On A Carousel

Oswald Spengler, a kind of historian and philosopher of the early to mid-20th century, wrote a book called The Decline of the West.  Being German, he was unable to keep himself from using words like "being" and "becoming" as he wrote what he called, modestly, his complete explanation of world history--the only true one, others being counterfeit.   It strikes me that his initially interesting insight that human history was organic thereby degenerated into a kind of mysticism.  He opined that we pass through inevitable and successive phases of time he described as "culture" and "civilization."  The latter is an aspect of decline.  In antiquity, Greece was a "culture" and Rome a "civilization."  The modern West he thought had entered into the "civilization" phase which he predicted would be governed by "Caesarism" much as Rome was after the Republic, for the next couple of hundred years.

I'm leery of efforts at constructing grand, all-encompassing explanations of complicated phenomena, but think there is an element of truth in the claim that our history is in some sense cyclical, which is to say that we repeat ourselves, swinging pendulum-like from one extreme of social consciousness to another.  I'm inclined to attribute this to an inability to learn and to think, however.  This isn't to our credit, but it generates optimism of a sort--we can at least imagine that the current fad for autocracy and sameness, and the repression of contrasting views and lifestyles, will dissipate in time, as we ride the carousel of our history.

Thus, the prospect of an aging, scatter-brained and astonishingly self-centered snake-oil salesman becoming president once more need not terrify us, and it may be hoped that no permanent harm will be done to the nation.  The recent, relentlessly clownish, convention might merely be a tawdry circus rather than a horrifying glimpse of things to come.  

But assuming we survive the upcoming election as something resembling a Republic, what kind of a nation will we be?  We already are an oligarchy, or more properly a plutocracy.  Our legislators are for sale; the justices of our high court look for handouts and appear more and more like panhandlers wearing black robes.  What do we call a nation governed by gluttons and hoarders?  I don't think Aristotle came up with a term for a land of Trimalchios.  

We must emulate Montaigne, who wrote: "Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them."  We must become nations in ourselves.  Not like the silly so-called "sovereign citizens" who live in a fantasy world much like a roleplay game, but rather as individuals mindful of their own interests and seeking peaceful co-existence with others but taking intelligent steps and making intelligent decisions for their own protection.

Invincible Irrationality

I'm not much of a fan of Nietzsche.  I've come to refer to him, perhaps unkindly, as Frantic Freddie.  I quote him nonetheless, and in doing so include thereby a picture of him wearing a mustache not quite as foreboding as the one we see him with in other photographs, and in caricatures, looking somewhat demented.

He has something of a point in this particular quote, at least.  I ask myself how the irrationality of a thing would be an argument against its existence, I confess, but it can be maintained easily enough that it is a condition of ours, at least.  Not necessarily what we lawyers like to call a condition precedent, perhaps, but a condition at least to the extent a characteristic can be one.

It was Aristotle I believe who wrote that we humans are rational animals, meaning that we are capable of reason.  The Stoics thought that capacity was what made us, in small part at least,  participants in the divine intelligence of the universe.  Reason was long honored with the highest place in the history of human thought, and then replaced (or supplanted) by faith when reason was thought to be inadequate, only to reappear during the Renaissance and then explode during the Enlightenment.  Since then it has been dying a slow death; slow, because the achievements of the methods of science cannot be denied entirely, but dying nonetheless because it seems not to satisfy what we want, because what we want now is to be irrational.

That seems obvious enough given the fact that apparently thousands if not millions of people not merely accept that the world is flat (according to CNN) but wish others to do so as well.  This belief requires that a good deal of what seems obvious be ignored or explained away, and this is done with fascinating ease by the conviction that the government or someone or other having great power and influence wants us to believe otherwise and so fake a landing on the moon, the apparent curvature of the Earth, and much, much more.  Thus do we cycle back into ignorance.

There is currently an obsession with conspiracy.  To an extent this is understandable, as there can be little question that our politics is corrupt as are our politicians.  We've grown accustomed to deceit and combinations entered into to benefit the interests of a small and perhaps shrinking group of people who care about nothing but themselves, ultimately.  We see this every day.  We see it most clearly in the impeachment hearings, courtesy of someone who is intent on self-gratification and his minions.  But we see the appeal of the irrational in the response to the hearings as well.  It is assumed that others share the same proclivity for self-gratification and so do what they do to advance their own interests by thwarting efforts by others to do so.  There is a presumption of selfishness that must be overcome, but, curiously, it cannot be rebutted because selfishness is the rule, the standard by which all is judged.

It isn't rational for Republicans, for example, to not merely protect but encourage an executive who seeks merely to satisfy his own concerns.  A Democrat may soon be in the same place, and do the same things, and Republicans will then be faced with the same arguments supporting such conduct they used to support it when it benefited them.  It's hard to believe any rational person would be so short sighted.

But it isn't just in our politics that we see this invocation of the irrational, but everywhere.  The more that science, or statistics, or reason, or the learned recommend certain actions or support certain conclusions, the more those actions and conclusions are thought to be fake, or deceitful, or to result from some wrongful motive.  Thus the return of the flat earth theory.

When the inclination is to disbelieve what is credible and supported by the best available evidence, there is a serious problem.  It's a problem which will become increasingly significant as the attitude is encouraged and fostered, as is being done now.  Soon enough the irrational will become invincible, impervious to reason, impervious to argument, impervious perhaps to fate itself.  We'll slide into chaos and self-destruct, unthinking.

Acropolis Now

Above is a picture I took of Athens, on a full moon night last month.  You can see the Acropolis in the distance.  You can see moonlight on the sea.  I'm rather fond of the picture, taken with a cell phone in the early morning.

I've been away from the blog for some time.  I've lacked the energy, perhaps, but also the interest.  It's difficult to be interested in these times, though they're no doubt interesting to some, and will be interesting to historians of the future.  I nearly wrote "if there is a future."

I'm being over dramatic, of course.  There will be a future.  We go on and on, and are none the better for it if I am any judge. There is something remarkable about us.  We don't change but we survive.  We don't adapt, we don't learn, we simply still are here, and will be here until our unchanging nature exhausts the world.

I've now been to many places.  I've walked where Cicero, Cato, Augustus and Caesar walked when I visited the Roman Forum.  More recently, I walked where Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes and Zeno walked when I visited the Agora of Athens. It's unfortunate to live in this time, when there are no people comparable to those who went before.  Is anyone now living who can be described as great, or noble, or heroic?  Is there anyone who will be worth remembering or studying when this time is past?

If the Pythia was still sitting on her tripod at Delphi, which I was also fortunate enough to visit, perhaps she could answer such questions.  I suspect she could and even would, but in no clear manner, as it seems was her practice in ancient times.  She could also be quiet droll, as Croesus learned.  Any answer would do, comforting or not.  Delphi's magic is long gone but we still strive to learn the future in ways not all that different from consulting oracles.

In this disturbing, dull and shabby age, it's particularly pleasurable, to me at least, to see the ruins of the ancient world.  As unremarkable as we are, the achievements of the ancients were remarkable.  I cannot imagine how the Parthenon and the other structures were built on the Rock, as it was called by one of our guides.  Nor can I imagine how the great temples were built in the mountains at Delphi, or how it was that so many traveled so far and so slowly to reach the oracle.  Were they actually better than we are now, in many ways?  Perhaps we do change then....for the worst.

Moralists and the religious enjoy declaring that we become decadent over time.  I don't think we're more decadent than those who lived in the past, though.  I think that we're merely more stupid than they were.  How else explain how a prosperous people and nation have come to be ignorant, bigoted,  petty and cruel?  A certain degree of dullness is required.  The bovine are self-satisfied, fearful of change, content with what is, resentful of what is not, is different.

Well, let's carry on.  Stoicism is not a philosophy of the status quo, as some have said.  It is a philosophy, instead, which grants us a measure of peace and serenity when the status quo is deplorable.

Invincible Ignorance

"Invincible ignorance" has at least two meanings.  In Catholic theology, it refers to the state, or condition, of persons who are ignorant of Jesus because their circumstances are such that they are, or were, unable to know him.  Among those who possess invincible ignorance according to the Church are pagans who lived before him--especially worthy pagans such as Plato--and infants.  These necessarily ignorant, and thereby unworthy of heaven, are said by some to spend their afterlives (assuming the infants die before baptism) in Limbo.  Limbo is a kind of place which isn't heaven, but isn't hell either. There, it is to be presumed, Plato, Aristotle and other pagan greats debate and think great thoughts while changing diapers and otherwise tending babies.

Another meaning for "invincible ignorance" is the condition resulting from a refusal to accept evidence or argument.  This is referred to as a logical fallacy, sometimes.  It is the ignorance I address in this post, and was also I believe referred to by the man quoted above, a French physician and philosopher of the Enlightenment.

It is the refusal that characterizes ignorance of this kind.  You or I may be ignorant simply because we don't know something or other for perfectly acceptable reasons--acceptable in the sense that there is no deliberate effort not to know something or other.  Invincible ignorance is ignorance by choice.  The invincibly ignorant choose not to know.  Their ignorance is the result of their willing rejection of knowledge or the effort to know.

According to Julien Offray De La Mettrie, our happiness depends on this kind of ignorance.  Judging from the nature of the quote, he probably had ignorance of some thing or things in particular in mind.  But ignorance of anything which disturbs us can contribute to our happiness.  Ignorance is bliss in some circumstances if not all circumstances.

But the refusal to consider an assertion or an argument, or the evidence which supports them, is different from a refusal to know something in the sense of experiencing something.  You can have perfectly good reason, I would think, to refuse to know what it's like to murder someone or torture someone and can hardly be blamed for balking at having knowledge of what it's like to do so.  In some cases, then, the desire to be invincibly ignorant is quite understandable.  Some knowledge isn't good.

Sometimes an argument or assertion is so absurd there's no point in giving it any serious consideration.  Judgment must be exercised in determining absurdity, though.  Judgment is something we come to lack more and more these days, at least here in God's favorite country.

It strikes me we live in a time when people are less inclined than ever to consider any position that may challenge or undercut personal, political, religious or cultural views.  It may be that such consideration is too trying; the world is more complicated than it has been in the past, in great part because there are more of us needing and demanding limited resources.  It may be that the uncertainty of these times causes us to cling more than before to cherished and comfortable thoughts and customs, particularly where religion and politics are concerned, and to so dread what is different as to disregard it as much as possible rather than try to understand it.

But I'm concerned that fear and uncertainty and the desire for the happiness that results from ignorance aren't the only motivations behind invincible ignorance.  I'm concerned that many of us are invincibly ignorant simply because we have accepted the view that many intellectuals and academics have propounded for some time.  What I'm thinking of is what has been associated with the word "postmodernism" rightly or wrongly.  That is, an adverse reaction to the Enlightenment and the faith in science which dominated modern Western culture for two or three centuries, until the 20th century.

A skepticism regarding the extent to which science can cure all our ills and make the world a paradise is understandable.  But that skepticism has been associated with a distrust of reason and logic generally; with the view that they are mere constructs of a social and political tradition or culture, no more admirable or desirable, or worthy of respect, than any other construct.

If that's the case (not "true", of course), why is there any point in being anything but invincibly ignorant?  We can ignore, refuse to consider, anything we like.  There's no basis on which it can be said that assertions or arguments different from those we favor are to be preferred.  There's no reason to consider the evidence in their support.  There's no reason to think, in fact, or second-guess ourselves, when what others think or claim is no more worthy of respect or acceptance to what we believe and like already.

The invincibly ignorant are fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. 

Charged with Grandeur



The 19th century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had a remarkable way of using language in his poetry which sets him apart from other poets of the Victorian era, and from the English Romantics generally.  It's hard to describe, for me at least.  Hopkins' poems seem playful sometimes, sometimes erudite, sometimes philosophical.  Often philosophical, I think, and even more often religious.

The language he employs can be archaic, antiquated.  He was fond of alliteration.  He seems to have sought to use unusual words--unusual groupings of words--in his poetry, and I believe this sometimes saves him from the sanctimony which too often infuses the writings of the religious, and from being sentimental.  Sanctimony and self-righteousness was prevalent among the Victorians.  Sentiment was prevalent among the Romantics.  In a way, his poetry seems almost modern.

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."  This is the first line of his poem titled, unsurprisingly, God's Grandeur.  It's an arresting opening line.  "Charged" suggests electricity, a force invisible but pervasive, empowering the world as it courses through all that it is, all that's in it.  "Grandeur" as in splendor, greatness, majesty, magnificence.  The world seethes with God's splendor; it's an embodiment of it.  It shines forth "like shook foil."

It seems a Stoic view, to me at least.  Perhaps a view of the world even older than that of the Stoics.  This can be inferred from another of his poems, one with a lengthy and somewhat awkward title, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.

Heraclitus was one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and what we know of what he thought and taught is fragmentary.  Some of what he is said to have said is well known, like the statement that one never steps in the same river twice, and all is flux.  The fragments we have sometimes seem contradictory, and he is criticized for this by Plato and Aristotle.  The Stoics valued him, however, and it seems Cleanthes especially admired him.  The Stoics seemed to have admired his cosmology, particularly his view of the universe as being eternal and its basis being a kind of fire, divine it would seem as the Stoics conceived of it.  God to him and to the Stoics was immanent in the world.

It seems Hopkins thought well of him also, given the title of this poem.  Like God's Grandeur the poem begins with an artful, witty, even musical-sounding celebration of the world.  "Nature's bonfire" is referred to.  That's the only clear reference to anything like the fire of Heraclitus I can see in it.

In God's Grandeur, the celebration of Nature is followed by lines which express regret that the world has been sullied by man and his toils, bleared and smeared by it, in fact.  Then, hope and wonder is expressed that there remains something beautiful and divine in nature, nurtured still by God in his capacity as the Holy Ghost, or as that person of the triune God called the Holy Ghost.

In Nature is a Heraclitean Fire the celebration ends in sad reflection on the temporary nature of man:  "Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!"  But these broodings are ended by the knowledge of the Resurrection to come after death:   "In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond."

That's very impressive stuff, to me.  And perhaps it expresses and explains better than anything I've read the appeal of Christianity at its beginning to those who came to be called pagans, and its success even though the wisdom of pagan philosophy was acknowledged and admired.  It was an appeal the mystery cults may have had as well to an extent, but were the gods they extolled "what I am" as Jesus was, before his Resurrection, fully man?  But also fully God, it seems, inexplicably to me but perhaps this was, and is, of little concern to true believers, and pagan philosophy forgotten in the acceptance of mystery.

Send in the Clowns

Yes, I know, they're already here.

Although it's difficult to assess whether the politics of our Glorious Republic is comedy or tragedy, the efforts of the relentless categorizer Aristotle notwithstanding, there's something laughable about this presidential election.  I wonder if the plethora of clowns running for that sublime office is a kind of affirmation by fate that our elections have caused whatever gods may be to despair of us entirely.  Since we are beyond saving, why not turn our national politics and governance into a kind of farce, something entertaining if nothing else.

The cast is impressive in size, although the characters are stock.  The venal, disingenuous, unlikeable Clinton; the big-mouthed,  pompous ass Trump; the holy-roller Huckabee; the scatter-brained, disturbingly named Rand Paul; the oleaginous opportunist Cruz; the youthful, handsome and vacant Rubio; the excitable, apparently vindictive, Christie; the dully passive-aggressive Walker; the odd, emotional Graham; the unexciting leftover Jeb Bush; and the others, thus far unnoticeable, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, who seems to suffer from nothing more than being old in age and an old-time liberal.

And soon, perhaps, Vice President Biden may join the race.  That would be like Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin running for the office.

How can an intelligent, responsible individual make a choice among these undesirables?  It is not, if it has ever been, a process of choosing the best or most qualified person.  It has become an exercise in determining who is most likely to do the least amount of damage to the United States and its people, and even to the world given our propensity to rush into problems and places where angels fear to tread. 

There are of course intelligent, responsible individuals left even now here in God's favorite country, and it's likely some if not all of them vote.  But it's not at all clear that they will have any significant impact in deciding who becomes president.  We (and other, less favored, people) enjoy comparing our nation to ancient Rome, which in a way is appropriate as we borrowed so much of its form and architecture.  We have not quite made it to the point where the presidency can be bought in the way Didius Julianus bought his place as Roman Emperor, but we clearly have reached the point where money is of paramount importance, a direct if not the sole cause of success in our elective politics.  For this we must thank our Supreme Court, which decided that hurling any amount of money at our politicians in the hope if not the expectation of favors is perfectly fine in the law.  Only bribery of the most blatant kind is prohibited here in the home of the free and the brave.

We may still hope, however.  Didius Julianus reigned for only a matter of weeks, and was disposed of by the Praetorians he paid.  The auctioning of the Roman principate was shown in a Hollywood spectacular, called The Fall of the Roman Empire by someone who was its seems unaware of the fact that the empire continued in the West for another three centuries or so after that memorable event, and in the East for another thirteen hundred years, more or less.  I recall Christopher Plummer playing Commodus in that film as something of a cruel but cheerful lunatic.

But who can be said to be even the least likely to do harm to us among this rogues gallery?  We can expect such as Clinton and Jeb Bush to play the tired old game of Washington politics in a predictable if not effective manner, but the ascendancy of that caricature of a boorish rich man, the Trimalchio of our time, is it seems a sign that many have soured on business as usual, or have at least concluded that if we must suffer through it we may as well have someone who, being rich and only concerned with being rich, doesn't care about what he says or thinks.

Is it possible that Trump's popularity may indicate that we all now recognize our politicians are pandering hypocrites, ready to do or say anything to be elected and remain elected, which is to say ready to do the bidding of their paymasters?  Or indicate that we are for other reasons sick of what has become a sham?   If so, it may perhaps be a desirable development in its own peculiar way.

Comparing Stoicism and Christianity

Anyone who does some reading about Stoicism has encountered books in which it is compared, unfavorably, to Christianity.  These books seem to have been written, at the latest, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  More recent books about Stoicism don't make the comparison, and I wonder whether there simply is no longer an interest in doing so.  Sometimes, the comparisons that were made seem to be in earnest, and even thoughtful.  Sometimes they seem quite partisan, and far less than impartial.  They all seem to have certain claims in common, however.

I've sometimes wondered whether Christian thinkers have resented Christianity's great debt to pagan philosophy.  Christianity hasn't benefited merely from Stoic influence, of course.  It incorporated the thoughts and works of Plato and Aristotle as well; Christian mystics and ascetics spoke and conducted themselves much as the ancient Cynics did.  The influence of the school of Epicurus is not as evident, as may be expected.

The early Christian Fathers didn't share in such resentment, though, nor does it seem to have been prevalent in medieval times, or during the the Renaissance when Aristotle was "the Master of All who Know" and he and other pagan thinkers spent their time in Hell in its relatively comfortable first level, according to Dante.  Certain of the Fathers, at least, spoke of Plato and others as having approached the truth, a remarkable concession from an otherwise highly intolerant crew.  Seneca was considered a kind of Christian, and Marcus Aurelius was said to have regretted or to even have been ignorant of the persecution which took place during his reign.  It was in a sense assumed that people who wrote and thought and acted so wisely, as these figures did, could not really have been all that unchristian; indeed, must have been proto or quasi-Christians.

Perhaps this kind of hat-tipping to the pagan thinkers began to disappear as it became clear that such fabrications as the correspondence said to have taken place between Seneca and St. Paul was established as being forged, and other myths such as Plato's friendship with Moses were found to be contrived.  I suppose it may have been easier to acknowledge the extent to which Christianity borrowed from the ancients when it was at least arguable that Christianity or "proper" Judaism influenced the works of the old philosophers in some respect.

It seems clear, though, that the New Testament doesn't indicate that Jesus and his disciples discussed or were much concerned with the fundamentals of pagan philosophy which became the fundamentals of Christian theology.  So some justification was required when the equivalent of Plato's forms and Aristotle's First Mover and natural law and universal law began to appear in defenses and explanations of the Christian religion.  Perhaps the acknowledgement simply became more grudging or reluctant.

We see Stoicism sometimes described as the noblest of the moral codes pagan antiquity managed to formulate.  But there is always something wrong with it according to these writers, something which, they maintain, caused it to dissipate though it was at one time the preferred philosophy and even religion of the thoughtful Roman upper and mid-to-upper classes.  It was, of course, Christianity that satisfied the need Stoicism could not.  Stoicism's subsequent revivals over the centuries in, for example, Justus Lipsius are acknowledged by these writers, but they seem to consider these events as similar to fits or fads. 

As might be expected, Stoicism's failure is ascribed to the fact that it's tenets are too stern, cold, abstract, unrealistic.  It's claimed that the Stoic view of the emotions and passions was too negative.  Most of all, it seems, it's claimed that Stoicism failed to acknowledge or recognize love--which is to say Christian Love.  And it's claimed the Stoic view of God was materialistic and distant, despite the efforts of Seneca and Epictetus to portray God as more the personal God of Christianity (more personal, at least, when that characteristic fits the apologist's purpose; the God of the famous proofs is notably vague and abstract).

What Christian Love is supposed to be is an interesting question.  The Gospels were written in Greek by men who could not have known Jesus personally.  Was the "love" referred to in the Gospels or St. Paul the kind of "love" we may read about in the works of the pagan philosophers?  Was the "love" presumably referred to by Jesus the same, or something different?

There are quotes from the early Stoics which seem to support the claims the writers make.  However, more recent thinkers have found the Stoic view of the emotions to be far more sophisticated than previously believed, and the therapeutic effect of Stoic practice to be far more effective than previously believed.

It's possible Christianity may be waning now, or that the personal God posited by it an other established religions may be considered less and less credible the more we know of the universe.  Stoicism is not so limited, however, though there also seems to be nothing prohibiting the Stoic from suspecting that God is, in a sense, concerned with human beings and "personal" in that sense.  Perhaps it is this flexibility that is one of the reasons it keeps appearing.  It's by no means defunct, and I suspect it never will be.