End of year roundup
I got the DALL-E AI image generator to produce this image with the following
prompt: Kurt Gödel writing his proof of God, surrounded by logical symbols
and stark shadows. Done in an older 1930s style with dramatic tensions.
The wrong-footedness of the conservative
I'm often frustrated by how far bad ideas go. This conversation highlights that they do it by attaching to our desire to show empathy.
In these arguments (sexism, transgenderism, ableism, "fat-phobia", etc) the conservative is the one appealing to tradition, and he or she ends up having to defend any and every bad thing that happened during the time when that traditional view on the topic was in play. Whereas the progressive only has to paint a utopian picture of the world we "could" have if only people stopped defending tradition!
They don't have to defend anything. They just project a dream-future and by implication you are less-than if you don't hop aboard their imaginary train into that future.
In a low-consciousness society, it makes sense that these progressive views will come out ahead, because they please anyone who is half-asleep and doesn't want to be disturbed any further.
I too know the bliss of sleeping late as the sun streams in, making the blankets warmer and even more comfortable!
Anyway, this point was at the end of a long conversation about "why men aren't approaching women in public anymore." The whole thing is interesting, Louise Perry begins by mentioning a phrase she read in a book about wine: "Traditions are experiments that worked."
The video below is primed to play at 13:52, so you don't have to watch the whole thing. But Perry's words are excellent:
Kurt Gödel's God Proof
I've been interested in proofs of God's existence, and was excited to see that Gödel has one. Here is a good video explanation of it. The Wikipedia page is interesting, with lots of fire and brimstone on the talk page. Interestingly, I learned there of a novel written around the proof.
I didn't buy the book yet but would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts. "The God Proof", by Jeffrey Kegler. A reviewer said that if you like Umberto Eco and Douglas Hofstadter, then you'd like this. Consider me sold! I just have to find it... No ebook, unfortunately...
I can heartily recommend Matt Fradd's book "Does God Exist?: A Socratic Dialog on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. An enjoyable read that will deepen your imaginative picture of Aquinas's arguments for "that being which we must call God."
Beautiful passage in Witness
I'm re-reading Witness, an incredible book by Whittaker Chambers. His life was turned upside down when he testified that a high-ranking government official, Alger Hiss, was a communist. Chambers knew this because he was a communist, too, though he left the party in 1938. This nondescript, pudgy man looks entirely unimpressive, especially next to the glittering Hiss. But he had courage. And his story about the way into and then out of communism is so illuminative.
There are so many passages I love in this book, and I think I'll end up re-reading this more than the Lord of the Rings, or Til We Have Faces, two other books I always return to. Chambers describes three childhood experiences that brought him close to the mystery of God. Here is the third. I found it devastating and beautiful:
The third experience occurred at school. There was a big girl at school who seemed much older than I; she may have been fifteen or sixteen. Her family was extremely poor; I had heard that her father was a drunkard. I thought that she was dreadful to look at. Her head was rather large. Her face was red-skinned, bony and hard, and there was an expression on it that I did not understand, but which I now realize was hunted and knowing.
The other children called the unhappy girl “Stewguts.” As she walked home from school, they would form a pack around her, yelping “Stewguts! Stewguts!” until she went berserk. They were careful to keep out of her reach, for she was quick and strong. I never took part in these baitings. My mother warned me never to have anything to do with that girl, never to speak to her.
Stewguts had a younger sister in my class—a pasty-faced child who looked a little like a sheep. She always kept her eyes down, as if she were keeping a secret. She was also very stupid.
One day, during recess, I found myself alone in the classroom with this younger sister. Nobody else was in the room. The door to the cloakroom, which was beside the blackboard at the front of the classroom, opened cautiously. Stewguts peered in warily, and, seeing only the two of us, slipped in.
She had come for a purpose. To impress the meaning of words on us, the teacher used to draw a column of flowers on the board with colored chalk—a different color for each flower. Opposite each flower was a word. The teacher would point to the word. If you knew it, you were privileged to go to the blackboard and erase the word and the flower. This was called “picking flowers.”
Stewguts drew a column of colored daisies on the blackboard. Then she beckoned her sister to come up. Patiently, she went down the column of words, asking her sister each one. The younger girl got most of them wrong. Gently, they went over and over them again. Stewguts never showed impatience. Sometimes, she let her sister “pick a flower.” I watched fascinated, listening to the girls’ voices, rising and falling, in question and answer, with the greatest softness, until, with Stewguts’ help, almost all the flowers had been “picked.”
Then there was a tramp of feet in the hall outside the room. Stewguts slapped down the pointer and hurriedly erased the last of the flowers. Suddenly she took her sister’s face in both of her hands, and, bending, gently kissed the top of her head. As the hall door opened with a burst of voices, Stewguts silently closed the cloakroom door behind her and fled.
I knew that I had witnessed something wonderful and terrible, though I did not know what it was. I knew that it was a parable, though I did not know what parable meant, because I knew that in some simple way what I had seen summed up something very important, something more important than anything I had ever seen before. It is not strange that I should not have understood what I saw. What is strange, and humbling, is that I knew I had seen something which I never could forget. What I had seen was the point at which from corruption issues incorruption.
After that, I knew that Stewguts, who was bad, was not bad.
I'm tempted to share more quotes about his love of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. But for now I'll leave with Chamber's simple explanation of the appeal of Communism for the intellectual classes in the 1930s, as he said at the end of his nearly 10 hour cross examination before the House Un-American Activities Committee:
Marxism, Leninism offers an oversimplified explanation of the causes [of world economic crisis] and a program for action. The very vigor of the project particularly appeals to the more or less sheltered middle-class intellectuals, who feel that there the whole context of their lives has kept them away from the world of reality.
There is a lot of food for thought in there.
Why Climate Change is not an Emergency
I've long admired Patrick Moore for his presentations on climate. Have a look at these graphs of world temperature over millions of years and despair.
Despair that the mainstream media lies as it breathes.
A link to the same at the CO2 Coalition web site.
And Happy New Year to one and all!