it can be at least embarrassing to express some irrational opinion about the meaning of quantum mechanics when a nearby teenager might well have some elementary but solid understanding from documentaries and from books available at many public libraries. Modern Americans feel no such embarrassments when speaking about, say, the irrationality of Iranian leaders who are, in fact, said to be more rational than American leaders by various knowledgeable observers who aren’t inclined to general admiration of those Iranian leaders, to put it mildly.

Largely because we desire a specific sort of failure, oddly consistent with worldly success, and think it to be a sign of our native superiority, our modern educational systems have failed. It hardly surprising that these systems have failed utterly to teach even the most basic skills of literacy and numeracy to those who don’t wish to learn and to those who have serious problems learning; after all, the systems are run by bureaucrats who show truly modern sensibilities by ignoring all inconvenient facts such as those related to the inability of many adolescent males to sit still in classrooms for five hours or more in a day. Our school systems reached a point by at least the mid-1970s where they couldn’t even provide basic learning skills to those who came to school capable of concentrating for more than the length of a television commercial or—more or less equivalently—a skit on Sesame Street. In fact, the school systems teach not the ability to concentrate on a task but rather the cow-like habits of responding to bells and of shaping habits to the needs of bureaucratic managers. (Teachers, including those who desire to do their job, are also subjected to the same conditioning.) The sad thing is that many of those who most readily acquire such habits are exactly the children who come to school with the behaviors which would allow true learning.

Nearly all human beings like colorful images, live or captured on the pages of a book—verified by psychologists and somewhat explained by evolutionary theorists as being one possible response to the opportunities and dangers of our environments. One way to disrupt the thinking processes of young students is to show them a lot of videos and to use textbooks with a lot of glossy pictures. While the improper use of images, especially very colorful, has been shown to disruptive of thinking and learning by modern scientists, we should remember that it also reverses the traditional pathway to literacy which begins with big pictures and a few words on each page and moves toward pages with text and only occasional pictures, if any.

This is part of a general problem which has been developing in the West since at least the century of decay (14th) which followed the High Middle Ages. The radical Franciscan theologians and philosophers of Oxford in that period (roughly, the school of Duns Scotus and William of Occam) provide a focus for this view of that general problem—though they weren’t villains in any moral sense. Those thinkers began the process of demoting mind to being subservient to some ghostly entity called `will’. Even the process of intellectual education, of disciplining the individual aspects of mind so that it can take up the greater communal aspects of mind, becomes a matter of will. If we will to be educated, then we can acquire education if we are placed in a building with books and teachers and maybe computers for a sufficient number of hours a day. In fact, those students from communities, Jewish and Chinese and a few others, which intelligently recognize the importance of intelligence in forming a strong and disciplined intelligence are those who can take advantage of even such incompetent educational systems as we have in the United States. Those from other communities are raised with a disrespect for intellect, communal and capitalized intelligence, and are expected to exercise their will and to take something called `knowledge’ into their poorly formed minds so long as they find themselves in one of those buildings with books and teachers and computers. The process is apparently magical, invoked by that strange and mythical entity typically labeled not only `will’ but `free-will’.

I’m mostly concerned about mathematics in this essay, our schools’ inability and unwillingness to teach even an esthetic appreciation for mathematics to either those with some level of talent or those who don’t have such talent but should be educated for their roles, as musicians or carpenters or homemakers, in an advanced civilization in which mathematics is a deep part of our efforts to understand our world, even the entirety of Creation from a Christian or Jewish viewpoint. In fact, there are almost certainly ways to teach at least some serious mathematics to non-mathematicians.

As matters currently stand, some dislike learning mathematics or other demanding subjects and the rest can mostly be trained to dislike learning mathematics. I was in the second category though I was in college before I learned that my liking was for mathematics of a type and at a level which was easy to learn and was tested by way of trivial problems. Even when I learned how to study well enough to get good grades for my junior and senior years of college, I most certainly had not learned how to truly learn mathematics, how to immerse myself in a demanding subject of study and to respond to it in such a way that my mind would be shaped to that subject. In a sense, I’d been Americanized, had learned how to exert some energy by an effort labeled `will’ and had targeted some textbook summaries of mathematics as the region I’d conquer by this will. In fact, the process of becoming a true mathematician, or a true cabinet-maker or pianist, is that of willingly letting oneself be conquered by a specific region of Creation, not a process of conquest but a process of being conquered and shaped to be a true resident of that region.

Difficult subjects in most American educational systems are dumbed-down, emotionally as much as intellectually, in an effort to engage the minds of the students by entertaining them. Literature becomes a series of electives including vampire-stories or romances at the same time that the study of calculus becomes not only the viewing of glossy images but also efforts by under-educated and mostly bored teachers to answer the sorts of questions which can be answered only after many years of intense study—in mathematics, “Why?” can be answered sometime in graduate school or perhaps in the mature adulthood of someone with good skills of literacy. At the high school level and mostly at the undergraduate level—prepare for a zig, mathematics is a game. At a young age, even a mathematical genius isn’t ready to learn the deeper truths which lie underneath the sorts of games which a reasonably talented child, one capable of becoming a serious scientist or engineer or technically-oriented philosopher, can learn at 12 or younger. Entering this game involves desire, not some sort of higher `will’ independent of an organism. See my recent and freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being for an overview of human nature which considers desires and other emotional aspects of human being as subject to the sort of discipline which forms us into better sorts of social or communal beings.

Those with mathematical talents have also their developmental patterns which aren’t necessarily compatible with the standard curriculum, which was Algebra I to Plane Geometry to Algebra II to Trig/Calculus or something of the sort 40 years ago. Human being, the human organism in a particular manifestation, is not so easily overruled by a willed submission to the plans of bureaucrats or others. I knew some young men back in the 1970s who learned basic Group Theory on their own, yes!!, because of a book which taught methods for solving Rubik’s Cube. I was never much attracted to games of that sort, not even liking chess much and liking card games for the social aspects. I’m what you could call a metaphysically oriented mathematical thinker. I would have been more inclined, even at a young age, to make a major effort to solve problems asking for the sorts of abstract reasoning that can prove: if an group has property X, then each member of the group has a square root also in the group. Take the prior statement in a naive way if you’ve not learned the basics of group theory, forgive my liberties if you have learned group theory perhaps far more deeply than I have.

Let me up the ante. Mathematics is such an important part of a proper human mind, individual and communal, as defined by the true traditions of the West, equivalently—such an important part of the nature of Creation, that the West can’t survive if it doesn’t appreciate mathematics well enough to recognize its central importance to the Western intellect, the communal and capitalized living intelligence of the West. This is to say that the West came into existence in the work of Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, Benedict of Nursia, and a host of following thinkers who were scientists and artists and politicians as well as theologians and philosophers. For much of the history of Western Civilization, theologians and artists and literary men were educated in the best of mathematical thought as it existed, much of it being inherited from the ancients, the Egyptian designers of pyramids through Ptolemy—at which point most mathematics was frozen for centuries. The West has gone far beyond that as part of an ongoing effort to explore God’s Creation, far distant shores such as the Americas and planets circling other stars as well as mathematical entities such as groups or physical entities such as protons, and to properly respond to Creation as we can best understand it, the working of wood and the management of factories and farms as well as the construction of hydroelectric power plants and the composition of musical works proper to current sensibilities of a higher and more disciplined sort.

From a different perspective, that of a professional mathematician, Edward Frenkel—Professor of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley—writes of a great mathematician who is off the radar of Western Civilization, such as it is. In this article, An Unheralded Breakthrough: The Rosetta Stone of Mathematics, Professor Frenkel concludes:

The Weil conjectures did for mathematics what quantum theory and Einstein’s relativity did for physics, and what the discovery of DNA did for biology. Alas, we don’t hear much about this story or about the fascinating drama of ideas unfolding in modern math. Mathematics remains, in the words of poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “a blind spot in our culture—alien territory, in which only the elite, the initiated few have managed to entrench themselves.” And this despite the fact that math is so deeply woven in the fabric of our lives and is becoming, more and more, the engine of our power, wealth, and technological progress.

Mathematical formulas and equations represent objective and necessary truths, which describe the world around us at the deepest level. And what’s also amazing is that we own all of them. No one can have a monopoly on mathematical knowledge; no one can claim a mathematical idea as his or her invention; no one can patent a formula. There is nothing in this world that is so deep and exquisite and yet so readily available to all. Today, our celebration of the work of a great mathematician serves as a reminder that everyone should be given equal access to this timeless and profound knowledge.

The Weil conjectures, developed first and partially proved by Andre Weil (brother of the philosopher Simone Weil) while in prison for refusing to serve in the French military under the Vichy government, provide very deep and ultimately simple relationships between numbers and shapes. Professor Frenkel’s article begins by noting those proofs were completed by Pierre Deligne, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Professor Deligne, the “great mathematician” in the article, has recently been awarded the Abel Prize in mathematics, a prize intended to make up for the odd lack of a Nobel Prize in mathematics. Of course, Andre Weil was also a great mathematician, perhaps one of the greatest of recent centuries.

I do object to Professor Frenkel’s claim that modern men, at least those with some years of schooling, have some understanding of the meaning of “quantum theory and Einstein’s relativity” and of DNA. In fact, even modern physicists have not been able to gain an understanding of quantum theory which places it the context of some greater whole, Creation to a Christian such as myself, and most non-scientists, even highly literate thinkers, have an understanding of many parts of modern science better labeled as “superstitions” than as “understanding”. See my very short discussion of an insight of John Polkinghorne, theoretical physicist and then Anglican clergyman: Shaping Our Minds to Reality. After talking about the experience of teaching new mathematical truths and attitudes (What is a vector? “‘But what is it really?’ they say.”) to young scientists, he speaks also of the difficulty physicists have in thinking in terms of quantum phenomena: “Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.”

The particular difficulties in truly understanding modern empirical sciences, history or quantum theory or mathematics or genetics, vary but each can be overcome only by a major effort along with a willingness to allow our minds to be reshaped to the knowledge of reality, to be reshaped to reality through the proxy of human knowledge and human understandings of a particular age and civilization.

By 1930 or so, Jose Ortega y Gasset labeled men of the modern West as “barbarian children”. While he was making a brutal assessment of the state of the common folk, he wasn’t criticizing them in a moral sense so much as the leaders. Under his quite plausible interpretation of the recent history of Western Civilization, masses of human beings had been released in the 19th century from parochial lives by modern political and technological developments. The `clerics’ or teachers and leaders of the West were the ones who failed to raise those peasants and other peoples of limited experience to an appreciation of Western Civilization; in fact, those irresponsible teachers and leaders willingly and even joyfully at times fell to the level of those who left behind the social and political order, the moral order, the culture, the generally pietistic forms of religious beliefs of rural areas and villages, to enter a vacuum of sorts where they should have entered the cosmopolis. The novelist Walker Percy should have titled his collection of essays about modern men as Lost in the Cosmopolis rather than Lost in the Cosmos. The Cosmopolis is the human manifestation of the current understanding of the Cosmos. We are lost in the Cosmos, not because we are inherently alien to this world nor because the world is defective in a way meaningful to us in our mortal lives, but because our understanding of that Cosmos, our Cosmopolis, is defective.

Most men and women of the West remain in that vacuum in which they can exist and sometimes even prosper in ways of individual mental development as well as prospering in ways of material standard of living. The failing of modern men is largely in the ways of the intellect, the “communal and capitalized form of live intelligence” as Jacques Barzun called it—see Intelligence vs. Intellect. For a more complete overview of individual and communal human being, download my book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. The intellect of a Western man is, or should be, the mind of the Western Cosmopolis as incarnate in Western thinkers and Western libraries and Western techniques of building and manufacturing and growing food and so forth.

Despite the isolation which is often a necessary part of intense mental efforts in such fields as mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, poetry, novels, musical composition, and so forth, these fields are as much a part of human communal effort as, for example, the design and construction of great buildings. Even the occasional child genius has a tremendous amount of that “communal and capitalized form of live intelligence.” Mathematics, as Professor Frenkel tells us, “is so deeply woven in the fabric of our lives and is becoming, more and more, the engine of our power, wealth, and technological progress.” I think the point can be made in a still better way by speaking of the deep relationships between mathematics and all aspects of our civilization, not just those aspects which can be labeled `materialistic’ when isolated, but it seems clear that Professor Frenkel does hold the wider and deeper view. It’s not just coincidence that artists were typically engineers or mathematicians during the early Modern period when the West was progressing so rapidly in so many ways. Those artists developed some of their techniques, such as perspective, by way of mathematical insights but their entire understanding of reality and of what it meant to be an artist was shaped by their entire individual and communal human beings, including those aspects of their beings labeled as “mathematician.”

Mathematical reasoning is a part of the individual minds of some and the communal minds of all in an advanced civilization. Even those who have difficulty understanding specific bits of mathematics will have cultural outlooks reflecting modern understandings of numbers, of infinity, of shapes. To be sure, this process of integrating recent mathematical understandings into the West has been slower than it could have been, largely as a result of the problem I discussed above: the failure of teachers and leaders to respond properly to the greater and higher possibilities of our civilization. Besides, it’s awfully hard to integrate something into decaying human communities. This is a problem I’ll be trying to address over the next few years, or more, by trying to develop a moral language drawing upon modern mathematics and other sciences, which language would allow us, for example, to speak of our `moral space’ being bent by large masses of human beings rather than forcing us to try to put everything in the linear and flat terms of Euclidean geometry, the terms which do show up in our moral discourse, “the straight and narrow way” and all of that. It’s our now improper geometric biases which make it so difficult to understand what it means to be a `non-conformist’ and, equivalently, to understand the strange way in which we’ve truly progressed in the growth of the Body of Christ though recent times show events which indicate to shallow intellects that demonic evil has become more powerful.

Mathematics is the most fundamental set of tools in the human effort to explore, analyze, and understand the world in which we live. In Professor Frenkel’s words: “Mathematical formulas and equations represent objective and necessary truths, which describe the world around us at the deepest level.” Again, I argue often and repetitively that mathematical understandings underly and provide many of the concepts and terms even for our moral discourse, which remains inadequate and even improper largely because we haven’t yet learned how to speak of our moral lives, individual and communal, by use of our far richer mathematical knowledge. We speak of our moral lives in terms of mathematics, such as Euclidean geometry, as understood in the ancient Mediterranean world and, as a consequence, our moral understanding has not advanced from those ancient understandings. To say, that moral realities haven’t changed over the centuries of human advance in technology and political systems, and the huge growth in population and in the complexity of human communities, is to take up a strangely inadequate form of conservative thought.

Despite all that can be said about the importance of mathematics, and other fields of human endeavor, to the greater human understanding of reality which is civilization in a true, if limited, way of speaking, most of those blessed with chances to attend the well-funded if mostly dysfunctional school systems of Western Civilization consider all that culture stuff, the great novels and great visual art of various national traditions in the West as well as science and mathematics and engineering, to be so much stuff to leave behind when handed their diplomas. We are barbarian children. That stuff we don’t like comprises many of the various aspects and parts of civilization; what we like are violent sports and disordered music and other entertainments which are the stuff of barbarian tribal life.

In contrast, Puritan divines, clergymen and theologians, such as Cotton Mather and Jonathon Edwards devoted part of their leisure time to the study of the great science of their days, including the work of Newton which was presented in the very demanding form of Euclidean geometry instead of the more sophisticated but simpler form of Newton’s own calculus. Many of the great, multi-volume works of serious American history and biography from the Gilded Age and a little later were produced by men who were insurance brokers or lawyers or the like and were read by a variety of middle-class Americans who wouldn’t have thought themselves to be particularly intellectual.

I return to mathematics to note that it takes some effort to learn the calculus but then many arguments of modern physics can be presented in a few lines in terms of that calculus instead of pages of involved arguments in terms of Euclidean Geometry. In part, this is the genius of mathematics, a genius shared with many fields of study and practice: put in the effort to build a vocabulary and set of techniques which can be applied in efficient ways to very complex and complicated problems. In metalworking, it shows up in the use of the best current machines being used to manufacture current products and also future machines which are better in some desirable way. This is one major way to view a civilization under development: ever more wisdom is being encoded in more compact and more usable forms.

We pretend to recognize the importance of the mind and yet we glorify mostly those who develop extreme skills in sports, those who are ruthlessly successful (or lucky) in politics and business, those who invent gadgets we enjoy. This isn’t to deny the perceptual intelligence and quick decision-making skills of a Tom Brady or the similar intelligence and skills of an experienced catcher guiding a young pitcher. Yet, we should realize that it was Shakespeare who gave us so much of our beliefs about what a modern, Western nation is and what its leaders should be like. Can you name the great athletes alive at the time of the Bard of Avon? We remember Plato as a great thinker and moral presence and know only vague rumors of his accomplishments as a wrestler.

Many of us can’t engage in mathematics to be sure. One rejoinder is that few Americans can run fast enough to play wide receiver in the NFL but many Americans sit in front of the television each Sunday watching NFL games. If we better form ourselves as images of God by being NFL fans than by engaging in efforts to understand God’s Creation, then we Americans are in good shape for our final judgments. If God would prefer that we devote some serious effort to understanding His thoughts as manifested in Creation, we might be, at best, headed for a long stay in a remedial education program before entering Heaven. The prior statement should be understood in terms of human communities and not in terms of human individuals, many of whom aren’t gifted with mathematical abilities and won’t be held responsible personally for not understanding, or even knowing about, the work of Andre Weil or its completion by Pierre Deligne.

My guess is that we better serve God, Western Civilization, and future generations by understanding the work of those mathematicians than we do by gawking at the achievements of Tom Brady, though—to be fair—sports is a part of human civilization as well as mathematics. Tom Brady has his place also, along with those forgotten great athletes of the Elizabethan Age.

Most scientists, many supporters of science, don’t seem to believe that past works, outmoded works—even some with serious and avoidable errors, are worth the effort of study. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that science has been so important a part of the modern cultural mainstream that scientists have naturally come to move along with the general herd, frantic scurriers, hamsters on the exercise wheel. There seems to be no contemplative time of the sort available to the gentleman naturalists of the 19th century. Darwin couldn’t be in retreat for years as he slowly formulates a grand theory in the midst of a civilization decayed so that it was out of touch with the world in its greater sense. Nowadays, scientists are supposed to be busy, taking perhaps more time to get grant money for their students than to do research or perhaps themselves junior enough or anti-establishment enough to be in the research lab or seated at their desk working on the next great hurdle to understanding the occurrence patterns of prime numbers, themselves without pattern. At the worst, scientists and many other knowledge gatherers or analysts can become parasitical intellects which chew up and otherwise dispose of the knowledge they were given, their traditions, as they seek to move on to something new. Many scientists, even those who are believing Jews or Christians and part of great traditions, are oblivious to the nature of traditions, containing not just `old’ knowledge but also the socially disciplined emotions and behaviors as well as intellects, communal minds, which form successful and complex human communities, including those of science. (See Intelligence vs. Intellect for the appropriate discussion as well as a discussion of a book by Jacques Barzun which deserves to be reprinted and spread widely.)

Let me state the point I’m making about an understanding of science itself, and the scientific aspects of the human mind, by analogy to the way in which evolutionary biologists, including some medical clinicians, understand the human organism and its `defective design’. If we take a human being, for example—my own self, as a creature designed to be what he is in the current context of his family-line, we’d have to wonder why sinuses (mine for sure) are angled to drain properly if he were a crouching animal and why his sciatic nerve passes out of the backbone and through the hip/buttocks region at an angle more appropriate for a crouching animal. Our very backbones give us so much trouble as they are partial adaptions shaped from the backbones of crouching animals.

Clearly, the human body is the result of some selection processes acting upon a crouching animal. In a meaningful sense, at least for the purpose of understanding some of our problems and trying to deal with them, we are still partly crouching creatures standing upright. This is also true of science: in some meaningful sense, modern biology is still partly Medieval and even partly Hellenistic. Similar statements can be made, with greater clarity in fact, of modern physics and mathematics and engineering. This is not a bad thing. If the human mind could be passed into a robotic thing which was engineered to rigid specifications, if that thing had only a past ending in science and engineering textbooks taken out of context, that thing would be a horror beyond even Frankenstein’s monster, the poor creature which was living and had a human past though he was alone among other human each a part of communities and members of some sort of people. Having no past, he would be timeless, without a future. A similar thing could be said about a science without a proper past, a proper context. This might be the reason why some farsighted scientists of philosophical bent, Michael Polanyi and David Ruelle among others, have expressed fears about the decay of moral standards in science—and those two men wrote of experiences from decades ago when science seemed still a Victorian Age gentleman in many ways. As I have noted in the past, modern scientists are not so much different from modern politicians and modern bankers and modern bureaucrats as they might imagine.

Choices made in the past still are present and the effects of any regrettable choices (even if they were plausibly unavoidable) have to be worked out over time by sometimes slow processes of evolution and development. Even more generally, our best thoughts still have contingent aspects which are the result of choices made by Plato or Archimedes or Galen or Newton or Cauchy or many others. In speaking of choices and contingency, I speak of those we make for our endeavors on a conscious basis and also those made by human communities and those made by the impersonal forces of history and biological evolution and so on.

I came to this line of thought while contemplating this article, Brain Development Is Guided by Junk DNA That Isn’t Really Junk. I first thought of my amused response to learning, circa 1995, that much of our DNA is inactive and probably just junk. For an example of what is truly junk, I remember that we still carry non-functioning (this is good) DNA for forms of hemoglobin for ancestral species, creatures much closer than we are to the ancestors we share with chimpanzees. From remembering that amused response, I passed on to the idea that harmful elements can remain with any and all entities which are the result of evolutionary and developmental processes. Unless there is some sort of truth to a dualistic understanding of mind vs. thing-like being, our minds are also part of this world of such processes; we fool ourselves in potentially dangerous ways when we think the evolutionary biologist studying the human brain can overcome all the problems and compromises in that brain he’s aware of. Let alone all he doesn’t know about. In fact, one of the reasons for the true conservative core to the thoughts of E.O. Wilson and other sociobiologists is their awareness that we are still part of these processes they study.

If anything, sociobiologists and scientists influenced by their insights have the typical tendency of the sort of conservatives we call `reactionaries’, tending to be a bit pessimistic about the entire situation, to not see that while we cannot escape this world’s evolutionary and development processes, we can mitigate and often overcome many, perhaps most specific problems which we can define well—in principle; we have not the time nor the energy to overcome all and we work at cross purposes when we take on too many problems. A lot of qualifiers are in the previous complex statement, and those qualifiers along with the sociobiological insights tell us that science itself is `trapped’ in this world of evolutionary and developmental processes, having to deal with inherited inadequacies and outright problems which are deeply embedded in the very nature of science as it has developed. In addition, as theorists and precursor thinkers in the field of algorithmic complexity theory have told us: we can’t foresee the future well enough to avoid making our own mistakes and leaving them to future generations. Even some of our greatest successes will turn out to be problems for future generations.

To eliminate one possible objection: any path of escape from this world’s nature for science itself would depend upon a dualistic view of reality. A mind, or at least the knowledge jammed into the brain, would have to somehow float free of the stuff of this world and the evolutionary and developmental processes which shape that stuff.

The situation is even more interesting than we might have thought. The above article, Brain Development Is Guided by Junk DNA That Isn’t Really Junk, tells us that much of that junk in our DNA isn’t junk. The particular studies dealt with in this article involve “mysterious RNA molecules” and the `junk’ DNA which are their templates. These particular bits of RNA and DNA are involved in brain development and in some diseases of the brain. They found one particular RNA molecule which is linked to the devastating Huntington’s disease—Woody Guthrie died from this.

Junk DNA isn’t always junk and neither is the inheritances from past manifestations of science which are often labeled in terms not much different from `junk!!’. For example, the ways of thought of Darwin himself about the ways of biological inheritance were a bit wrong and far from complete and yet the defective and incomplete theory of evolution which he developed is still studied by biologists and still inspires and shapes the thoughts of many of those scientists who might well come to read The Origin of Species already having technical knowledge superior to that which can be found in that book.

If scientists wish to understand human ways of thought, they need to understand how we got to a better, richer and more complex and more true, understanding of biological inheritance, they would need to understand the ways in which past generations of scientists came to their less rich and less complex and less true ideas. More than that, those ideas are with us yet and few if any evolutionary biologists would say we should stop students from studying the great works of Darwin and Huxley and other old-timers, to concentrate fully on learning some purified and more complete understanding of evolutionary biology as related in a schematic manner in a textbook.

The positivistic view of science, and the related view of individual and communal minds of scientists as being able to stand apart from the world in judgment–as it were, runs parallel to intelligent design theories they so hate. What cannot be the result of intelligent design, our universe, is to be understood, encapsulated, in a great project of reverse-engineering which is managed by way of intelligent design as biology or physics. The great intellectual sin of `intelligent design’ is the common man’s version of the positivism held by many modern thinkers, scientists as well as philosophers and by some of the intellectually ambitious or pretentious among the common folk.

Against the intelligent design view and also the similar if more intellectually respectable positivistic view of mind and empirical reality, I have argued that the human mind is so powerful because it is the result of the human being, individual and communal, responding to his own body, his environments, even all of Creation, in such a way as to encapsulate all of that in his heart and mind and hands, his thoughts and feelings and behaviors. We shape our minds to be maps, in a manner of speaking, of all that we can grasp.

A few weeks ago, Ed Yong posted an analysis of the current state of research in the study of the human brain: Neuroscience Cannae Do It Cap’n, It Doesn’t Have the Power. It is statistical power that is missing. For reasons discussed clearly by Mr. Yong, results in neuroscience are often false or exaggerated. A study indicating that an anti-psychotic drug has a strong and good effect on schizophrenic patients might produce strong signals that it does have such an effect; follow-up studies might show only a weak effect or none at all. Think of it in terms of the underlying genes. If there is a gene which has a significant but small effect on the development of schizophrenia, then it might well be the case that ten research projects can look at that gene, eight failing to find an effect and disappearing without a ripple, one finding a weak effect and getting only modest attention, and one finding a strong effect and generating headlines. Overall, the statistics are true to the underlying significant but weak effect but the one research project which receives a lot of attention is the one which exaggerates the effect.

We should be careful when we read of results in the biological sciences in general and Mr. Yong tells us that this problem of statistical lack of power, playing hide-and-seek with an effect, occurs in medical studies in general, including “basic studies in cancer, heart disease and other conditions” and also psychology in general. He also states that geneticists are developing methods using large amount of data (more possible in that field than in some others) which avoid low-powered statistics.

Another major reason, in my opinion, to be careful about many studies of the brain, to be very careful in designing new studies, is that a properly developed human brain is integrated with a human mind itself shaped by responses to other parts of that human body, to other individual and communal human beings, and to physical reality in general; maybe even to God. To indicate what I’m getting at, a human being who has developed schizophrenia or bipolar disease will have a brain which is malfunctioning in some ways and also relationships which are askew. Even in cases of extreme damage to the brain, cases where serious problems will develop even in a human being maturing in very good circumstances, what lies outside will have an effect on the details of the mental disturbances because that brain-mind complex which is disturbed has been shaped largely by responses to what lies outside. In fact, emotional or cognitive trauma can result in personality disorders in otherwise healthy human beings and those disorders might partially mimic a `true’ psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia.

Our minds are encapsulations of our total context and our minds in this sense are shaped from our natural brain activities and also feed back to our brains. In their fundamental physical manifestations, our minds, including our sense of self—our stories, are representational maps within the brain rather than simple actions of brain-cells pre-programmed to form a human mind, and certainly are not brain-cells pre-programmed to cooperate with an immaterial soul or mind. A sound-byte: our minds are more outside of us than inside. Our minds are more than could be strictly predicted from a full knowledge of our brains but are such that, after formation, those minds can be understood so that we see they are shaped from relationships and narratives made possible by the evolution of the human brain at a species level over all the years of life on earth and by the development of communal human being over the thousands of years of human cultural development.

The human mind isn’t the same thing it once was. A mind shaped in response to computers and electronic communications isn’t the same as one shaped to letters written by quill pens and carried by couriers on horseback. A mind shaped to the theory of evolution and quantum theory, to Broadway musicals and personal libraries of recordings of all of Beethoven’s known compositions, isn’t the same as a mind shaped to Aristotelian or Christian-animistic understandings of Creation, to Sunday hymn-sings and performances by occasional traveling minstrels.

An understanding the human mind is something which itself moves with the effort to understand all that exists and is within the attention of our personal or communal selves, where communal selves in the modern world have elements from the entire world and many past ages of human life. There is much about the mind which can be understood at various levels of detail and specificity, but any true understanding has to be expanded to include the mind in context and mind as a story.

One of my books which is available for download deals with human being, individual and communal: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. The five parts of the book, intended to give an framework for understanding human being from a viewpoint which is respectful of both Christian teachings and empirical knowledge, are:

1. Making Peace with Empirical Reality
2. The Human Mind as a Re-creation of God’s Creation
3. The Mystery of Human Feeling
4. Human Acts as Participating in the Story Which is Our World
5. Communal Men and the Body of Christ

Despite my—so to speak—metaphysical biases toward empirical knowledge, I carry with me a human respect for `ideals’, loosely defined, so that I don’t like the idea that liberty is gained and held by a balance of weaponry between the citizenry and their government. I do accept the arguments in the end, partly because the number of innocent human beings murdered by evil or psychotic private citizens is vanishingly small compared to the number murdered at the orders of the political leaders of centralized governments, including the United States as well as the British Empire, the German Reichs, the Tsarist Empire and Soviet Union, Communist China, and so on. For example, retired high-level CIA and U.S. military officers, as well as a handful of journalists with moral integrity, have supported the estimate of 176 children being killed by Obama-ordered drone strikes in Pakistan alone. Maybe if we were more worried about American government crimes, then we wouldn’t have such a problem with large-scale killings in the United States. Europeans should be able to make similar statements.

We Americans, and most Europeans, have been living for generations in an oasis, surrounded by the deserts our own leaders, business and cultural as well as political, were creating throughout many regions and realms of our own countries as well as the colonized or otherwise exploited countries of Latin America and Africa and Asia. We were protected by some sort of magical field that protected us from those who would enslave us in various ways. And then the urbanized, middle-class and upper-class Russians found out what it was like to be a serf. The Jews of Germany and, in a lesser but significant way, the Christians and non-believers of Germany, discovered what it was like to be at the wrong end of the weapons of brutal rulers. Now, to their great surprise, Americans and others—including Germans once again, are learning a brutal truth of history—allow yourselves to become dependent upon centralized powers and those dependencies will eventually be used against you.

We are particularly vulnerable now, circa 2013, to be pushed back into serfdom. There are various reasons for this but one has to do with those guns and other weapons. In Tragedy and Hope, published in 1966, Carroll Quigley said that the modern `democratic’ forms of government as well as the various modern `rights’ of individuals are endangered because the governments of the world can now afford and can use weaponry more expensive and more powerful than that available to the ordinary citizenry. Under this way of thinking, which certainly carries some truth, the American colonists were able to successfully rebel against the British government in 1775 because the weapons available to the British army were, at best, as good as the hunting rifles owned and often used by many the colonists. The British cavalry were mounted on horses, at best, the equal of those ridden by the horsemen under the command of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee or Marion Francis. This is not to deny the general superiority of the British army and the unlikelihood of rebel victory, at that time, without intervention by the French. It is to say that, even if worse had some to worst, the American colonists would have put up a surprisingly good fight.

Nowadays, bands of heavily armed and heavily armored men and equipment can be quickly assembled and sent on missions through Boston, to choose one purely hypothetical event in a city once the center of a struggle between soldiers of a world-spanning empire and farmers and tradesmen with good muskets and knowledge of a landscape suited for partisan fighting.

Yet, a simplistic application of Quigley’s thesis doesn’t work. The Afghans and Iraqis, Hezbollah in Lebanon, have shown that even tank columns and soldiers with expensive, hi-tech weapons and armor are vulnerable to disciplined partisan fighters.

I’ll not go more deeply into the problems we’re facing as Western Civilization breaks down in fundamental ways, though a contemplation of our current economic problems can provide enough material for contemplation of the problems we’re facing and the likelihood that a corrupt power-elite will defend their own wealth and power by impoverishing many in the West who thought that good times had come for time without end. Even so sober a historian as Jacques Barzun speculated in From Dawn to Decadence, published in 2000, that we’re entering a period when the public school systems will be shut down as impoverished children are sent back into factories or onto the farms. What will happen when we are told by militarized IRS agents to hand over more money to the government though our children are hungry, public schools are being shut down, and child-labor laws are being repealed?

We might be returning to the Age of Chivalry. That is, we, or our children, might find out what it’s like to be a serf herded into the factories or mines of fields by warriors mounted on expensive transportation and wielding expensive weapons. Apparently, despite the speculations of modern liberals such as Francis Fukuyama, the reports of the death of Clio have been wildly exaggerated.

Believing that we have enough freedom of a creaturely sort to at least make an effort to make tomorrow’s world as decent as, or better than, the world we inherited, I’ll claim that we are the problem. These problems were developing and began showing themselves as early as the American War Between the States or at least World War I, and we and our ancestors ignored them, preferring to accept any gifts offered by the gods of the marketplace. We didn’t want to stop the rolling good times to contemplate the possible dangers of our growing dependencies upon various sorts of centralized institutions run by technocrats or the complementary dangers of the growing cost and complexity of modern weapons. Even with problems becoming obvious, many I know take, implicitly or even openly, the position that they’ll keep their heads down and try to make it through the remainder of their own mortal life with as few problems as possible. Let the next generations eat moldy bread while working in hell-hole factories.

We have allowed those technocrats serving the central powers to gain nearly complete control over our ways of making livings, our ways of housing and feeding our selves and our children, the viability of our religious organizations so dependent upon tax exemptions and government grants, and so much else. And they have very powerful weapons. We have not, and cannot have, the weaponry to defend our selves and our children against politicians, generals, policemen, bankers, and others in the power-elite. We also have not the toughness to fight in the way of those Asian tribesmen who’ve been willing to die by the dozens, and to see many children die, to kill one American or British soldier. This problem of unmatchable weaponry wielded by those serving centralized powers is a secondary problem, but it likely will play a role in the creation of the next phase of human civilization, complicating and endangering the building of a new Christian civilization.

This essay is written in response to an article which is highly rational and not `conspiracy-minded’ according to the current mind-set: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever. This article deals with the price-fixing activities of money-center banks and allied financial institutions, activities which are proving to be wider ranging and larger in scale than even cynics, or even-even `conspiracy theorists’, had guessed. I’ll return to thus article’s topic after dealing with some slightly more general issues.

Any coherent response to the title, “Conspiracies Confirmed!?,” depends upon the definition of `conspiracy’. There are those who see grand conspiracies, many of whom are good thinkers and are capable of honestly dealing with evidence of large-scale criminal acts on the part of political or military leaders, officers of criminal investigation agencies or national security agencies, bankers or executives in the petroleum industry. The list is somewhat open-ended though we can rapidly run out of potential criminal conspirators who are meaningful on a national scale or even the regional scale of a large country such as the United States. When we move down toward city streets, we’re speaking of the variety of neo-Nazi, African-American, Latin-American, and other gangs which fill—very roughly—the ecological niche once dominated in some cities by the Mafia and related gangs. Those who understand the nature of these street-level criminal conspiracies insist on thinking that there are no corresponding gangsters and criminal conspiracies at the level of the centralized governments. The great historian, Lord Acton, writing in an age of far less moral decay, told us that the problem with powerful centralized governments is that they attract men with the moral characters of gangsters. (Along with a larger body of men willing to go above and beyond the call of duty and a much larger body of ordinary decent folk who just want to be paid for a day’s work while accumulating benefits toward retirement.)

Criminals are many in all ages of men and in a morally disordered age will operate in a manner almost open. The United States is morally disordered for sure and so are the remainder of Western countries. After a couple centuries of destruction of their social order by colonizers (including American and British drug smugglers from as early as the 1700s) and then their own home-grown communists, China seems to be even more damaged than the United States.

Disorder reigns, despite the number of human beings who are at least decent when times are good and a fair number of human beings with deeper moral integrity. (The weaker and less discerning have shown surprising strength in community when they’ve had good leadership; as examples, consider the individual families or parishes or towns who risked their own lives to help Jews and other victims of the Nazis, but, so far as I know, only when leaders were strong and of good moral character.) At all levels of the West and China, of most African and Latin American countries, in all realms political and economic and judicial, there are pockets of gangsters who engage in various sorts of battles against each other and against the befuddled general citizenry as well as a scattering of would-be honest political and other leaders who are now in quite over their heads. The gangsters battle each other in the way of barbarian warriors who are fighting for the right to loot from the general citizenry.

Gangsters. Merely criminals and not wizards of great occult power. Some of these gangsters are pirates and some are failed and incompetent Alexanders. (See Pirates and Emperors if you’ve never heard the story.) These criminals leave behind tracks not so hard to see, if not so grand as those of Alexander, but we modern Americans, and others in the West to a lesser extent, insist on seeing our leaders in terms perhaps appropriate to the generation of leaders known at the Founding Fathers, men who were sinners like the rest of us but also more noble in many of their public activities. Even our two would-be Napoleons, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, were at least interesting men of moral substance, not mere thugs as nearly all leaders of the modern West have been, including the `great’ presidents of the United States. We try hard to fit what happens into the narratives pushed into our heads during our public school days but it be impossible to fit Operation Keelhaul and related operations against civilian refugees, the War Against the Vietnamese Peoples, the Cold War as a whole, the take-down of the Twin Towers (impossible that the government’s story is true according to any firemen or engineers I’ve found willing to talk even `in secret’), the current and ongoing theft of the assets of ordinary Americans to keep money-center bankers, central-government politicians, and military contractors flush with cash. This is just a sampling of historically recent, large-scale criminal conspiracies for which we have detailed facts or at least strong evidence of the circumstantial sort.

This stuff simply doesn’t fit into the narrative most Americans and Europeans hold even when we add in some well-known aspects of the Gilded Age and its Robber Barons, most of whom seem to have at least been competent thieves who didn’t need to destroy a billion dollars of wealth to steal a few tens of millions. With these odd facts sticking out all over the place when anyone tries to fit them into the stories we were fed in American high schools—many weren’t bad stories for teenagers who need to have higher standards before learning about sinful men—then some will try to generate their own narratives, sometimes involving grand mystical conspiracies run by Illuminati or Freemasons or other wizards behind the screen or the Comintern or Communist International which was created to “fight by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.”

So there are some gangsters, ideological or other, who admit to enough that the conspiracies aren’t even secret. Over time, the victims and others also come to know about many individual criminal conspiracies (projects), such as criminal exposure of workers in an industry to poisonous substances or bid-rigging for highway construction or laundering of drug-cartel money. We now learn from, Matt Taibbi, an honest and insightful investigative journalist, that Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever.

The money-center banks and some other well-placed financial big-boys have been systematically colluding to set precious metal prices as well as a variety of loan and investment rates, in the process stealing from municipal governments, school districts, states, entire countries, the endowment funds of charities, pension funds, those who borrow to buy houses or cars or iPads; all of us. Anyone who’s borrowed money or put money in the stock markets or bond markets in recent decades has had their pockets picked. So far, the American and other regulators have let them off with fines which were a fraction of executive bonus pools and, when some of the injured parties brought civil suit, a judge let the banks off after the lead attorney for the rate-collusion defendants argued that “while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren’t guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion.” Taibbi adds, “This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.”

Essentially, they defended themselves by saying those who thought the banks were anything other than self-interested parties getting together to collude toward their own greater profits had deluded themselves and deserved what they’d gotten.

We still probably know only a part of the greater story—more of these schemes are coming to light, but what is known paints a picture of a vast conspiracy which is pretty much a bankers’ version of a Viking invasion, probably complete with starving or enslaved masses before our economic problems are over. It’s likely that these schemes have been the proximate cause of our current economic and political disasters. I say, “proximate,” because much of the world was fragile after centuries of exploitation of various sorts and the countries of the West had been keeping open their self-inflicted wounds from World War I and other strange and stupid events. Since few are even talking about those problems, major collapses of our institutions, including entire countries, would have come at some point even if we and our leaders were honest in the more personal ways.

You can’t solve the problems you refuse to acknowledge and to investigate, whether those problems are criminal conspiracies or the problems of a civilization with eroded foundations. But this is odd. As I noted near the beginning of this essay, those who see street-level conspiracies (involving a few millions a their grandest) refuse to admit that larger opportunities, the wealth controlled by large countries or money-center banks or the power of the American military, will simply draw more ambitious gangsters. In a similar way, those who speak of moral decay in such matters as sexual behavior or cultural standards refuse to see the decay is still more advanced in our political and economic behavior, in our government and business and religious institutions.

This, What Keeps the States United?, is a well-written and clearly reasoned review by Joseph Baldacchino of a book, Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century edited by Donald Livingston. (I haven’t read the book though I’ve read writings of some of the authors.) It deals with the general problems in American political and economic and cultural communities which I discussed in a recent essay: The Fragmented States of America. The review comes to a conclusion similar to my claims, though I would have gone beyond words about `Christian traditions’ to write of communities actually shaped in response to the Creator and His work in a special way, a way at least hinting of what we will be in our individual and communal human beings if we are chosen to enter the completed and perfected Body of Christ. I also concluded that we’re not capable of reforming the United States as it stands and would be wise to voluntarily separate into smaller republics which could then start the hard and multi-generational work of doing it better, even to rebuilding not just the United States but a larger scale North American or even Western hemispheric republic or “federation of republics.”

It’s clear there are very deep political and other problems in the United States in this year of 2013. The wrongful ideas and attitudes and ways of acting which underly those problems probably originated in the West in general and—I think—were nurtured most tenderly in the United States. See Gore Vidal’s novel Empire for a view of our corruption around 1900 from the viewpoint of the likes of Henry and Brookes Adams as well as men of political action such as John Hay. I’ve also read works by other thinkers of that time who came to a similar conclusion, such as the Irishman W.E.H. Lecky or Lord Acton who was worried about the damage Americans would do to themselves and their country if American leaders meddled in the complex affairs of Europe and Asia. Our leadership elite has been bad for a long time—Tocqueville found them to be scoundrels in the 1820s, as soon as the Founding Fathers’ generation was gone. Yet, we can’t blame them entirely. Better men, such as Ron Paul, arise sometimes and we’re not interested. In the likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, we have the leaders we deserve, even the leaders we want in some sense of `want’.

So things are bad and Mr. Baldacchino is here to tell us what I also tell my readers: very fundamental reforms are needed, not short-term, painless, technical fixes. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

Like many conservatives, the book’s authors seem to think that the principles of the U.S. Constitution could be revived if only more people could be persuaded of its correct interpretation. But the original Constitution and its liberties presupposed Americans with certain character traits and cultural habits. The moral, religious, and social practices prevalent in America in the 1780s were grounded in a Christian and British tradition. Only a society with that kind of public ethos would pay more than lip service to a Constitution of checks and balances.

Returning to the Constitution of the Framers would require nothing less than a revival of the kind of civilization and character type from which it is indistinguishable. This cannot be accomplished quickly, through political speeches or decisions. It would require protracted moral-cultural regeneration of Americans, one person at a time.

My title doesn’t refer to either either the reviewer or the authors in the book getting public religious issues upside-down but rather to the lack of understanding on the parts of the leaders of American Christian communities, the American Catholic bishops and other Catholic leaders as well as the Protestant leaders, ordained and lay. In their current battle in favor of religious freedom, they have gotten wrong the main point of the above paragraphs from Mr. Baldacchino’s review: the Constitution is grounded upon Christian beliefs as manifested in a particular British cultural tradition. Our sorts of freedoms come from Christianity and whining as if the Constitution is what allowed Christians to be `free’ in a Western Civilization of mysterious origin shows ignorance, cowardice, and faithlessness.

The religious and other freedoms implicit or explicit in the Constitution weren’t a result of the words or the political struggles at the Constitutional Convention but rather the background of those words, the background from which those various freedoms emerged after centuries of struggle by Christian peoples to overcome the temptations to misuse of power which seemed to overwhelm the Western Christians as soon as they came into power. The overcoming of these temptations involved, among other complex events, the renunciation of certain advantages of power and wealth by their holders, Popes as well as princes and kings and merchants and rentiers. The actual history is certainly ugly, perhaps at its worst when it is decent and morally well-ordered men who regress to an abuse of power, usually in an effort to reach a greater good.

The result was ugly even after some had learned lessons from the disedifying wars over the control of a people’s religious communities, the persecution of a Galileo who wished to simply pay attention to the Creator’s works, the burning of Servetus and Hus by Calvinists and Catholics respectively. Over the succeeding centuries, political theories which justified rights and freedoms matured and were sometimes enacted in governmental structures and definitions of power. Yet, we still look at matters in the way I phrased it in the previous sentence and that is wrong, dualistically wrong in the eyes of a Christian. In fact, theories were, as usual, the description of empirical realities however dimly seen, however imperfectly and incompletely realized as the theories were being formulated. Yet, we modern men, including nearly all practicing Christians, have swallowed the modern liberal story of Western freedoms being a matter of some sort of progressive recognition of some allegedly metaphysically grounded rights. (See my book, Human Rights: An Evolutionary and Christian Perspective, for a radically different take of these modern rights and the allied freedoms. My take is both Augustinian and Darwinian.)

These rights and the allied freedoms were earned by sweat and blood and tears and are not to be found in some metaphysical realm of truths accessible to the mind of any human individual but are rather the result of evolutionary and developmental processes in mostly the communal human being of the Christian West. Those rights and freedoms were largely character traits of Christian communities from the Western traditions. The modern political theories, at their best, were descriptions of a well-ordered Christian’s mind and heart and hands, where `Christian’ points toward communal human being even more than individual human being.

If the Western realms, including the United States, are losing their formal respect for freedom of religion, then it’s a result of the losses on the part of Christian communities. Fewer Americans and Europeans are truly attached to Christian communities, and this lack of attachment covers many who still show up most Sundays to attend Mass or other worship services. Even those attached to Christian communities seem not to have a true Christian understanding of the rights of Anglo-American traditions, typically seeing those rights in the way advocated by secularists. The American Catholic bishops and intellectuals seem to have mostly accepted this secularist justification of freedoms and rights. (And this secularist justification is probably derived from unhappy branches of Christian natural-law thought; there is a vicious circle of sorts being traveled, most especially in various Christian ghettos of thought.)

Christian communities of the modern West are more often than not gatherings of individualistic Christians cut off from a living tradition or sometimes gatherings of Christians trying to be in communion with each other in ways which were part of earlier phases of God’s story.

If we Americans would enjoy the benefits of Christian civilization, Christian rights and freedoms, Christian political structures, Christian culture, then we as a national community must be predominately Christian. What we have lost in our political and economic and cultural communities can be described as “ways of the West”", including the more particular ways of the Anglo-American regions of the West. If we’ve lost some of our most important freedoms, we’ve done so because we’ve not properly cared for and loved our communities which have, as a consequence, decayed to states of weakness and relative disorder. As Mr. Baldacchino says in his review: “Returning to the Constitution of the Framers would require nothing less than a revival of the kind of [British and Christian] civilization and character type from which it is indistinguishable. This cannot be accomplished quickly, through political speeches or decisions. It would require protracted moral-cultural regeneration of Americans, one person at a time.” I’d purge the term “one person at a time” and insert something like: “in an iterative and recursive process involving individual human beings and old or new communal human beings.” A creature in such a world as this can enjoy only limited freedom if trying to be a freestanding individual. True freedom can come only when we share the life of God and that comes only when we enter fully into a Biblical religious community, when we accept the communal human being of the Body of Christ (or the People of Israel) as our own and contribute all we have and are to that Body.

Over the past two centuries, American and the British peoples have passed on their Christian beliefs and the closely connected traditions of particular political and moral order in an increasingly weak, hollow-chested, form. By cutting the communal ties, we cut ourselves from the tradition, the links, that would tie us to the historical events in which God revealed Himself and His plans for us, however little the greatest of Christian thinkers have understood those revelations. The Constitution is merely a piece of paper without those Christian beliefs and British manifestations of certain Christian traditions. Logically enough, our politicians and judges treat the Constitution as a paper covered with words which mean what they wish them to mean at any instant, any point of fruitful crisis. Christian leaders, including American Catholic bishops, should be worried about their failure and the failure of their predecessors to nurture Christian beliefs in those under their care, the failure to pass on some manifestation of Christian traditions. It’s quite possible that much of this failure is due to forces beyond their control, but they have the duty to be honest with their own selves and with their fellow-Christians about this situation. We don’t need any Bishop Alfred E. Neumann: “What, me worry?”

In any case, we aren’t losing our religious and other freedoms because politicians or judges suddenly decided to take them from us. Rather is it the case that our ancestors long ago began a gradual process that we’ve continued: step by step, we’ve passed on progressively weaker versions of Christian belief and traditions until many decided it wasn’t even worth going to Mass or other services if, for example, God had gained the interesting trait of all-forgivingness. We tore ourselves from our communal human beings so that we could become modern, radical individualists. Gatherings of such individual human beings have nothing to do with the Biblical traditions of religious communities being shaped by God: the people of Israel in the Old Testament and the Body of Christ in the New Testament. We modern American Christians, in fact—all Americans, are no longer peoples capable of being free nor are our Christian leaders capable of being the leaders of free peoples. We rely on the Constitution’s illusory promises, once well-grounded to be sure, when we should be learning how to share the true freedom of God.

I’ll invite the interested reader to explore my ideas about individual and communal human being my blog writings at Acts of Being or in my recently released, downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. In part, this book develops an understanding of the Body of Christ in which the Church is the most important organ and not the entirety of that Body. I think that we’ve passed into a part of God’s story which is so complex and rich as to overwhelm our priestly orders and the lay bureaucracies which are the institutional church. If I’m right, recovery will come as new Christian communities develop to deal with educational matters as well as to handle relationships with political and economic and cultural institutions. These new communities won’t exclude ordained men, religious men and women, or lay employees of Church institutions, but these new communities will not be under the control of the official Christian institutions. For at least the beginning of an approaching reform and revival—which might be very painful, the new instruments of a greater Christian civilization will likely be dominated by the laity outside of Christian institutions.

God’s Creation can be described in terms of `mystery’ when we speak in certain modes, poetic or spiritual, but that’s not the truest way for a Christian to speak. It’s not the truest way because Christians, of all human beings, should be faithful to the Creator and open to what He’s telling us through this world and all that lies within it. This is the proper attitude because this world and all the creatures it contains—indeed, all of Creation and the creatures it contains—are manifested thoughts of God.

There is an analogy in the history of modern geometry for what I’m trying to get across. Einstein’s general theory of relativity deals with gravity and teaches us to consider space and time as a single geometric object, spacetime. There are a number of peculiarities to this theory from an ordinary human viewpoint. For example, the concept of `shortest distance’ is generalized and is generally a curved line rather than the straight line of Euclidean geometry. And I’ve just pointed to a major problem. To most modern human beings, including those who enjoy science fiction movies with black-holes, general relativity is a mystery, but only because we insist on trying to put a greater creature inside a smaller creature, a more abstract geometry inside of Euclidean geometry. It’s not at all a mystery for those who have the mathematical sophistication along with the necessary time to study this more abstract geometry. After such a study, the mind is reshaped, shaped properly to deal with that more abstract geometry, capable of dealing with the concepts of general relativity. The mysterious has become part of the common sense of a human being who has reshaped his mind in such a way.

We Christians, indeed all modern human beings, need to go through such a process to learn how to view this world in light of all that we have learned about it in modern times. What some call `mystery’ is part of God’s way of thinking in His role as Creator; we need to make that mystery part of our way of thinking if we are to be better images of God in the same way that modern scientists and engineers have made more abstract geometries part of their ways of thinking.

If it were true that the answers which we would give the world, the answers which would allow us to make sense of the world and move on to build a new and greater civilization, are beyond our knowledge and beyond our reach even in principle, then Christianity has nothing to tell the world, nothing to help us better order our lives, individual and communal. In this case, a religion which speaks of a savior both man and God, of a Creator immanent in His own work, would be no more than a lie, a set of delusions organized under some grand delusion.

By speaking of `mystery’ when we should be reshaping our minds to God’s way of thinking, we show ourselves lacking faith in the Creator and in Jesus Christ, true God and true man. This language of `mystery’ often arises when dealing with the modern questions, questions which have received some halfway decent answers, such as the words of the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution, but often those questions have led to the guillotine or concentration camps or to battlefields more gory than anything even Genghis Khan could have imagined.

We shy away from the questions raised in the modern world despite the clear evidence to those with open eyes and firm faith in the Creator that all this modern empirical knowledge is telling us much that is important about the work of God in His role as Creator. We are duty-bound as Christians to deal with these questions for they are raised by human exploration of God’s Creation, of thoughts He manifested. We are all duty-bound in our communal being and some are duty-bound by their individual callings in intellectual or spiritual realms of life.

Yet, we continue the language of `mystery’ as if we were still nomads gathered around a stone altar. We have no good answers to those modern questions, about pain and suffering, which tie back to ancient questions and we have no good answers to interestingly rich versions of these difficult questions which have arisen in our days. I’m pointing to such questions as:

• What greater, moral sense can we make of human life in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes which are bloody and seemingly morally chaotic?
• What sense can we make of the physical stuff of Creation in light of the discovery that even matter and energy are contingent things, not categorical entities, and that they have evolved and developed from more abstract forms of being?

We have no good answers to these and many other important questions, not because those who call themselves “images of God” have any right to shy away from participating in the Creator’s acts-of-being by way of understanding them. We have no good answers because we’ve not shown the faith and courage to deal with these questions in their modern or ancient formulations.

I think I’ve come up with a pretty good way of dealing with these and other questions which have arisen in our age. There is no doubt that we need answers which allow us to talk of Jesus Christ being the incarnate Son of God, of our salvation and resurrection into a life shared with God, of God as being the true Creator of all that is not Him, of His purposes in creating this world so chaotic and disordered at times.

I’ll give a very quick overview of what I’ve developed, the sort of complete Christian worldview which is needed though someone might produce a better one. I invite anyone to try. I don’t pretend to have the final answers and even if mine prove to be good enough for now, they’ll prove to be inadequate eventually, and eventually might be just the next generation.

First, we need a good understanding of being, of the stuff of which our bodies are made as well as the bodies of other creatures. I’ve proposed, consistent with both the school of St. John the Apostle and quantum mechanics, that relationships are primary, that stuff comes into existence and can be shaped or reshaped by relationships such as love. I’ve also proposed, consistent with modern understandings of the nature of spacetime and mass and energy, as developed in cosmological physics and particles physics, that being lies on a spectrum ranging from the abstract to the concrete with the concrete being shaped from, made more particular than, more abstract forms of being which are still present in the concrete stuff of this particular world. A marketing slogan: concrete things are frozen soul-stuff. (Judging by modern physics, more abstract forms of being are `hotter’, higher in energy.)

Second, we need to understand the human mind and human being in a more complete sense. I recently put a new book on my website, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, which deals with this issue in a way which is certainly preliminary but—at least in my opinion—far closer to the truth than any other such understanding of human being. Based upon modern neurosciences and evolutionary biology as well as my understanding of our relationship to our Creator, I’ve developed the idea that our minds are the result of that very complex organ, the human brain, shaping itself in response to the surrounding environments right up to the level of all of Creation. This shaping takes place on the species level over vast amounts of time, on the cultural level over generations, and on the personal level over our lifetimes. Furthermore, man can be viewed as mind and heart and hands with the strong qualification that our being becomes unified, in a God-like way, as we become true persons and as we prepare to share the life of God. Beyond even that, based upon the Church’s own admission that She is not omnicompetent and upon my limited understanding of history and politics and sociology, I’ve reinterpreted our understanding of the Body of Christ to be more inclusive of human nature and worthwhile human activities rather than limiting it to `churchy’ aspects of human nature. Download and read the book for more.

Third, we have to return to the Biblical understanding, shared with history and literature and even cosmological physics, that we live in a story which has many contingent aspects, even a certain amount of freedom suitable to our creaturely beings—greater freedom comes as we begin to share God’s life.

Fourth, we need to see and to truly live the purpose of Creation: the birth and maturing of the mortal manifestation of the Body of Christ.

The above, if fleshed out properly, will give a good Christian understanding of our world as a concrete level of Creation, but a level in which the more abstract levels, mathematical and metaphysical, can be seen present in the concrete. Such an understanding would allow a more coherent, more plausible, way of speaking with and dealing with such difficult issues as abortion, birth-control, stem-cell technology, waging of wars, capital punishment, and the organization of our political and economic communities. As things stand, we tend to confront these issues by opposing our assertions to the assertions of those holding different, but even more incoherent, views of reality.

This article by William B. Hurlbut, St. Francis, Christian Love, and the Biotechnological Future, was written by a medical doctor who apparently does research in the neurosciences. He’s trying to deal with our moral confusions as they specifically impact the biotechnological issues and has many good things to say, largely from the viewpoint of a Christian with deep respect for the ways in which St. Francis of Assisi viewed Creation and dealt with matters of human life in that Creation. There’s good stuff here but confusion as well. Professor Hurlbut first errs by engaging in that original sin of Christian moral theology, theodicy or the effort to vindicate an all-good and all-knowing and all-powerful God in light of the natural and moral evil in this world—as defined by human creatures. Professor Hurlbut tells us:

How, within the creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, there can be both suffering and love remains a mystery. But clearly for Francis, that creation was simultaneously material and spiritual—sacramental through and through.

Why is this a mystery? Because many thinkers over the century have imposed their own schemes upon a reality far richer than anything which might fit in their heads. Because many thinkers have thought to judge God’s work without having a good handle on God’s purposes in creating us.

Years ago, the Calvinist philosopher, Alvin Platinga, who works in a modern analytic framework, presented serious arguments that any such questions presume we can know enough to judge God, that we can judge whether the good which God is to accomplish in this world justifies all the pain and suffering and moral corruption and so forth. Professor Hurlbut has asked questions which imply we can evaluate God’s Creation in this way but he also proposes near the end of his essay the position more compatible with Christian beliefs:

All of creation, and its evolutionary ascent to mind and moral awareness, may be recognized as a kind of living language in an epic tale of the deepest spiritual significance. Through the eyes of faith, the entire cosmic order of time and space and material being may be seen as an arena for the revelation of Love, for the creation of a creature capable of ascending to an apprehension of its Creator; but more profoundly, for the reaching down, the compassionate condescension of Love Himself.

We’ve moved from theodicy into the dynamic realm of narratives. That’s good and proper. It’s what the Bible teaches us to do. Christ didn’t present Himself as a problem to be solved, nor did St. Francis view life as a problem to be solved. To be sure, I’ve spent a large amount of energy upon the metaphysical problems of being, “What is stuff and relationships and so on?” but I did so on my way to understanding this world which is stuff engaged in a story being told by God. As soon as we have a handle on the nature of matter and energy and spacetime, a handle on relationships and things or love and stuff, we can move to the main task of understanding all of that in the context of the story God is telling.

The questions remain but they become measurements of the gap between what we are and what we are to be if we are to share God’s thoughts and even His life.

I develop views of human being, individual and communal (right up to the Body of Christ), in that book I recently released, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. I also have written a large number of essays over the previous seven years as I developed that viewpoint on my blog at my website, Acts of Being. Most of the writings on that blog have been collected into a large book, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2012.

This article, The Invisible Hand Illusion, deals with a laboratory testing trick by which psychologists can make people feel as if they have an invisible hand. Ed Yong writes:

Hold your hand up in front of your face. It is patently obvious that the five-fingered thing in front of you is your hand, and the empty space next to it is not. But this ability to recognize your own body is more complicated than it first appears, and can be fooled through a surprisingly simple trick.

…

[A psychological `trick' which had become a popular party trick] suggested to [Henrik Ehrsson from the Karolinska Institute] that even though we have a lifetime’s experience of owning our bodies, this seemingly ingrained feeling is actually very fragile. Our brain constructs it all the time using information from our senses.

And so it is that clever psychologists can make you think you have an invisible hand.

It’s odd to those who feel a need to think of a human being, their own self or another, as having some sort of well-formed existence given at conception or maturity or whatever. This is the mistake of thinking of an empirical creature, a human being, as metaphysically grounded, a complete being thought of as perhaps a `person’. I might describe this as `backdoor’ Platonism, a replacement of an ultimately erroneous but plausible and rationally stated understanding of being by mere assumptions, prejudices of a sort guaranteed to decay into superstitions if held too firmly and too consistently.

We are embodied but our individual `selves’ are constructed by our interactions with our own bodies and with a lot of surrounding entities, some of them abstract and not embodied, at least not in a direct way. (Embodiment can be a misleading description of, say, a community but it is a valid description if properly qualified by references, for example, to past and future generations or even the me of last year and the you of ten years from now.)

We are, in some reductionistic but legitimate sense, mappings in our brains, mappings which include both our individual and communal selves. In a book I released for download recently, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, I wrote:

In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by Dana Foundation, there was a reprint of an article I Feel Your Pain which was published at Salon. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain can be felt when we see others suffering.

Why not? The destruction by fire of cells on the tips of our fingers doesn’t magically lead to pain felt in our brains or in parts of the nervous system between finger and brain. There is no magical, nor metaphysical, foundation to the processes of pain in our bodies. It’s a result of biological selection processes which favored nervous systems which registered damage in such ways as to force the organism to react strongly. There is something real about pain but that reality is mediated by way of nervous system interactions more the result of tinkering than of design of the sort possible to modern engineers.

It seems quite reasonable that we would be made so that those brain-cells registering pain might well react to the pain of others, especially others who might be members of our communities. It’s this simple: if we build drones or other robotic devices to monitor forests for fires, then any reaction tied to direct detection of a fire can also be activated if the robot sees another robot acting as if it detected a fire. In a human being, or another social animal, we can merely add a mapping `module’ in the brain to put ourselves in the place of another and that reaction is experienced as something akin to the pain we would feel if we were actually in that situation ourselves.

Tentatively, we can say that empathy is the response of certain brain-cells to certain sorts of stimuli. That stimuli can be directly provided by the surrounding environment or it can be provided by signaling of various sorts.

Is that really empathy? Is that what ties us together during times of distress and trouble? Is that what motivates some to take in orphans and others to go off to serve in regions just hit by natural disasters? Is that what leads Joe to feel sorry for a man who just lost his beloved wife even when he’s the jerk who cheated Joe out of a promotion? We seem to have a need for some sort of higher explanation, something that would raise our emotions—loves and hates—into a realm more pure than our world of flesh and blood, dirt and rocks. There’s no reason to expect such an explanation exists. Though the entities of this concrete realm be shaped from more abstract stuff, neither concrete entities of this world nor their complex aspects are to be found in some realm of ethereal being and beings.

This world seems to contain various sorts of two-edged swords. It’s hardly surprising that we come into existence as, shall we say, tentative individual persons and communal persons by way of processes which also leave us vulnerable to magician’s tricks and maybe to manipulation by various sorts of human predators.

There’s a recently published essay, Sex After Christianity, which is interesting and insightful and tells a sketchy story of the loss of Christianity in the United States (probably the entire West), a story which might be sketchy but is more plausible than what you might gather from the way most Christians speak and far more plausible than the Nixonian gibberish about the “moral majority.” Mr. Dreher points to some standard scholarly studies of American social views which showed we were a sexually `liberated’ people even back in the decades before the 1960s. A strong version of this claim was recently raised by a scientist’s discovery that Penicillin, Not the Pill, May Have Launched the Sexual Revolution. Once the dangers of syphilis were thwarted, Americans were hitting the sack with a variety of partners not their spouses, and this by the 1950s, not the 1960s. See A Medicine Which Saved Lives and Destroyed Moral Order? for my take on this situation.

Even mainstream histories of the United States, more than a little whitewashed, will tell the tale of Americans being radical individualists, making their own moral and social rules, by the 1700s or so, as soon as a little prosperity freed them from traditional dependencies. From the beginning, we Americans have been willing to give much, our freedom or our souls, in return for a good paycheck and benefits but we don’t readily bow to the authority of family or other human communities, not even Church. Heck, God Himself has no right to tell us how to think or feel or act, unless He sends us lots of pennies from Heaven and even then… In other words, we Americans, and others in the modern West, are little different in our raw moral characteristics from other human beings for all our feelings of being special.

In Mr. Dreher’s essay, Sex After Christianity, we can read:

[I]n the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

I would rephrase things, would write of civilization requiring us to shape ourselves to certain habits of mind and heart and hands rather than speaking of deprivation, but the analysis is basically spot-on and the entire essay is good as an analysis of our loss of respect for Christian views of marriage. Yet, there is something amiss. I’ll concentrate on the strange gap: the acknowledgment of the loss of a “meaningful cosmos” with also an apparent loss of Christian initiative resulting in the failure to even try to find a newly meaningful cosmos. The best our Christian intellectuals seem able to hope for is to patch-up the old “meaningful cosmos.” Why bother with the inconvenient fact, as one example, that our Christian view of human nature in the West comes from St. Augustine’s endorsement of the “fall from a state of grace” understanding of the story of Adam and Eve, an understanding he knew and presented as being in conflict with his alternative speculation that men arose within the natural world, not as a special creation in a special state of grace. In this other view, men arose from lower species. We now know men did so arise and we apparently have few thinkers so smart as Augustine as to see we need to radically rework our understanding of human nature. Fr. Stanley Jaki, the polymath scholar, labeled Augustine’s decision to go with “fall from state of grace” as the most damaging and most cowardly intellectual act in history; and Fr. Jaki was mostly a big admirer of Augustine. We Christians did our best to move out of this cosmos a long time ago; we are perhaps only now learning we have to live in the cosmos as God made it and not as we would like it.

Mr. Dreher sees that we Christians must struggle on cosmological grounds rather than moralistic grounds. So there are some other Christians who agree with me on that issue but there are, so far as I know, none who are willing to actually engage my efforts to so struggle, to join with me in assent or respectful debate aimed at some better view. The readership of my blog grows slowly and there are increasing numbers of downloads of my books, even into countries where Christian writings are, shall we say, frowned upon, but I see few signs that others are actively agreeing with my way of carrying out this struggle or trying to develop other ways. Yet, it’s early in this sort of struggle, a sort which is carried out over centuries of seeming peace interspersed by open conflict. In a manner of speaking, God began seriously irritating me about 30 years ago and forced me into a desert 25 years ago. I shouldn’t expect others to be able to re-turn toward God’s Creation any faster than did I. And the initial stages of looking into a blinding light, of learning to tolerate it and responding to it in such a way as to reshape your own self, are—shall we say—painful in ways described well by my confirmation saint, St. John of the Cross.

We have no meaningful cosmos and we have plenty of analyses which tell us this, all from a group of viewpoints describable as baptized paganism. See Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small and Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason for my analyses of speeches by Pope Benedict XVI, a man who was far too good for our age just because he had shaped himself to the task of helping us to leave the Christian “intellectual ghetto” as Etienne Gilson, a man of similar outlook and temperament, termed the places where we hide from God and His Creation. In the speech which is the subject of the second essay, Pope Benedict XVI told us: “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.” In any case, Joseph Ratzinger, as Pope and before that, has failed to accomplish much in this area during his own public career. We can only pray he planted many seeds.

Over these 25 years, I’ve moved toward a complete Christian understanding of Creation, stuff and relationships and narratives and so forth. My main blog, Acts of Being is something of an intimidating pile of essays written at an average pace of six a month or so since the middle of 2006. There are also some relevant essays at my other blog (it exists but is no longer active), To See a World in a Grain of Sand.

I’ve collected and partially organized most of those essays in book form, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2012, and it can be freely downloaded; it includes references to other downloadable books in the Overview. This collection is somewhat of a work in progress as I have no editors nor any coworkers; a bad situation since I’m inclined to carelessness such as the tendency to read what I meant to write rather than what I did write. Many essays need to be cleaned up and lots of typographical improvements could be made, but I think the substance is the best any Christian thinker can offer in response to the questions raised in the modern world, questions answerable only by producing an understanding of Creation through use of both revealed knowledge and modern empirical knowledge, both subjected to speculation.

In the above referenced essay, Sex After Christianity, Mr. Dreher writes, “You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).” Of course, natural-law theory convinces no one; it’s based upon an understanding of nature, of created being, of God’s way of telling this story which is our world; but our current natural-law theories are based upon an understanding which is centuries old and which ignores modern empirical knowledge—knowledge of nature, an understanding which sounds like gibberish to young men and women in our society, young men and women who’ve been watching documentaries about genes and evolution as well as historical documentaries which present a bad image of Christian civilization by telling the truth. That these documentaries, and much of the teaching in schools, are out of context is not the fault of the modern secularists and pagans but rather that of the Christians who had a great civilization and failed to protect it and nurture it.

Apparently, we Christians had better things to do than preserve the Christian civilization which was the work of multitudes of our ancestors over many centuries. Or maybe there have simply not been enough Christians in recent centuries to form a viable cultural mass. In any case, most human beings, other than speculative thinkers, are not to be persuaded. They are usually to be raised to be part of a story, whether the creation myths and heroic legends of a tribe or the more fact-based, but often ideologically deformed, histories of the modern West or any of its major regions. What’s shocking from this angle is the ease with which such thinkers as Locke and Kant were able to deform a Christian viewpoint into a de-communalized and, consequently, secularized viewpoint. The struggle for salvation became the journey toward the Big Rock Candy Mountain, at least in the United States.

In earlier writings, Joseph Ratzinger wrote of moral irresponsibility on the part of modern Christians who had inherited a treasure of a civilization and then failed to care for it. Etienne Gilson had written of a failure to provide Christian answers to the modern questions (circa 1800) followed by a retreat into a Christian intellectual ghetto. In a similar vein, though it might appear different at first, Hermann Melville spoke of a streak of moral insanity in the American character, an insanity which was a rebellion against God and His Creation not quite good enough for us Americans. Melville was seconded by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. at least so far as Emerson and Thoreau were concerned; these oh-so American philosophers despised communal human nature, that of—ultimately—the Body of Christ. Again, Americans had already turned away from the God of Jesus Christ more than a century ago and perhaps well before that. How many ways can I point out that this was never a Christian country?

In my recently released and freely downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, I propose a general Christian understanding, more exact as well, of human being. This understanding pays no attention to metaphysical categories such as those of vice and virtue, concentrating instead upon the effort to develop a moral order which builds upon our stuff as understood through our best empirical knowledge but disciplines it to our best understanding of God’s story. This understanding also assumes that we were born and live to participate in the growth and development of the Body of Christ. It may or may not prove another charge against Christianity that I found myself relying upon insightful analyses of the communal nature of Biblical religions made by the Jewish thinkers Jacob Neusner and Abraham Heschel; Martin Buber also is in the background though not explicitly mentioned.

Let me head in a truly positive direction… Christianity is imperialistic. The human race needs a Christian civilization, not because any Christian institutions can be said to be objectively superior to other human institutions but rather because the Body of Christ is the entirety of what is worthwhile in individual and communal human being, what is to be saved into everlasting form. The Church Herself is an organ in the Body of Christ, the organ of worship and moral conscience. She must serve God’s story primarily, serving even the poor not in some knee-jerk, bleeding-heart way but in the way dictated by that story. Politics must play its proper role as well as poetry, the deployment of technology as well as the esthetic aspects of architecture, our worship and the management of our religious communities as well as our ethnic-cultural activities, should be the best they can be by serving God in His freely chosen role as Creator and story-teller. The Body of Christ is so complex a `network’ of individual and communal human beings as likely to be yet beyond the descriptive capabilities of our best modern sciences. Christian theology and philosophy have yet to respond to God’s Creation as we now see it and, consequently, have yet to join ranks with `modern sciences’. When this happens, Christian thinkers will be able not only to make sense of what we have learned about Creation; they will be able to help shape and direct the future explorations of Creation.

Modern empirical knowledge of human beings plain and simply doesn’t seem to fit into our inherited categories. Vice and virtue, emotion and feeling and thought and act, don’t seem to provide good structures for a proper understanding of human nature. (Once again, see my recently released book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being for very preliminary discussions of this and related issues.) It’s certainly relevant to discussions of any plausible understanding of marriage that modern scientists have found `male-ness’ has more to do with brain structure and brain processes than with bulging muscles or even the penis, but there’s nothing in Christian anthropological theories that could make sense of the humorously serious comment a brain-scientist made decades ago: the brain is the primary human sex organ. To Christian intellectuals, a certain human being is male and, thus, God put a male brain in his skull. Very simple. Makes no sense in the context of modern knowledge of individual and communal human being, but it’s very simple.

We like simple and don’t care for all the evidence that God shaped a world in which time and space are best described by differential geometry rather than the straightforward Euclidean geometry which generated such simple views of eternity and of the physical relationship of Heaven and Hell. We like simple and don’t care much for the evidence that God shaped human being out of nonliving matter by way of sometimes violent and bloody evolutionary processes rather than putting the life in Adam by way of an act of magic.

This all does matter to all aspects of a Christian understanding of Creation. I wrote in the previous paragraph about our preference for the simplicity of Euclidean geometry over that of differential geometry. We should note that a Ptolemaic, Aristotelian, Euclidean view of Creation allowed Dante to write his Divine Comedy and that view was the best available at the time, accepted by scientists and philosophers as well as theologians and poets. We can no longer speak in coherent or explicit terms of Heaven and Hell—modern Christians are great hand-wavers—just because any efforts to speak thus would lead to absurdities until we learn how to speak of God’s Creation in terms compatible with what we know of our Universe, that realm of His Creation which has been explored and analyzed with such courage and honesty and energy in recent centuries. When those who try to proclaim the Christian truths have no way to speak of Christian Heaven, the world of the resurrected in my terms, is it any wonder than many are losing their faith in the main Christian story of the resurrection of Jesus? How can they believe in their own possible resurrections as part of the Body of Christ? If Christ has not risen from the dead, our sacrifices of sexual pleasures are in vain. If Christ has risen from the dead, where could He possibly be? I have a tentative answer which is more than hand-waving, but no one seems interested in exploring that answer with me, and I have only 24 hours in my days.

We Christians have not done our duty. We have not kept that Easter message alive in the language and concepts of the modern world and we can no longer say that Christ rose from the dead, literally, in the flesh and in His divinity, without sounding like actors in a toga movie or outright lunatics. This is our fault and not that of the enemies of Christianity and certainly not the fault of the young men and women who have left the Church in recent years.

An article about the analysis of monetary flows in the continental states of the U.S. tells us, “By combining network theory with the travels of our dollar bills, the ‘real’ effective boundaries in a new USA are far simpler, reflecting where money ‘stays’ as opposed to more arbitrary state boundaries.” These mathematical analyses result in 8 such regions where “money stays.” The resulting map can be found in the article: The 8 United States Of A New Monetary America. There is also a link at an open-access science website to download the article summarizing the mathematical analysis. This study looked at the regions as replacements for the 50 states in a continuously existing United States, but I’ll shift to the idea that these regions might well define sovereign nations—at least until processes of federation produce a more coherent republic at a larger scale.

What I find interesting is that the regions correspond well to those proposed by a Russian academic, Igor Panarin, who proposed in the 1990s that the United States is politically incoherent and would collapse as a nation and form into regional nations—see As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. . It also corresponds to regions I’ve seen proposed, seriously and tongue-in-cheek at the same time, because of cultural differences within the United States. For a variety of reasons, I’ve also claimed that a similar breakup of the United States into such regions would produce more coherent political systems and also more coherent cultures. Once able to live as independent political and economic and cultural communities, those regions would, in my opinion, be wise to move toward a smoother integration into a North American or even western hemisphere federation.

Powerful armies and predatory banks can both be used, and arguably are being used in Europe and the United States, to protect centralized powers which would be endangered by even the attempt to reorganize countries or institutions so that they are more coherent, in both structural ways and dynamic (narrative) ways.

I would emphasize that a federation still larger than the United States makes good sense and would seem a logical development in a world I believe to be the story of the formation of the Body of Christ, an all-inclusive human civilization in which the most important organ is the Catholic Church. Under this viewpoint, the end-point in this mortal realm would be a Christian civilization which includes the entirety of the human race as well as a bewildering network of networks of nations and worship communities not fully under the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of educational institutions and symphony orchestras, of businesses and nature clubs, of extended families and urban neighborhoods,

For a discussion of how I think human communities should develop, see Conservative Politics in light of Evolutionary and Developmental Processes. Don’t expect a description of desirable communities nor a recipe of how to build an allegedly good community. Human communities are more like organisms than machines, potentially like a world in the sense of a coherent narrative and not like an engineered building. Clearly, no one intended for these regions of more coherent cultures, regions which also are where the “money stays” to develop. No government agencies regulate them and their cultures or flows of money. In fact, government agencies try to encourage or even force the homogenization of culture and economy on the national level.

These regions developed despite the desires of the American central powers. They developed because of developmental processes involving both individual human beings and small communities of human beings and the way they interact with others.