Acts of Being

The state as we know it in the United States and most countries in this year of 2011 can’t be limited without destroying that state. This is because — in Jeffersonian terms — the state as it currently exists in most countries is an instrument of a vague group of human beings which we could call the predatory class; these morally disordered creatures have taken control of the governments of these modern states. This current generation of predators are certainly good at destroying, even at the level of entire countries, but not so good at even profiting from that destruction, let alone being good at building something worthwhile.

How did this happen? As badly behaved as the British government was at times in the 1700s and 1800s, it never was guilty of that sort of mass-murder and destruction of the infrastructure of entire countries.

C.S. Lewis once claimed that Hitler and Stalin had not lost. In the way the West chose to fight them, the peoples of the West became the disciples of those brutal men who were much better at destroying than at building much that was useful let alone good or beautiful. The leaders of the modern West are very much in this mold. However much they like to soak in their own morally-advanced juices, they know only destruction, the reduction of enemies to submissive, quivering creatures and the reduction of sewage systems and hospitals to piles of rubble.

To save these states, the United States and Germany and so forth, legitimate governments would have to be formed by some morally well-formed human beings from the producer class, preferably having formed smaller-scale groups with interests and legal rights tied to the future. Then they would have to take over and powerful, greedy men are rarely thrown out of power without the type of violence which simply places a different group of powerful, greedy men into power, but that’s not a set of issues that I can discuss in this short essay.

More importantly and relevant to the themes of this essay: I see no signs that the ordinary citizens or even the most capable of producers have learned much. If the United States is rescued as a prosperous republic by some miracle, the American citizenry would allow another predatory takeover of the United States so long as the new predators were careful to appeal to the fears and desires dominant in the public marketplaces of our sad, sad days. I imagine the situation is little different in other parts of the West.

I’ll sidetrack a small bit to give a warning to the wary: membership in the class of predator or that of producer isn’t pre-determined but is, at least partly, taken on. Nor are most of us pure producer or pure predator. To use some oversimplified historical examples from a crucial period of American history: Henry Ford — despite some rough characteristics — was almost a pure producer of wealth, Andrew Carnegie probably had a bit more predator in him, John D. Rockefeller proved he could be a producer but opted to become largely pure predator, and J.P. Morgan was a predatory financier from the start to end.

The modern movement towards democracies and republics which has led to the state as we know was largely enabled by the freeing of community members to be individuals under kings and some early advocates of democratic or republican forms of governments. This process was partly driven by offers on the part of power-seekers to relieve the troubled of some of their suffering. It was also partly driven by the mobility of opportunity and the overlapping mobility caused by the chance to escape various forms of persecution. The first cause is more important to my current thought and I’ll ignore the ways in which communities dissolved or weakened simply because their members left for better opportunities or at least the dream of such.

The modern state has continued to secure its power by offering help to those suffering from abuses of power in smaller-scale communities. How many fathers are abusive? It doesn’t matter to the leaders of modern states and their employed do-gooders any more than it mattered to King Louis XIV and his do-gooders in the 17th century or any other would-be tyrants in history who have sought power by shattering natural human communities. So long as the modern state can elicit complaints from some allegedly abused children, you can interfere in all families. This is a game American politicians are good at, so good they’ve taken their show on the road managing, for example, to show the world some of the bad and some imaginary bad done by Saddam Hussein before moving in to wipe out all the good he’d done without more than a show of healing the damage he’d done to his country. (Iraq had good infrastructure before the American military destroyed it, that is, destroyed sewage systems and fresh-water systems and schools and hospitals.)

In all likelihood, as I said above, the American citizenry and the citizenry of other countries of the West would fall for this sort of a routine once again and the related routine offering of government jobs to more than can be supported by the rest of the population. I’m not saying that all government jobs are useless or dangerous. In fact, in alliance with politicians, such legitimate workers as doctors and ditch-diggers have grabbed a large enough share of the economy to cause damage. And then there are bankers… Nuff said

In any case, politicians have the power and ambitious, stupid politicians have the motive, to make governments excessively large. Nathaniel Hawthorne pointed out in the 1850s, in the introduction to The Scarlett Letter that Americans will seek promises of financial security of this sort and are quite willing to sell their liberty in return for government jobs and other such frauds. Our moral characters haven’t gotten any tougher since then.

This would indicate that a general regime of individual freedom isn’t going to work the next time either, though I think other possibilities exist which don’t lie on that simplistic spectrum of possibilities from individual freedom of the modern libertarian (or 19th century liberal) variety over to modern style tyrannies, but let me zag a bit now that I’ve zigged — as is my custom.

I’ve been very critical in the past toward my fellow Americans — that is, ordinary citizens and not power-seekers — and toward others in the West and I probably shouldn’t have been. The Bible tells me, the Catholic Church and nearly all Christian churches tell me, that most of the brethren of Jesus Christ are sheep, not shepherds and not even brave by the limited standards of sheep. This helps us to understand what’s at stake with some of the important questions I’ve tried to raise when I address political and moral issues.

Why do we let legitimate governments mutate into cancerous masses? Are we so taken in by the big show of federal money to put fancy swimming pools into schools not able to teach basic skills of reading and writing? Sure it is that the pools were intended to improve the physical fitness or make up for past prejudices against some racial or ethnic or religious groups. Or at least the politicians lead us to believe they are truly compassionate and devoted to the public good. At the same time those state-centered leaders do what they can to destroy the authority of those communities which have retained enough coherence to remain true communities in the face of the state and its allies in Hollywood and on Wall St.

As I’ve been doing for several months, I’ll turn to The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue, seeking to cast some light upon our modern mess:

[I]t is characteristic of liberalism to make politicians of us all; and in this case we find liberalism promoting alertness to trends among the population at large. Indeed, to be liberal is to accept an obligation to be concerned with matters beyond our direct responsibilities. [page 109]

In these words, I find a strong pointer to another reason for seeking to be a member of a concrete, local community which is represented in centralized governments rather than being an individual member of an abstract, fluid herd voting for a morally compromised product of political machining. Those whose primary energies are devoted to family and local communities, those who devote more of their remaining energies to following professional football than to the most casual readings about the countries recently invaded by the armies of the West, troop off to elect the scoundrels who will decide which countries we’ll invade over the next few years. By making government the work of all, at least for one day every year or two, our political masters have made sure government isn’t the special work of those who know enough and have the qualities to protect those who belong to their communities. We have also, borrowing from Thomas Jefferson, developed a “perverse literacy” in ourselves and this has led to an “invincible ignorance” which leads most to pay no attention to the thoughts of those few who’ve bothered to learn something about the modern world. The invincibly ignorant feel it good enough to learn a few convenient talking points and to maybe learn something about the issues as defined by policy wonks who live in a world where the nomads of Afghanistan are no more than pawns in political games played in Washington and London and Rome.

There are a lot of things going on in the modern world. There are a number of long-ignored problems which are developing into festering sores the size of Mt. Etna. Meanwhile, we allow ourselves to be taught that any Vietnamese or Iraqi peasant who shoots a heavily armed American in his backyard is an evil creature and we concern ourselves with so-called issues which have little to do with reality and a lot to do with the egos and squabbles of those who live in political snake-pits.

So: What is going on in our day and age? What should we be doing, for example, to return the West to some path of moral and intellectual sanity?

I don’t think we can understand our world by laying matters out in a schematic form. There’s a story going on, a story being told by God, and it’s not a matter of intuiting a priori or any other metaphysical truths, but rather a matter of paying attention to the actual past, on evolutionary and historical and annual scales, and trying to figure out the nature of the physical surroundings and the nature of the characters and the types of events which move the story along smoothly and the types which disrupt the story in various ways. Let me zig again to quote Professor Minogue on his use of `state’ to refer to a legitimate form of society and associated government:

The State is not an aspect of society; it is the only unity that society can lay claim to. [page 131]

This is as good an excuse I can find for a somewhat delayed retreat from my recent tendency to take the libertarian understanding of `state’ as something always bad, always imposed upon a population who should be free of central authority. Let me take a definition of state, from an older and more solid dictionary (Webster’s 1913 dictionary from The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48):

State: A political body, or body politic; the whole body of people who are united under one government, whatever may be the form of the government; a nation.

The definition says nothing about where power originates which would seem to be the entire problem; certainly, the origin and nature of power, as well as the need to protect it from the inordinately greedy and ambitious, was the major political problem of their day for some prominent Founding Fathers of the United States and most especially John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in their work as Founders and also in their correspondence during their years of retirement. It is also clearly a major problem in to some highly-regarded advocates of liberty such as William Lecky and John Dahlberg (Lord Acton), and others who occupied islands of sanity and intelligence in this modern desert. For an intimidating list of books by serious students of these issues — including Lecky and Dahlberg, see The Online Library of Liberty. Many of these books are out of copyright and available for free download as pdf files.

I admit to still having some reluctance to use `state’ in that sort of good sense, however tentative and qualified that goodness, perhaps because I started coming to some dim awareness of my political environment during the years of the American war against the Vietnamese people followed by Watergate followed by the disasters we know as the Ford and Carter administrations — Monday morning quarterbacks can see these disasters were largely, though not entirely, caused by Johnson and the criminal way he financed a criminal war. Then, things seemed to get much better and, like many of my generation, I was lulled to sleep by the future-eating prosperity of the mid-1980s through 2000 or so. (Actually, I was a little ahead of the game, waking up to our dangerous situation around 1990 but that was forced by some crises in my personal life.)

As a young and very confused advocate of conservative thought and behavior, I had hopes that Reagan would re-establish something like the decent and fairly well-ordered small-town world I’d known as I grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s. I was under the illusion for a few years that this had truly happened and then, for another ten years, under the illusion the Reagan Revolution had been for real and betrayed after the fact by Bush and other Republicans. Oddly enough — in retrospect — I can see the world I longed for was a somewhat mindless world which wasn’t so good for me but that’s another story I’ve at least hinted at in other writings. There’s now historical evidence, including testimony from Paul Craig Roberts and Angelo Codevilla, that Reagan had honestly planned to do what he promised in his first election and his administration had been somehow bullied (don’t know what the threat was) into accepting George H.W. Bush and other pro-statist insiders who proved to be saboteurs of the most treacherous sort. I knew there were traitors to Reagan and to the American nation as a whole but didn’t know how early they’d done their work. Murray Rothbard has also written of Reagan’s campaign promises to cut back on the power of the bankers and their creatures in the Council for Foreign Relations, Trilateral Council, etc. David Rockefeller obtained a one-on-one meeting with Reagan after he’d won the election and Reagan appointed a cabinet dominated by charter members of the Trilateral Council, such as Schultz and Weinberger.

In retrospect, things look very bad for any who would speak of the American state as being a morally ordered community, one caring for all its members and — at the very least — maintaining a level playing field. But we should remember that failures in a dynamic world of evolution and development don’t mean that the effort was wrongly directed. It might be that multiple tries are needed for one reason or another. In other words, our failures are likely the failures of creatures living in the early stages of an evolutionary process, a process in which a variety of social relationships are forming and a variety of ways of stabilizing those relationships are coming and going. The American State as we know it is going, probably pretty fast. Such is true of most of the states in the West as well as those around the world, even in the Orient, which have modeled themselves upon some orthodox or heretical view of political systems advocated in the academic and journalistic communities in New York City or Paris and sometimes actually tried in the American State or the Soviet State or the Italian Fascist State.

If the nets of salvation are to gather in many, communities of various sorts are needed to care for the many who don’t have the initiative or the talents to explore Creation and to think through what they discover. Communities of various sorts are needed for the blind and the timid — if they are to be saved. That is to say — human communities must care for the weak and cowardly in the flock. After all, God could have created a world which would have terrified and broken the strongest and most hardheaded of men. By God’s highest standards, all human beings are lacking in intelligence and initiative and courage and faith, but, in His mercy, He has set lower standards for us.

I’m now ready to claim that we need some form of the state to compensate for weaknesses and to satisfy positive desires of the members of the Body of Christ. I’m also claiming that God will give us what is needed for that Body.

What then has gone wrong with the state in recent centuries? Let me just hint at an answer by addressing one specific problem I see in our efforts to form communities and to govern those communities.

The problem with the United States is not that we’re currently paying no respect to the Constitution written in 1789 but rather that we think it possible to so structure a growing and developing community, political or otherwise. The Catholic Church has a similar problem as do many other communities of Christian or other nature. The Pope is less the father of a growing and developing community — as most recent Popes would prefer to be — and more the king of a community assumed to be frozen into a structure that it will take on in heaven. We maximize the dangers and damages of rapid change, and lose all control over our most immediate future, when we treat the United States and the Catholic Church and so many other human communities as frozen structures. It would be dangerous, and an intellectual error, to assume a community is the same as an individual organism but it’s a simple observational truth that they are similar in many ways, including the fact that they are developing entities rather than entities which can be designed at one time for all time. No wise parent determines details of their child’s life when that child is but an infant. Even in the most traditional of societies, the farmer’s son might become an apprentice to a blacksmith, the farmer’s daughter might have to learn how to arrange the more complicated, if more luxurious, life of the household of a major merchant. We don’t know what God’s world will offer us or thrown at us, as individuals and as communities. To predetermine our responses is to live yesterday’s life in tomorrow’s world, it is to be planning to drive a horse-and-buggy in a world which suddenly is building interstate highways. In the realm of politics, it also to put your children’s life under the control of men who have learned the tricks of gaining and using, or abusing, power in such a mindless society.

Political structures — indeed, all communities — evolve in the way of stories rather than being entities from a short list given to us, once and for all time, by Aristotle. To a Christian, the proper form of a state is that which serves the Body of Christ, as a whole and as a collection of individuals. The proper form of a state isn’t that which enables efficient economic development, though competent and wise statesmen wouldn’t interfere in matters not directly the business of the state. The proper form of a state isn’t one which allows ambitious men to stride as glorious conquerors across the stages of history, though such men play a role in that history perhaps similar to the role of various brutal predators in the story of biological evolution. The proper form of a state isn’t one which either interferes with religious matters nor one which serves human religious institutions. I have even come to believe the Christian Church herself is but one organ in the Body of Christ though a particularly important organ. In this mortal realm, it may well be proper that the Church and state are wary of each other as their overlapping roles develop.

In any case, we need some sort of centralized political authority, something which corresponds vaguely to our current idea of a state, but we don’t really know what form that state should take on and we certainly don’t know how to build one. But that’s part of our problem. We think to build such a complex entity when it needs to evolve and develop. We need to learn how to be energetic and intelligent characters in a story rather than strange engineers designing the future of our communities as if designing a road-system.

Love is probably undefinable but we can at least understand some aspects of that love and can probably come to a substantial narrative understanding of some loves in their specific contexts. We can maybe even understand some of the ways in which a truer and incorruptible love will make the world of the resurrected, heaven, a far better world than this.

In the poem, The Country of Marriage, Wendell Berry, speaking to his wife, prophesies:

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.

There’s more, before and after, but what interested me was the last sentence in what I’ve quoted: “In [love's] abundance it survives our thirst.” Love never runs out. This points to a claim, a la St. John the Evangelist, that “God is love.” I’m making my way toward an issue I’ve dealt with before in a very cursory way. In an essay I published on this blog more than four years ago, What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven?, I tried to make sense of the question in that title, a question seemingly simple but actually the question needed to be answered by anyone who takes seriously (without necessarily holding any strong beliefs) about both the nature of this universe as currently understood and also the possibility of a world where some or all might live for time without end with their God, whether understood in Christian or Jewish or Islamic terms. In effect, we need to be able to speak about created being in a way that can help us to believe that there can be a realm, a form, of created being not subject to decay.

As I’ve stated many times: the Christian principle is that grace completes and perfects nature rather than replacing nature. If this principle be true, there must be some way of talking coherently about the world of the resurrected — Heaven in traditional terms– in terms drawn from our understanding of Creation which itself has to be based upon our understanding of this world.

Let’s strip thermodynamics of its particular nature in this universe. Is there some abstraction behind the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that entropy or `disorder’ increases, or at least doesn’t decrease for an isolated system? There’s one abstraction well-known and discussed by physicists — the increase in entropy is actually an increase towards a state of higher probability.

This means we are discussing not necessarily well-behaved functions but rather movements along paths through state-spaces which might be somewhat `pathological’ as we might say. For example, there might be no paths to the state of greatest entropy but for those which pass through states with far lower entropy than the system currently has. This would put us in a valley of sorts, surrounded by insurmountable barriers, at least seeming `insurmountable’.

The mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose has claimed, in constructing a plausible way of speaking about reality, that our universe is so well-behaved in moving relentlessly towards an overall state of greater entropy because it began to expand from a state of extraordinarily low-probability and low-entropy. When the universe began its current expansionary phase at the time of the so-called Big Bang, the opening in the balloon was pointing into the valley in which we find ourselves. This universe seems to lie in a region surrounded by regions of far higher entropy or disorder. There is no obvious way to escape this region, but there remains so much we don’t know.

When we seek to understand the true possibilities for worlds in this Creation, we would have to first explore the nature of the state-space of possible universes which could provide the stuff of a world, a universe ordered as a coherent narrative, that is, ordered to a purpose.

If I were willing to suggest that Heaven lies not in the empirical realm but rather in the transcendental realm where the Holy Trinity has His absolute existence, I could say that the problem is solved. God, who is love, who is beyond even absolute infinity, will take us into His own life so that we will stay there. Creation, any contingent being or even the set of all possible Creations, is so small compared to God that there would be zero probability of moving out of that transcendent realm — unless God willed it to happen.

The previous paragraph will almost certainly prove to be wrong in terms of better ways of thinking about these issues but perhaps, like many human thoughts about far lesser matters, it points towards a better way of speaking. In any case, it might provide many believers a way out of the intellectual ghetto in which they find themselves because they have no way, are putting no effort into discovering a way, to discuss this universe in terms of a Creation of the God of Jesus Christ.

I’m going to lay out a basis for part of an intellectual program which might help us find a way to reunite faith and reason (my writings over the past 20 years, including my novels, are all parts of a greater such program):

1. God is true to His self-chosen role as Creator and will remain true to Creation in the way that He shapes the world of the resurrected, that is, He won’t suddenly bring His friends into a realm outside of Creation properly understood;
2. To first appearances, that world of the resurrected will be much like this but will not have decay or disorder, nor processes which might lead to such;
3. To provide for the dynamic nature of a world suited for the resurrected individuals and the Body of Christ of which they are members, there will have to be a movement towards an ever lesser entropy or — far better — a greater and more God-like order; and
4. In terms appropriate to this universe and at least indicative of the more abstract terms suited to a description of all of Creation: movement of the physical stuff of any world, corruptible matter or matter perfected by grace will be a movement towards a more highly probable realm, an infinitely larger realm for the situation I’m dealing with here and so it is that I claim that love, God’s realm in a manner of speaking, is effectively all that truly exists.

If only we understood the state-space of Creation — to use the terms appropriate for physics in this world, we could see this more clearly. But the greater situation in this world, at least from the Christian viewpoint, is obscured. It would seem God has given us a valley as our place of birth and development and this valley is eroding and flowing locally toward the lowest spot in the valley. We’re surrounded by mountains which prevent us from moving toward better regions of Creation. Or maybe there would be a way to, somewhat, reverse the processes of decay in this world if we could understand the mountains and learn how to move over or through them. I would doubt it but no human community has done well betting that any given level of human understanding would prove plausible or even rational in a few centuries. No human community has done well betting against the possibility of advanced technologies pulling off miracles of a sort.

More importantly, at least to a Christian and certainly one who takes seriously the viewpoint in the writings of the school of St. John the Evangelist, love is all. Love is the highest probability state of all though we might have trouble understanding that while we remain stuck in this valley, this “vale of tears” as a prayer to the Mother of God, Hail Holy Queen, terms it. Without God’s help, we can’t pass beyond all barriers to enter the absolutely good regions of Creation, though we might be able to pass the immediate mountains and better our situation. In any case, God — for reasons He hasn’t told to us — has isolated us from regions where we could move toward greater order rather than to the disordered muck at the bottom of our valley.

Am I satisfied with my current understanding of this aspect of Creation? Am I satisfied with my understanding of the ways in which the world of the resurrected will have better thermodynamic properties than this one? No, I’m not satisfied with my current understanding by a long shot but I am pretty happy with my understanding as a very tentative position. I’ll end by pointing out that, ultimately, we should question if it makes sense to use thermodynamic concepts to discuss the better-ordered, higher-probability regions of Creation. Yet, we have to be realistic about our limited natures and the general situation we’re in. We have to make our way slowly toward a better understanding.

I haven’t had any health-care for ten years or more. Haven’t seen a doctor. Have only had special blood-tests when donating blood a few times. I’ve been lucky for sure but it’s also likely that I’ve gotten good advice from non-interventionist doctors who told me to avoid the medical system as much as possible. To be sure, they did tell me to find another non-interventionist doctor wherever I happen to live and to go for a check-up every couple years, but I made a decision to do the work I felt God called me to do and I’ve made not a penny from my writing. Trying to be consistent with my beliefs, I’ve accepted help from relatives and friends but haven’t applied for any sort of government aid.

Why haven’t I made any money? I can only repeat what I was told by independent literary agents as well as ex-employees of the mainstream publishers: the American mind has deteriorated so badly that even the employees of the publishing industry can’t handle demanding books. There is no market for what I’d call real books — not that I deny the goodness of a certain amount of mind-candy in the intellectual diet.

In any case, there is apparently no need or at least no felt need in the United States for books or other products which might develop the mind. This would imply that Americans, probably most in the modern West, feel no need for a well-developed mind just because they have fulfilled Adam Smith’s fear that the citizens of the prosperous West he foresaw would feel no need for moral integrity. Yes, in general though not in all cases, I do tie together moral integrity with a proper cultural level for your historical circumstances.

Let me move back to the question in the title by considering a quote from Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind:

[W]hile the welfarist is concerned with vague general ends, it is in fact the means which are crucial in society — for the simple reason that the ends are never reached. [page 106]

This implies our true ‘needs’ are for means to reach ends rather than being ‘needs’ for the ends themselves. As they say, “Teach a man how to fish rather than giving him fish.” As our means expand, so will the ends we might personally define as ‘needs’ and so will our luxurious desires. All of this should be, must be, defined within an understanding of a good human life and that will involve means more than ends.

There’s an interesting and more specific line of thought I’d like to quickly explore. If we were to develop greater means, I think it’s likely we find ourselves in a different place than we would have planned. Going forward from that place, we would start desiring still different ends, perhaps ends we couldn’t even imagine. In the meantime, we, or our descendants, would have started developing means we certainly couldn’t imagine.

To make “vague general ends” our focus is also wrong because such misthought and misbehavior will lock us and perhaps our descendants into pursuing, with ever greater desperation, goals which have revealed themselves as strange.

Let me now switch to a practical issue of great immediate importance.

We are at a transition point. The Modern West is decaying a bit prematurely but it would have happened at some point. This decay into decrepitude and senility is happening early because of our lack of courageous and creative response to the very successes of the Industrial Revolution and various sorts of reformations including those in religious and political communities.

We are looking at the need for very basic changes which are likely to lead to a variety of changes in our political communities. There are likely to be many hurt as we respond to this decay of the West and its various communities, but far more would be hurt and hurt for generations to come if we don’t respond in some plausible and proper manner. One of the most dangerous of temptations in the early phases of our responses is that of reforming various parts or aspects of communities which are fundamentally flawed and need to be dissolved or radically restructured. Only time will tell us exactly where to head as God’s story moves on, but we shouldn’t be looking backward and using too many resources to solve ongoing or new problems by way of defective institutions.

So far as Social Security and Medicare are concerned — they could have been designed to maximize conflicts between generations and between various ethnic and religious groups which have very different ways of approaching financial matters, caring for the elderly and those who fell through various safety nets, and so forth. The Euro-zone is currently being destroyed by conflicts between the Northern and Southern Europeans. The American population almost certainly has similar conflicts because of different ethnic traits — on top of the generational conflicts already showing. For example, members of some ethnic groups tend to seek high cash income while the members of other groups will seek business ownership with lower cash income in the short-term along with the build-up of business assets. All else being equal, the first will be better off with retirement annuities, cash benefits, whether purchased from a private institution or supplied by a government program funded by some sort of taxes. They might even be better off with a sub-optimal government program with a bad tax strategy. The second might be best off if they can leave their business assets to the next generation under favorable circumstances in return for being supported in their retirement years. Meanwhile, tax and regulatory policies in the United States have destroyed the viability or at least attractiveness of traditional family businesses.

In other words, despite what big-mouth and invincibly ignorant politicians and ‘expert analysts’ say, there is no one solution which is perfect for all of us. At least, we haven’t discovered it and we aren’t likely to do so or even to find a variety of better solutions for the different groups in our larger communities so long as we remain committed to our current ways of doing things, spending time and energy and other resources to reform institutions we should allow to die.

We’ve trapped a lot of human beings into dependence upon these government programs which worked well at least for some but only so long as we met the solvency requirements of these not-quite but sort-of Ponzi schemes. It’s probably a bit more complex for Medicare but Social Security was in good shape so long as we had annual net (after inflation) growth of 3% in the national economy and a ratio of about 3 active workers for each retired worker. We passed to the bad side of any such point of solvency by the early 1990s or so.

I suspect our good-looking, pre-2000 economic statistics were fraudulent since at least the 1970s, but a little thought would indicate that even a well-designed pay-as-you-go system can have serious problems with even a relatively short stretch of economic problems and the consequent inadequate premiums/taxes. So far as the workers go: I believe we currently have 1.8-1.9 active workers for each retired worker on Social Security. It’s likely that we would have run into the demographic problems even if our economy had grown non-stop and were projected to continue to grow. At the very least we would have had to up the 3% net growth as the birth-rate fell. I’ll leave it to the reader to contemplate my claim in light of history or to explore the issue in an historical context — not the hot-house context of current politics and growing generational conflicts.

So how much health-care do we need? Part of the answer is that any human beings who dumb themselves down in front of the television screen after becoming dependent upon the goods and services of a huge and immensely complex society with an advanced technology better learn to have relatively modest needs in the realm of health-care and elsewhere. We Americans, if we don’t start acting in a responsible manner, might soon have trouble maintaining our basic fresh-water and sewage systems and that would cause more damage to our health and a greater shortening of our lifespans than the loss of our oh-so modern hospitals.

The complete answer would be a very complex version of my commentary above: we have no right to demand of this world any level of health-care or retirement benefits or the like. What we have is a duty to build the sorts of communities which have the means to care for their members according to the traditions and overall purposes of those communities. If we succeed in building the means, including the music and other arts which bind communities, we’ll be able to help care for ourselves and others in the appropriate ways, which may or may not involve high levels of the sort of industrialized health-care which is the standard in the decaying West.

Here’s a link to a good article about some specific problems which have developed in the Medicare system, resulting in fraud: The Systemic Nature of Medicare Fraud.

Some of us are crooks for sure. Why do those crooks all of a sudden have the power to bankrupt our society and destroy our middle-class prosperity?

Years ago, I had a conversation with a former Assistant Director of the FBI. He told me, nearly 25 years ago, that the United States had once been a country of citizens with good moral habits and behaviors. Little in the way of policing was needed for the average citizen but only for those truly inclined to crime and that police work was done after crimes were committed.

Police generally didn’t snoop though they perhaps didn’t have to snoop about the most important matters since a good part of the American population, and many others around the world, lived in stable small communities where people knew each other and — as I recall even from the 1960s and early 1970s — kept watch on each other’s children and houses. The policemen in town knew which young men were inclined to draw a knife or throw a punch in anger, which women didn’t respect the property rights of others, which children and parents needed a talk every so often to remind them of the future of someone who goes bad. And, of course, everyone knew where and how the town’s bankers lived and could be suspicious about sudden displays of wealth which might indicate embezzlement. They knew if the town’s grocer with a liking for games of chance was suddenly desperate for money. Money wasn’t just siphoned away by the mechanisms of an abstracted banking system and the town’s potential exploiters didn’t live mysterious lives in rich men’s towns several stops up the railroad line.

Our country worked not because we had amazingly efficient police forces and technologically advanced regulators but rather because most citizens — including policemen and bank regulators — were doing their modestly defined jobs and had good reason to go about their business mostly trusting their neighbors and bankers and lawyers and co-workers and so forth. And they had good reason to believe they would know if someone went bad or ran into problems which might lead them to desperate acts.

Things got away from us. We were so successful in many ways that we developed rich and complex banking systems and manufacturing systems that we didn’t understand well and didn’t know how to control. Most Americans were oblivious until recently that problems were developing though historians and others have been warning for several generations that our societies and our technological capabilities were growing and developing faster than our abilities to understand and control them.

I’ll throw out a suggestion which comes from my grandfather who was a small town police chief from about 1936 to about 1954. He died when I was young so I never really knew him but I’ve been told that, back in the 1930s, he predicted that the rate of violent crimes would rise greatly in the United States in the ensuing generation. I doubt it was his only reason for such a fear but my grandfather did believe the rise of the FBI and other police agencies in the centralized governments would take away the freedom of regional leaders to make arrangements with criminals such as the combat-zones where rational criminals were allowed to control gambling and sex-trade activities in return for policing those zones themselves and in return for protecting visitors to those zones from undue harm.

I’ve been trying to deal with this general issue of a world grown too rich and complex for us and published two relevant essays in December of 2011: Overwhelming our moral characters and Predators, Producers, Sheep, and the Love of Liberty. In the second of those essays, I wrote:

[Lord] Acton had a vast and deep knowledge of history and seemingly of human nature and, like me, considered governments to be something greater, perhaps far greater, than necessary evils. He was right and so am I. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate government but rather to realize the political life as a natural part of human life. We have to be modest in the short-run, not letting the ambitions of even the better sort of men, certainly not the ambitions of men with the moral character of gangsters, to impose upon us political systems which are inherently bad or even systems for which we aren’t yet prepared. From one angle, we can say we shouldn’t let political systems or the underlying political communities grow too large or too complex until we’re prepared for that greater system and the greater community. Eventually, says some muse of history, we’ll learn how to govern something as large and complex and powerful as the United States. But we won’t learn it in the positivistic way of the Enlightenment intellectuals, including the Founding Fathers of the United States. We’ll learn it when several relatively large and complex human political communities come together to share many of their political duties and responsibilities, come together to form a greater political community. This greater political community will be associated with a body of knowledge, including speculations in the tradition of Plato’s Republic and Voegelin’s Order and History but also including the most concrete of practices and the entirety of that body of knowledge won’t really be known even to the best political thinkers at the time it develops. In fact, it’s probable a greater understanding of the nature of this political beast will mature only by the time the human race has moved on to a different, richer, and more complex state of being.

There has been a general decay of human nature, in its individual and its communal aspects, into a disordered state in the modern world. This doesn’t mean that we’re evil as isolated creatures though some of us are. It does mean we don’t know how to live individual lives of moral integrity and we don’t know how to form proper communities, including political communities.

What can we say about the political community which runs Social Security and Medicare, a few relatively large and criminal wars, a greater number of small criminal actions in any given year, a dysfunctional space-exploration program, a number of troubled transportation systems, vast networks of schools which aren’t, and assorted other disasters? It isn’t a community. It’s an incoherent gathering of disparate regions seeking to gain advantage at the others’ expense and of unassimilable groups seeking to gain still more advantage at the expense of other groups, many of them sharing a number of individual member. Such a political disaster can’t run any complex system in a manner hinting of either moral integrity or practical efficiency and effectiveness.

As I’ve said before, it’s time to let the United States break up into smaller countries which may or may not become republics and may or may not come together to form a more rational and more sustainable confederation. Some of those countries might well have the desire and the capabilities to organize various sorts of welfare systems for its citizens. Let God’s story work the way it will and we must learn how to move with the story rather than trying to impose our dreams upon reality.

In the meantime, any human crooks stealing from the public till should be prosecuted and jailed as individuals, any corporate crooks should be broken up, but that won’t fix much and won’t fix it for long. In a land of moral disorder and political incoherence, the crooks will find their way into that public till again. We could empty the till or leave only a few pennies in it, that is, go to an anarcho-capitalist system or something of the sort. I’ve vote to devolve into the sorts of communities which can meet human needs rather than to stop trying to meet those needs.

In the poem The Sycamore, Wendell Berry straddles some no man’s land between metaphysics and theology and poetry to give an interestingly aslant and insightful definition of narrative:

It [the sycamore] has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

As characters in the narratives which are our individual lives, we should gather all accidents into our purpose. We should respect and try to understand as others are gathering in accidents into the various purposes in the many stories inside this world. If others seem to be merely befuddled, if there is no such gathering and seems to be no intention to a purpose, we can only be sad for those others. If some are gathering the accidents of others toward an exploitive purpose, we should be angry but also should wonder how God might be gathering even the accidents of His evil creatures into His purposes.

We who are Christians, believers in an all-powerful and all-knowing Creator, should realize this narrative understanding of reality allows a harmonization between Moses and Darwin. Darwin describes the processes by which the accidents are generated to be gathered into the purposes prophesied by Moses.

God is even now gathering all accidents into the overarching purpose for which this story, our world, is being told: the birth and development of the Body of Christ, born in the cave in which the crucified Jesus Christ was buried and from which He emerged. This Body is growing yet through time as its various parts evolve and develop. The Almighty gathers all of our accidents and our purposes into that greater purpose. Even our purposes are but accidents within that greater narrative.

From the same poem, on a related topic, the very next line reads:

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

This seems to beg for a Thomistic understanding of ‘intention’ as a growth process of an organism rather than a subjective thing which overlaps with desire and motivation.

Because of centuries of neglect of Western Civilization — no, the ‘pagans’ didn’t take it away from us, we just abandoned it — we have a paucity of ways of speaking the Christian truth. I’ve claimed before that poets and novelists and artists and musicians have to give us a new vocabulary to speak of the new concepts which are just on the other side of our cognitive reach. Perhaps there is at least a part of such a vocabulary already existing in the works of some of our modern poets, such as Wendell Berry.

I’ve used a chunk of this quote in an earlier posting ( The Liberal Mind: What is politics?):

Now what makes liberal individualism so plausible is that the individual is the only self-conscious entity whose limits appear to correspond to a physiological creature; and also that the thoughts and feelings which constitute institutions such as states or churches must be physically located in the minds of human beings. A prime minister is undoubtedly at various times an individual self standing in competitive relation to other selves; especially, indeed, when he is struggling with political rivals. But there are other occasions when his thoughts and acts must be taken as State-thoughts and State-acts, and when they cannot be reduced to the psychological operations of an individual. In its extremer forms, liberal individualism is a fallacy which since Mill has been called Psychologism: the doctrine that each individual may be psychologically explained, and all social institutions must be explained in terms of individuals. This mistake is endemic in liberalism, though its presence has in recent decades been camouflaged by adding to the basic model of generic-man various sociological components — class membership, social norms and so on. Yet if we wish to learn about the military behavior of soldiers, we must study military activities, not psychology. And similarly, if we wish to understand politicians, we must attempt to understand the activity of politics, not discover whether politicians are nice or nasty men. It is not that psychological (or sociological) knowledge is in these cases of no account; it is simply that the distinction here between psychology and military art or psychology and politics is a false one, and that the starting point for explanation must not be the rationalist essence of the individual, but the complex situation we are trying to explain. [page 50]

The simplest of us is a most complex beast, though some saints, Buddhist as well as Christian, are said to be simplified towards a state of unity. We take on roles in life and may even have not only different ways of thought but also slightly different blocks of memory which are activated or de-activated when we move from one room where we are a son of an aging and mildly demented parent to another room where we have to deal with an overloaded schedule at a local community of worship to another room where we have to answer to a boss and clients. I’ve generalized freely from findings discussed briefly in a podcast from the Scientific American website: see my recent posting, Rooms of Memory, for my take on these findings as well as a link to the podcast.

Let’s say there’s no true ‘ego’, no true center of ‘self–consciousness’, no center of an inborn ‘person’. Where is the true ‘I’ to be found? Or is there no ‘I’ if there is no inborn substance, however metaphysical, to be described as ‘self-conscious’, no inborn substance which simply existed from some magical moment forward for time without end. Perhaps that magical moment is the instant of conception or perhaps an instant of ensoulment — if we wish to return to a Medieval idea which had the virtue of being rational and part of a coherent and consistent understanding of human nature in the context of a world also subject to a coherent and consistent understanding.

Where is the somewhat free individual to be found that he might be me? I’d claim strongly he’s not to be found in some metaphysical incantation which speaks of the undetectable to explain that which is detectable and subject to exploration and maybe even testing. I’d also claim he’s not to be found as a citizen of a realm filled with entities which can act upon an empirical world without being empirically detected. He’s not even to be found in a listing of some encoding of the human mind.

I’d suggest the individual, free-thinking and free-willing and free-acting in a highly qualified but concrete manner, is to be found where human beings are found — in human communities. This introduces problems to be sure. We’re learning from scientists and historians what we should have already known from the Bible and from our various human traditions — we are shaped in communities. I guess this is a painful thought for those who seem to have forsaken their traditions or to have been forsaken by those traditions — a situation found in all periods of radical, and often rapid, transition in the structures and maybe contents of human cultures or even of an overarching civilization.

We’re in trouble but our goals should be relative to our situation. We should seek to understand what our situation truly is which means understanding our own selves in the best available terms and that points to what the true problem is. Our situation is horribly complex and immensely complicated relative to what was properly anticipated by those who gave us our current understandings of our individual human natures, our communal human natures, and the basic structures of Creation. While retaining a respect for what is absolutely true and complete in its truth, we should realize that reality has to be defined as the best understanding of some partially viewed Creation, best being defined by our current capabilities for exploring that Creation and for making sense of it. Due to a variety of factors but mostly the great success of the exploration of this empirical realm of Creation in recent centuries, we are capable of a far better understandings of all of Creation than the understanding we’ve inherited.

Such an understanding has to be faith-based, not because dogmas need to be imposed upon what-is but rather because what-is has to be taken on its own terms and a greater reality has to be extrapolated from the relatively small human stock of knowledge and skills, small at all spacetime intervals however immense our knowledge and thinking skills might be relative to those available even in classical Greece let alone in the growing community of Jericho 10,000 years ago or more.

At this stage of this imaginative journey into the largely unknown, it makes some sense to retreat to the more limited, less truth-seeking, effort to understand the freedom of man viewed as an individual creature. In one of my early essays at my other blog-site, I asked, in that individualistic context: What is Freedom?. where I wrote:

In the modern world, we tend to think of freedom in terms of satisfying desires. To be sure, even many who live for that false sort of freedom seem to realize that we then become no more than our desires or, more horribly, the thwarting of those desires — a terrible and humiliating state in either case. Hannibal the Cannibal is the most free of all modern men because he has become his desires and he has gained the power to satisfy them. Hannibal the Cannibal is the role-model for our politicians and our lawyers, our investment bankers and our corporate executives, our athletes and our entertainers. He may even be a role-model for many clergymen.

Let me move in a different direction with a quote from a modern philosopher:

“[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” (page 172, Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint)

Let me provide another quote, this one from a prominent brain-scientist:

An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. (page 8, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman)

As Freeman discusses, intention is the movement of an organism into the future. If we intend to be free, we will take one tiny step after another towards the goal of having a “whole personality,” which can only occur in a human organism which has taken on the properties of a true person: unity, coherence, and wholeness.

Here’s what it comes down to: though forced in many of his actions by the needs of his land and his animals, a true farmer in his role as farmer is free in a way radically beyond the false freedom of a passive television viewer who can choose from 20 movies, seven football games and three soccer games, five so-called reality shows, and so on. Horowitz playing Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata is playing notes written a century before and yet he exercises freedom beyond my imagination as I try to choose from a bookcase filled with CDs with a variety of musical styles and performers.

They are part of a community and work as members of a community. In the case of American farmers, they have typically had clearly visible but informal cooperative arrangements with neighboring farmers as well as invisible but more binding arrangements with those who farmed that land in the past and the ones who will follow. Horowitz is in a community stretching over the centuries and it includes composers and arrangers, accompanists and conductors, as well as pianists. Farmers are bound by the needs of the crops and animals bred by past generations, pianists by the very design of their instrument and the way that composers sought to use its potential.

But again: that farmer and Horowitz the pianist are free when they truly intend to be what they only pretend to be at the start of their careers, what they become step by sometimes painful step.

There is a problem here that I’ve only partly solved, a problem caused by our inability to shed older ways of thinking and speaking — not always a bad thing since it can prevent changes for the worse or maybe useless changes for the no better. So it is that we can be easily led astray by a language and a set of concepts which grew to explain and justify an ending era of feverish and unbalanced prosperity, that is a prosperity of things and the activities which gain those things which was accompanied by a paucity of well-formed human beings, farmers or pianists, writers or politicians, home-builders or clergymen.

A rich community life is necessary for the development of men of substance and high achievements. Men of substance and high achievements are necessary for a rich community. There is a reciprocal relationship which can be excluded by our modern language and our modern conceptions of man and his communities for that language and all of those concepts were formed by the battle between liberal individualists and various sorts of collectivists. In analogical terms from physics, the liberal individualists would evaporate the streams of human history, liberating drops of water to be particles of gas which would be free from the other particles. The collectivists would freeze those streams into crystalline structures while claiming to be moving bravely into the future.

Water isn’t a compromise between ice and vapor but rather a remarkable substance with properties unpredictable to those who know only ice or vapor. Even in this physical substance, we see peculiar properties arise because of the characteristics of the entire universe, such as its thermodynamic path — from a indescribably specific state, it is expanding into a more general state, one with higher entropy though allowing for the development of highly specific states, such as life, at the expense of throwing still greater entropy into the surrounding environment.

This world is specific in a way that can’t be simply defined by the starting conditions of a physical system as we can currently understand it. It’s specific in a way that can only be described as ‘narrative’. It’s a highly specific story in which water arises because of some peculiarities in the union of two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom. Water is a very useful stuff and has a different relationship to ice than most liquids have to their corresponding solids. This isn’t the place to discuss matters in which I’m barely conversant but the point is: Water has to exist for us to know water. My own thoughts would indicate the likelihood that there are general principles which could allow us to predict the existence of water and its strange relationship to ice at the transition points between states of matter, but if we learn those principles in this mortal realm, it will only be because we first knew water. In this analogy, which might prove dangerous, we are water molecules but we have the full properties associated with such an entity only when we are part of a large stream of other entities like ourselves.

We are born as human organisms with the potential to become some true sort of individuals but we can only become human persons, rich and complex in the way of a small world, in the context of human communities. And a human community reaches a high level of complexity and richness, a level necessary for serious accomplishments, only when there is at least a significant minority of well-formed human persons, human individuals who are worlds in themselves but not separate from those communities.

I’ve advocated the view that our imaginations can encompass what God has created, what the Almighty has manifested in this Creation, but we need examples and stimuli — in a manner of speaking. We need to be courageous and open-minded in our responses to Creation if we are to learn from God, who has a far more powerful imagination than we can ever…imagine. So to speak.

In Shaping Our Minds to Reality, I quoted the physicist and Anglican priest J.C. Polkinghorne:

The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has to take on the atomic scale and below. Anyone who has had to teach a mathematically based subject will know the difficulties which students encounter in negotiating a new level of abstraction. They have met the idea of a vector as a crude arrow. You now explain to them that it is better thought of as an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. ‘But what is it really?’ they say. You implore them to believe that it is an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. They do not believe you; they think that you are holding back some secret clue that would make it all plain. Time and experience are great educators. A year later the student cannot conceive why he had such difficulty and suspicion about the nature of vectors. Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality. If we are indeed in such a digestive, living-with-it, period, it would explain something which is otherwise puzzling. A great many theoretical physicists would be prepared to express some unease about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics — in particular, about Copenhagen orthodoxy — but only a tiny fraction of them ever direct serious attention to such questions. Perhaps the majority are right to submit themselves to a period of subliminal absorption. [The Quantum World, J.C. Polkinghorne, Princeton Science Library, 1989, page 82]

As part of my comments, I claimed:

We do not come into this life with brains which are some sort of wetware general processors. We don’t really process information in the way of a computer or a communications channel. We handle information by reshaping ourselves to what we find when we actively engage what lies around us. Like a totemic hunter making himself one with the bear he hunts, we shape ourselves in some substantial ways to what we find and we can only find what we seek. Learning, in the general and academic senses, is an active process and, moreover, a process in which the mind itself is altered rather than just having new content loaded in. The hunter doesn’t think he can become one with the bear by imagining a bear which accords with his preconceptions. He learns how bears behave over his years as a boy and then begins to think as if he were a bear. The astrophysicist doesn’t think — not for long in any case — to become one with the Milky Way by building a galaxy as if using an erector set. He studies how the universe really is for many years and shapes his mind around the reality that he perceives. When the hunter begins to understand the bear or the astrophysicist the galaxy, then he can begin to enter the story of that entity, to travel along with it through time.

It all begins with a suspension of conscious efforts, a suspension of the will, that the mind, and perhaps other parts of that human being, can be reshaped to accord with reality. You’ve got to be willing to learn the rules of the game rather than thinking you’re entering some sort of game for which you have inborn knowledge of the rules as well as inborn skills that only need the developing. We have inborn knowledge of the general rules of this world, very general skills of the sort needed to function in this world. That’s all.

Polkinghorne raises an issue not addressed by St. Thomas Aquinas so far as I know: “Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.”

This process has already gone on for three generations or so in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that there are some reshapings of the human mind so radical that it takes generations to build the foundations before the building can even rise? Or is it just that few there are willing to accept reality especially in an age where we’ve deluded ourselves to believe we’re born as some sort of fully formed ‘persons’? How can we be reshaped if we’re already fully formed? How can we need reshaping to suit ourselves for lives as hunters or scientists or God-centered human beings if we’re autonomous agents who merely make decisions or consume knowledge or experiences the way we think to consume toothpaste?

Until fairly recently, I was myself confused about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, thinking of position — in terms of a a Cartesian x-y chart — as existing along with momentum. The fact that you couldn’t measure both at the same time with unlimited accuracy was a problem no different from that we would have if we tried to find a billiards ball in a black-box by shooting at it with probes, such as marbles, comparable in size to the ball. You find the ball by disturbing it in such a way that momentum is changed. You measure momentum in such a way that you disturb its position. That’s not entirely wrong and is probably the right way to think about this issue when learning about quantum physics, but it’s a somewhat twisted way to view matters.

A position measurement is quite simply a result of what might be called a position-oriented interaction with a more general sort of entity. Similarly, a momentum measurement is quite simply a result of what might be called a momentum-oriented interaction with a more general sort of entity. In more official words:

[W]hen an electron interacts with a device that measures its momentum, its wave-like aspects (definite wavelength) are emphasized at the expense of its particle-like aspects (definite position). [page 130, Quantum Theory, David Bohm, Dover, 1989]

So we might say that this situation is due to a wave-particle duality. Momentum is a wave attribute and position is a particle attribute. There are other such pairs including energy (wave attribute) and time (particle attribute). I’ve not yet read Bohm’s later writings where he restated quantum physics in terms of what is apparently a strange potential in an effort to make it all more rational, but I’ll make my own suggestion here.

We should imagine and speak of that electron as an entity more abstract than the concrete forms it might take after establishing a relationship with a more concrete entity. Until it forms a particular relationship with concrete entities, that electron is a form of being which is one step closer to the raw stuff of Creation, the thoughts or truths God manifested as created being, a specific set of truths for a particular Creation. Within that particular Creation many highly peculiar concrete worlds might be shaped.

Some physicists and philosophers might be inclined to speak in similar ways, including — I think — Bohm and his co-workers in his later efforts to make sense of quantum physics. The problem I see with any discussions I’ve yet read of Bohm’s later work or the less detailed but suggestive comments of other thinkers is that they propose more or less radical rethinkings of our ideas about the concrete being of this universe but, overall, they only patch up what might well be rather questionable concepts of being in a more general sense. I’ve proposed a more substantial, ground-up re-understanding of created being in a complex process which can be followed in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand and in my writings on my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, over the past 6 years or so. A large collection of my blog essays can be downloaded here. These essays, not yet updated to include my writings in 2011, are organized into seven categories:

1. Making Peace With Empirical Being
2. The Human Mind as a Re-creation of God’s Creation
3. Love and Stuff
4. What is a Universe?
5. Freedom and Structure in Human Life
6. The Narrative We Know as a World
7. What Means it All?

Many of the essays don’t really belong in just one category, but I think this structure makes it a little easier to figure out what I’m up to, a matter that often leaves my own half-reshaped mind in a state of confusion.

For now, let me finish by stating first three general principles of my metaphysical thought as it currently exists and then three aphoristic statements of important aspects of the underlying worldview:

1. The act of existence or act-of-being precedes and, so to speak, dominates substance.
2. Only God can perform an act-of-being which brings contingent being into existence where there was nothing, but even electrons interacting with each other can perform an act-of-being of a secondary sort, shaping a more abstract form of being into a concrete thing, such as an electron as a point-like entity with a specific location or an electron as a wave-like entity with a specific momentum.
3. Created being lies on a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete but abstract forms of being remain present in the most mundane things.

In a somewhat aphoristic style, I claim:

• Things are true.
• Truths are thing-like.
• Relationships bring things into being.

We usually think of entities of mixed biological and non-biological components as being monsters though good experience with prosthetics has perhaps eased that prejudice a lot. (I use ‘prejudice’ in a non-judgmental way as some prejudices are valid and some aren’t, some are dangerous to others and our own selves and some are not.)

Is it possible that as we form the Body of Christ, we integrate human technology such as the Internet viewed as a fancy memory device? See this article for a secular and somewhat mundane discussion of what is an important issue: Internet Changes How We Remember: Knowing we can retrieve facts online later alters memory. It’s possible that we are learning how to remember how to retrieve facts rather than remembering the facts directly.

Technology does become part of us. Michael Polanyi was a medical doctor before he left Hungary when the Nazis took over in 1933. He was also a physical chemist whose research was well-regarded and encouraged by Einstein and, in his middle years, became a philosopher of note. Professor Polanyi spoke in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy of our tools becoming an extension of our bodies when we become truly expert in using them. He spoke in particular of the scalpel from his own experience performing surgery. I would imagine the brain of a surgeon reorganizes itself so that there are regions devoted to the control of scalpel and other instruments. I imagine the brain of a pianist also reorganizes itself and also that of a carpenter.

Truly does technology become part of us and not just the tools we personally use. We grow larger and more active when our health is improved by fresh water systems and sewage systems. Our minds grow as they respond to the use of microscopes and various sorts of technology. Our minds grow also as they respond to proper use of books, even electronic books. There are many books which are a part of my being and some of them alive to the extent that they change beyond what the author had written — this makes it dangerous at times for me to rely on my memory.

Truly does technology become part of our communal beings, our communities. Even our ways of worshiping God are tied to the building technologies of an age. Our forms of friendship, our range of friendship, can change with greater mobility, with electrical and then electronic devices. Our communities grow larger and more complex, safer and more stable, with better energy production. As individuals and as communities, we form relationships, political and economic and intellectual and spiritual, with more more communities, some of them longfar agoway. Yes, even with communities long gone. However superficial the museum experience might be for most, we yet connect a little with the ancient Egyptians and Mayans, Medieval Saxons and Moslems, Renaissance Italians and Ashkenazi Jews, Colonial Virginians and West Indians, and early modern Japanese and Zulus.

We Christians have a tendency to etherealize the nature of heavenly and of resurrected human beings. In fact, our resurrected selves are completed and perfected versions of our mortal selves. If our technology has become a part of us and our communities here on earth, even a part of the pilgrim Body of Christ, then we would be mutilated creatures if we were resurrected without it, without perfected and completed technology of the sort which can aid in that perfection and completion of a true human life and in that perfection and completion of the Body of Christ.

I’m trying to deal with a problem I feel to be at the foundation of a body of thought which I generally admire — libertarianism of the Old Right and Rothbardian sort. On the whole, my attitude is similar to my attitude towards Jamesian pragmatism. For a discussion of that attitude, see my earlier articles which are, largely, reviews of Walter J. Freeman’s How Brains Make Up Their Minds: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality and Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism. In the second of those articles, I state:

I consider myself a Thomistic existentialist and most certainly not a pragmatist, though I think that pragmatist methods are the same as the ‘first-stage’ methods of Thomistic existentialism. I’ve criticized pragmatists, even those that I admire — such as William James or the brain-scientist Gerald Edelman because of the inadequacy of a pure pragmatist approach to understanding the universe. Their bottom-up approach is the proper ‘first-stage’ to understanding Creation but they refuse to admit it works only if there is a world to meet them, a world in all its unity, coherence, and completeness.

Libertarians are not really homogeneous in their doctrines, though it would seem to me that they have a shared belief in something called ‘liberty’ which is alleged to be a metaphysical right of man. Liberty is more than just a sum of particular freedoms; it’s a general freedom from past repressions which are assumed representative of the ways in which human beings can be enslaved if only partially. Libertarian versions of liberty seem, by a naive analysis of historical timing, to be founded upon what I’d call a semi-metaphysical principle sufficient to ground their pessimistic attitude towards government, which attitude seems to be a reaction against the strange monsters which arose in early efforts of predators and idealists and realists and simple folk to develop governments suited to the needs of modern complex societies.

Obviously, I’m closer to the views of Michael Oakeshotte than to those of Ludwig von Mises. Oakeshotte was one of the very few true conservative intellectuals in the 20th century. Amongst his other peculiarities, he considered the claims of the Declaration of Independence to be mere silliness, the stuff of delusions. It wasn’t the case that Oakeshotte had no principles and no respect for rights of some substantial sort. It was the case that he grounded his beloved Englishman’s freedoms in flesh-and-blood, dirt, and history.

History is an interesting part of the puzzle. I believe that human history is a part of the story God is telling which we know as the world which I define as the universe viewed in light of God’s purposes.

I can’t take seriously many claims about human needs or rights unless they can be seen in concrete men and in human history. This is a problem to be sure since history, as Lord Acton noted sadly, seems to be greatly influenced by evil men. Some of my recent efforts are directed towards writing a human version of God’s story in which those gangsters also play a role. I’m learning, as a child-like author, to imitate my Maker as He goes about His tasks in Creation. The actions of those evil men, some of them prominent in recent American history, are mildly described as despicable, but this is God’s world, God’s story. The Almighty did what He did and we should try to understand what He did and not what we imagine He should have done.

For now, it’s most important that I claim man is an empirical being in an empirical world. Again I don’t ‘reduce’ man and his world to a simple empiricist chaos, but there is much work needed to be done before we can have a modern Christian view with the contextual explanatory power of the view St. Augustine developed 1500 years ago, a view which largely held until the early modern period and a view I’ll partly — and only partly — revive as part of my effort to contribute to a modern Christian understanding of Creation.

We can make all the claims we wish about the desirability of liberty for men but those claims will be plausible only if the human race is composed predominately of those who wish liberty and can handle it. In fact, a metaphysical grounding of liberty, such as that read into Jefferson’s claims, would require any true human being to be — at least in potential — as much a lover of liberty as that redheaded Virginian himself.

In fact, I think what I have to say wouldn’t have surprised Murray Rothbard of libertarian fame or Albert Jay Nock of the Old Right at all, though they might have differed to some extent or other with my conclusion: the typical human being doesn’t seem made for life in a libertarian society. In effect, most human beings are more concerned about safety and comfort rather than liberty for themselves or their children. There is also a small group of human beings who aren’t suited for that life of ‘radical’ liberty because they have no respect for the liberty of others. They like to accumulate wealth and power.

Perhaps we human beings aren’t made of just a producer class and a predator class as Thomas Jefferson taught. Maybe there is another vaguer class of truly sheep-like creatures who might be predatory in a cowardly way or productive in a submissive way but aren’t about to show any initiative in pursuing good or evil goals. And maybe we’re all partly made of predator and partly of producer and partly of sheep-like creatures. Maybe many of the producers and even many of the predators wish to live in political communities which provide them with certain sorts of structures for their good or bad activities.

In any case, producers are only a part of the human race or — more plausibly — part of each of us. I’ll assume the simple case for now, that each of us is predominately of one type: producer or predator or sheep and there is likely a good amount of truth in that assumption at least with respect to our particular concrete beings as they develop in specific contexts. At the end of this article, I’ll point towards some work I’m trying to do, work which might give some understanding of human nature in light of all of our best knowledge in all the various fields of human thought and practice. I’ll return to the ultimately inadequate but interesting suggestion of Jefferson that we are producers or predators. (I’m sure he knew he was oversimplifying and knew well that was often a mistake to usefully make on the way to a greater truth.)

We have to realize it likely that only a part of the producer class is made of those who wish liberty. Much productive work can be done, if less efficiently, under conditions of political authoritarianism of some sort and that’s good enough for some tradesmen and doctors and even ambitious entrepreneurs. In any case, there are highly productive individuals, those who can take some initiative, who seem comfortable compromising their liberty and that of their fellow-citizens so long as they can do their work in a well-ordered society.

There’s much uncertainty in all of this. We don’t know if those who act the roles of predators are truly different from us or whether they might be strictly us responding to different opportunities, to different environmental conditions in general. This is to say, I don’t know if we can better understand men by thinking in terms of well-differentiated classes or in terms of a line drawn through the soul of each of us. Let’s slide by that problem for now. After all, this is a preliminary work directed towards the long-term goal of understanding men in the context of politics.

What about the sheep? Recent research have shown, at least for mice, lack of proper nurturing by the mother will leave her youngsters as anxiety-ridden. Likely it would be that we are similar — lack of proper nurturing by a mother would leave her children to grow into cowardly, anxiety-ridden adults who would consequently be passive, sheep to some lesser or greater degree. There are undoubtedly other ways a fearful human being could be produced even if his genetic code allowed for better character traits.

Speculations upon speculations upon…

In any case, I don’t present this argument as one who believes in liberty as a plausible goal for human beings. I’m not complaining that men don’t value liberty however much they might claim such when they wish to gain a particular freedom, such as that of watching trashy movies. I present this argument as one who believes human beings are what they are and that can only be determined by empirical evidence, not all of it of the sort to be tested in the laboratory. In fact, much of what I’m discussing has to be evaluated on the historical record as well as by observations of behavior in town government, at the church picnic, in the malls and the stands of professional sports stadiums, on the battlefield, in the various workplaces, and on the playground.

What I can say for sure is that there is plenty of strong but not absolutely convincing evidence that only a minority of human beings have the character attributes suited to the dangerous life of liberty, if such a life were possible as more than an idiosyncratic existence on the edge of structured human communities, including one or more political communities. More frighteningly, most men seem to have little concern for any of the specific freedoms necessary for any sort of republican form of government. This is almost a commonplace observation, as we could learn from two serious observers of Americans during the same period early in the life of the American Republic:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an introduction for the first edition of The Scarlett Letter in which he confessed to feeling unmanned when working as a government employee in the customs house in Salem, circa 1850. Hawthorne also stated a belief that Americans, in those days when we imagine such creatures as rugged individualists, wished to sell back their liberty in return for promises of financial security — a government job was often sufficient in those days before modern welfare systems. Hawthorne was forced to believe the United States had become a republic advocating personal liberty only because of a small group of brave and dedicated men.

  [According to Gore Vidal, see his historical novel Burr, Aaron Burr admitted that the Founding Fathers, some at least, were lawyers trying to create a country in which lawyers would prosper. I believe the best interpretation of history usually lies between idealistic and cynical understandings. In the period 1770-1800, there might well have a been a period when the idealists were closer to the truth -- the plutocratic families which had dominated colonial times had been at least partially pushed aside and men who were at least courageous and energetic came into power and held it for a generation against the growing numbers of opportunistic scoundrels.]

• Tocqueville, circa 1838, published Democracy in America in which he tried hard to be optimistic about what might be called the ‘American experiment’ but was forced to admit Americans held their mainstream opinions to an extent that they could ignore facts in conflict with those opinions, not even seeming to realize their views were contradicted by the real world around them. He predicted Americans would eventually create a new type of country for which he had no words but we might call it a benevolent totalitarian country, one formed by the herd itself and not by those “great men on horseback” who are so influential in history when the circumstances are right. In 1950, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 which explored the possibility that television would provide the technology for completing this process, allowing the herd and maybe most leaders to make a still greater effort to ignore reality, an effort which would lead to a true disaster — the large-scale destruction of much of Western Civilization capped by a nuclear war in his particular tale.

There is much truth in libertarian criticisms of the modern state, particularly in the words of those such as Nock and Rothbard who honestly describe the events and structures of our modern states in terms that at least implicitly admit that many men, probably most, seek security and companionship of the sort not much consistent with radical principles of individualism or even of more modest forms of political freedoms based upon intermediary institutions. In fact, there will always be those who are willing to betray family or church, perhaps for reasons we should sympathize with, and cooperate with the central powers who offer short-term relief in return for our allegiance.

Is this lack of respect for our own liberty a matter of bad formation? That would raise the question as to the better formation of masses of men and such a question would then lead to the sorts of political solutions denied by many, probably most, libertarians. That is, they might be tempted — against their better natures — to argue, essentially, for the formation of a new people to replace the inadequate people formed by nature. In my opinion, we should be heading towards an understanding of political institutions in which power is properly distributed. In fact, power should be jealously held at the highest level at which it can be morally and safely exercised, and no higher. And that level is determined by human nature and by the level of development of their political understanding and skills in at that time.

I often quote the historian Carroll Quigley: “Truth unfolds in time through a communal processes.” What’s important is to see the communal nature of even our better understandings of Creation, including we human beings who are part of it. In fact, this emerging truth isn’t merely abstract knowledge to be recorded in the works of philosophers and historians and chemists. It’s a truth in the fullest sense. Things are true and truth is thing-like. That is, truth is manifested in things and their relationships, including our political and economic and social and spiritual relationships with other human beings.

We can coherently describe human beings only as organisms, biological entities — living things, whose higher attributes and desires are potential rather than in their DNA or their abstract principles. In Thomistic terms, we should intend to a better state of being. It’s hard to imagine how this process could even proceed in a true individual given the vast amount of formation necessary. Again: “The truth unfolds in time through communal processes.” We are, in truth, members of communities and all of those communities have political aspects. Our own human beings are true but reach a level of higher truth when we cooperate with that unfolding of truth which is a communal process, one form of which is a political process.

There are most certainly political aspects to the processes by which all human beings form themselves. We see these political aspects even as early as those playground days when one energetic or charismatic fellow decides if it’ll be baseball or soccer today. This might give us a hint about the nature of the political process — politically inclined men might have a calling of sorts to draw us out of our tendencies to retreat to too small a life or too passive a life. In Thomistic terms, some of us need leaders to help us respond actively and properly to God’s world. Having written that, I’ll point to the problem Lord Acton saw so clearly — when political power becomes too great and too concentrated, it draws men with the moral character of gangsters.

Acton had a vast and deep knowledge of history and seemingly of human nature and, like me, considered governments to be something greater, perhaps far greater, than necessary evils. He was right and so am I. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate government but rather to realize the political life as a natural part of human life. We have to be modest in the short-run, not letting the ambitions of even the better sort of men, certainly not the ambitions of men with the moral character of gangsters, to impose upon us political systems which are inherently bad or even systems for which we aren’t yet prepared. From one angle, we can say we shouldn’t let political systems or the underlying political communities grow too large or too complex until we’re prepared for that greater system and the greater community. Eventually, says some muse of history, we’ll learn how to govern something as large and complex and powerful as the United States. But we won’t learn it in the positivistic way of the Enlightenment intellectuals, including the Founding Fathers of the United States. We’ll learn it when several relatively large and complex human political communities come together to share many of their political duties and responsibilities, come together to form a greater political community. This greater political community will be associated with a body of knowledge, including speculations in the tradition of Plato’s Republic and Voegelin’s Order and History but also including the most concrete of practices and the entirety of that body of knowledge won’t really be known even to the best political thinkers at the time it develops. In fact, it’s probable a greater understanding of the nature of this political beast will mature only by the time the human race has moved on to a different, richer, and more complex state of being.

Yet, we should be capable of recognizing a truly bad situation. The United States is a failed experiment and it’s likely the case that the best and most peaceful solution is a voluntary breakup into a number of more coherent entities which can then start learning how to form a better version of a greater republic. As a Christian, I also believe, and have stated in the past, that God might well pulverize the United States and then rebuild this country to be what it should have been. This would be a painful and degrading process and I believe it’s likely to happen because the United States remains the most plausible realm for the revival of Western Civilization, a civilization which might yet have a lot of ruin left in it, maybe even some good in it.

Do I believe all I’m claiming in this essay which has grown beyond my original plans? Mostly, though there is much uncertainty due to both an inadequate understanding of human beings and an inadequate understanding of this world, indeed an inadequate understanding of all of Creation. When we look at our race and speak of ‘predators’ and ‘producers’, we engage in a simplification which is useful but only so far as we don’t take it as literal truth. The same is true when we speak of nearly any aspect or attribute of a human being, even the most sharply defined of virtues. I could make similar comments about our understanding of this universe seen as a coherent narrative. Much of the problems in this area come from our Spinozean tendency to fragment our knowledge into sorts of knowledge to be handled by specialists. Those realms of knowledge have become representative of realms of being in the thoughts of modern men. Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off his wall and we look on as various specialists examine the remains. What chance have we of also making sense of the world in a single coherent narrative, even with the help of Plato and Augustine and Wordsworth?

A man is an organism which develops within certain inherited constraints and he develops properly when he actively responds to his environment and more. A man’s environment includes his human communities, starting with his mother but certainly he doesn’t emerge from his childhood as a freestanding individual but rather a dependent rational animal, in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre. Dependent. Dependent creatures forming complex communities need political structures, even government.

Man is a creature of flesh-and-blood, a creature of a particular type. Man is intertwined with his environment, most especially human communities. Man is an empirical creature and he is not to be truly understood by way of metaphysical principles as thought many in the past few centuries including Jefferson and perhaps some other prominent Founding Fathers. Nor is man to be understood by theological principles as too many of my fellow-Christians believe, explicitly or implicitly.
Man is also not best understood as an individual who is ideally free from all forms of government. We can’t even say man is best served by a minimal government. We can only say that we need to pay attention to the best research of anthropologists and historians as to man’s behavior and apparent nature in past years as well as to the best research of neuroscientists and others with something to add to the understanding of our racial nature. Then we Christians, in particular, should engage in intense study of the books of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah knowing they were well-educated men who were knowledgeable about the political situation of the rulers of Israel and also the situations of the rulers of the surrounding pagan empires. We would benefit greatly from such a reading of the political world of creatures shaped at the racial level by Darwinian processes and at the individual and community level by processes described by modern brain-scientists and historians and evolutionary biologists. In the context of this essay, there will be little support for theories of minimal government, let alone anarchy and much support for the ideal of a humble and modest cooperation with God’s story as it develops. Rather than setting the goal of tearing down, we should aim to build slowly and with modest aims, working along with natural processes of development.

The world itself develops and often in unexpected ways. Our understanding of the world develops in a still more unexpected way since we’re always catching up to what we didn’t understand in the past as well as struggling with the emerging aspects of God’s story.

That God is a clever Fellow. Awfully creative as well. And always surprising. And it is God’s thoughts which we should be trying to understand rather than making assumptions drawn from our preferences. This is true when we try to understand human nature or human history or spacetime or matter. It’s God’s thoughts, manifested as created being which are the proper study of mankind.

I’ve just listened to the former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, as he spoke about his moment of cowardice — when he learned of a memo from General Creighton Abrams which revealed the Army commanders in Saigon were deliberately lying about enemy strength. Mr. McGovern was a young CIA analyst and thought about revealing it to the press, which was willing to speak inconvenient truths at that time. McGovern admits he retreated from his moral duty because of concerns about his family and about his own career. Like Daniel Ellsberg who could have blown the whistle earlier, he reasoned he be able to do more good if he followed his career and gained enough prestige so that he could one day even tell the truth face-to-face to the President. (The audio of the interview can be found at Ray McGovern.) Mr. McGovern went on to an honorable career in the upper regions of the CIA and is now engaged in various battles to combat abusive use of power by at least the American and Israeli governments.

I wish to propose:

If certain forms and levels of power are such as to overwhelm the moral courage and strength of a typical human being, then we should be cautious about allowing those forms and levels of power to develop.

At the same time, I think that we shouldn’t adopt a view that all forms of authority and power are wrong. As a Christian, I believe in the Body of Christ and believe those who will live with Christ in the world of the resurrected will be a part of that Body while remaining individuals.

We, as individuals, are pilgrims in the mortal realm, pilgrims traveling through our own world towards a world which is a perfected and completed version of this world. The Body of Christ is, in an analogous way, developing in this mortal realm and grows, intends — in Thomistic language — towards its perfected and completed state which it can reach only in the world of the resurrected. The Body of Christ is currently riddled with entities which are cancers or parasites. Some of those malformed entities are classified in modern thought as criminal or terrorist and some are classified as political. I have little respect for the American government in Washington and I have a low opinion of it in nearly all of its manifestations since the passing of the Founding Fathers — and they weren’t perfect for sure. Even at that, my belief in the developmental nature of the Body of Christ forces me to acknowledge some legitimacy on the part of governments of even the worst sort — as Christ did though I don’t think He gave the all-out endorsement to the authority of mortal political entities which some have read out of His few words on that subject. As Lord Acton once pointed out, those who believe in the Christian Creator have to believe that these evil men who are so powerful and so prominent in history serve some purpose of the Creator. As I recall from my readings of Tolkien, he made a very similar point, at least in one of the ‘background’ histories.

How can Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan or Stalin or President Bushclinbushbama serve God’s purposes?

I certainly don’t have a good answer in the usual terms, as was true with Lord Acton, a historian and — I’d say — philosopher of history with deep and wide knowledge and the intelligence and skill to put that knowledge into the form of true histories.

I can say a little on the topic from my viewpoint which combines short-term pessimistic with long-term optimism.

We should be careful that we not allow power to concentrate in a form or to an extent that it can be handled safely and morally only by creatures with greater ability and stronger moral character than we mortal men have. If I’m right that the Body of Christ is forming to some extent in this mortal realm, as is true of individual saints, then there will be some forms of concentrated power in our future as a a race. Those forms of power will evolve and develop by natural means, in ways beyond our capacity to plan or even to anticipate. It is my very optimism about this aspect of human communal life that leads me to advocate modesty and humility and to deny that I, or any of my fellow human beings, can see much beyond the next step.

Let us learn to take that next step in all modesty and humility, moving slowly along the path of development of the Body of Christ or at least toward some reasonable idea of better human communities after recognizing the evolutionary and developmental nature of this world. Evolutionary and development processes do include the possibility of catastrophes or positive events of a dramatic sort, but they’re mostly unpredictable. Even when we can reasonably predict some great change is coming, as is true in this year of 2011, we can’t be sure when it will hit or what form it will really take. For example, we don’t know if it will immediately cleanse human communities of the worst of these cancerous and parasitic men and gangs of men or whether we’ll collapse into some dark age when they’ll rule.