Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Whatever else we might think about Saddam Hussein’s execution, I hope we all agree that it’s sad. If you believe that sometimes it’s necessary for societies to put people to death, it’s still sad that this is necessary. Even if you feel no pity for Hussein because he felt no pity for those he killed, we should still feel sadness that he killed so many; his death shouldn’t relieve this sadness at all.

It particularly shouldn’t relieve our sadness, because those whom Hussein ordered dead will never return. Our sadness does not end when Hussein dies.

As I watch the video of the hangman tying the noose around Hussein’s neck, I just feel sad for him. What was he thinking as it tightened? Was he scared? Was he trying to prevent himself from weeping? How had he spent the last few days? Had he been able to sleep? Did he feel any knots in his stomach? Did he think about an afterlife?

It’s possible to believe that Hussein is a wicked man who was a menace to his people, and that the world is better off without him, while still feeling upset about his death. These feelings are not contradictory. Nothing pleasing or happy has happened here. A man has died, and that is sad.

Proving that I have the sense of humor of an eight-year-old, I really did laugh aloud at a Boston baked bean joke. Then I said the joke aloud to myself and laughed again.

(Via Universal Hub, hereinafter “UH” )

P.S.: Also via UH, Boston is getting pretty lame snow, while Vermont — where I am right now — is under four or six inches of the stuff. And while I do love Boston, it displeases me that the snow immediately turns brown under the influence of cars there. Here in VT, or in southern New Hampshire, it stays white and snowballable for quite some time. Go rural areas!

Barring unforeseen badness, something exceedingly great will be happening, owing to the awesomeness of my friends Dylan Thurston and Ken Shan: I’ll be living a block or so from Central Square in a beautiful apartment, subleasing from my friends whilst they live in New York City. I can’t even explain how cool this is. More details as things firm up.

G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Dumb Ox:

 . . . what is not even now realised is that not only the practical politics, but the abstract philosophies of the modern world have had this queer twist. Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.

Right after this is a really brilliant and delicious passage comparing Hegel to Aquinas; I’d quote it, but I already worry about trying the reader’s patience. I’d recommend reading it in the Search-Inside-the-Book page for The Dumb Ox and reading pages 146 to 147. It’s just fun. So is the whole book.

Chesterton’s argument throughout The Dumb Ox is that many features of our world — the Renaissance, the Reformation, modern philosophy — are in many ways retrogressions from the world that Aquinas helped create. Aquinas, says Chesterton, stood for a doctrine of common sense: the world is the data, and from that our edifice can tower towards God. Our challenge is to explain the world that we have, given what everyone can see.

Brian Davies, in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, fleshes out this idea with a seemingly limitless skill at expressing complicated ideas concisely. In part this must be a hat tip to Aquinas himself. In part it just seems as though Davies could do nothing else; if his writing is any indication, he is an unclouded thinker who gravitated naturally to Aquinas.

The theology is complicated enough that I won’t spend the time on it just yet. Many notions within the book are new to me, or are covered in much greater depth than I knew:

• Divine simplicity: the idea that God is a single, unified whole of many attributes, such as goodness and wisdom. It’s not that God possesses these attributes in the way that you or I possess them, but rather that God is in some sense the living personification of these things. God is not just good; he is The Good. He is not only wise; he is himself Wisdom. You and I may be good or wise, but we are only good and wise because God himself is Goodness and Wisdom.

• Apophatic theology: we may not be able to describe God except by negation, but our words do bear some connection to God. One of many examples Davies gives is our use of the word “faithful”:

  In Aquinas’s view, therefore, we need to embrace two apparently opposing conclusions. We may say that terms can be applied to God as well as to creatures. We may say, for example, that I am good and that God is good. But we must also insist that properties or attributes ascribable to God and creatures differ in the way they are exemplified.

  Suppose I know of two faithful things. If I say nothing but this, you cannot know what I am talking about. For ‘thing’ is a kind of dummy word and it does not serve to identify anything. But you can still have some idea about what is meant by calling the things I speak of (whatever they are) faithful. At the same time, since you do not know what things I am talking about, you do not know the exact form taken by their fidelity, i.e. what it is like for each of them to be faithful. What is involved in a dog being faithful is different from what is involved in a husband being faithful to his wife. And that, again, is different from, say, a society being faithful to its traditions.

  In the same way, says Aquinas, we can talk about goodness in a meaningful way, and the concept still holds, but we must understand that its particular representation in god will be different; in his beautiful analogy, “One can, for example, understand the sense ‘Marmaduke is faithful’ without knowing whether Marmaduke is someone’s husband or someone’s cat.”

  With, of course, the better and lengthier arguing that you’ll find in Davies, this is a first step on the way to understanding negative theology.

• Evil: Aquinas agrees with Augustine that evil has no independent existence; it is an absence of the Good, which comes from God. Evil is, in a sense, not-being. Only the Good exists. A thing is good, in turn, according to whether it “looks like it’s supposed to,” in a sense: a word processor is good when it works like a word processor is supposed to; a human is good when he attains to the particular perfection of the human form (in something like the Platonic sense of ‘form’, though I’m sure the Aristotelian and Platonic uses of ‘form’ differ) which humans are supposed to attain to. “What the word processor should be” is defined by what its maker intended; so the goodness of humans is defined by what our maker intended for us. Something lacks goodness, then, inasmuch as it falls short of its form. Which then shifts the question from “Why is there evil?” to “Why isn’t there more good? And why don’t humans live up to their maker’s intentions?” I’ve not yet gotten to Aquinas’s answer, but that’s surely an interesting twist.

• Revelation and reason: it occurs to me (not really because of anything Davies wrote) that it may not be as far-fetched as I once thought to believe that much of our correct knowledge must come from revelation. It’s well-known, and has been well-known at least since Aristotle, that reason will only take you so far: a logical deduction will take you back to axioms, which themselves must not be logically justifiable. If they were, then that would take you back to still further axioms. Eventually, we must land on axioms that have no logical justification, or we’ll have an infinite regress. So then the question becomes: on what do those axioms rest? I can’t yet accept that they should rest on faith in an unobservable god, but I can at least see an opening in my worldview.

That’s all for now. Davies’s book would make great reading for those of us who are serious about understanding theology and not just wanking about it.

P.S.: The dig at Bertrand Russell on page 19 is quite funny, and actually rather profound. It’s funnier if you know at least the outlines of the Principia Mathematica. It’s funnier still if you’ve read the section on Aquinas in Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. At least the latter is in Amazon’s Search-Inside-the-Book feature; the bit on Aquinas starts on page 452. Russell seems fairly generous toward the Saint, though I think the dig I alluded to is a perfectly legitimate critique.

There’s a lot of reflexive Microsoft-bashing, some of which I’ve been guilty of. The latest Vista vulnerabilities, though, make me wonder: would it be better for the world, and for Microsoft, if the company threw out backwards compatibility and started from scratch, like Apple did with OS X?

A coworker a while ago noted that this is impossible. His observation — and I’d love to hear from Microsoft people on whether they think he’s talking out of his butt — is that everything Microsoft does is guided by its monopoly. With 90-odd percent of many important consumer software markets, the only direction it can go is down. So it will do everything it can to maintain that monopoly. In consequence, it can’t simply throw out backward compatibility and rebuild from the ground up. If it did, goes the hypothesis, users would abandon ship en masse. If they have to buy all new software anyway, why stick with Microsoft? Why not move, say, to OS X? Or to Ubuntu?

I’m not totally sure of the technical or financial reasoning here. Apple’s approach when they threw out OS 9 and moved to OS X was to insert an emulation layer of sorts, which (I believe) runs a full copy of OS 9 within OS X. If you wanted to run classic apps, you’d do so within the emulation layer. Microsoft could possibly do something like this.

Microsoft also has financial resources that Apple does not. Microsoft could probably pay large sums of money to its installed base to cover the cost of software for the new OS (“Windows 2020,” say). I wonder if Microsoft’s stockholders would understand that, while this is a huge short-term hit, it buys Microsoft long-term security gains.

What do those who know what they’re talking about think of all this? Is the hypothesis in the right ballpark?

There’s a 60-volume paperback Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiæ ($1800), and a 5-volume hardcover edition of it ($245). Looks like the 60-volume one has Latin and English on facing pages, so that brings it down to 30 English-version volumes. Anyone know (Jason, I’m looking at you here) why the one is so much shorter than the other?

P.S. (25 December 2006): Which reminds me that I’ve long wanted to own the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. That will come much later, though; there are better things on which to spend $895. In the meantime, I could always get an annual subscription to the OED for $295, but if I used it for any more than three years it would make sense to get the books. I believe the 2-volume OED is the Compact OED, which is still $270.

At Intermission Tavern on Tremont Street in Boston, apparently. (Via Universal Hub, to which I’ve now re-subscribed in anticipation of my move back to Boston.) I’m willing to go check it out, for science.

Though Al’s French Frys is a very tough competitor to beat. I’ll be in VT for Christmas and New Years, and I can’t wait to get a ton of Al’s fries.

P.S. (30 December 2006): I had Al’s tonight. They lived up to my memory. My life is complete.

I’m despairing of finding any one-bedroom apartments in Cambridge that are within my price range. Friends — including Adam and Jason — have suggested that I look in JP as well as in Cambridge; it looks like I may well have to.

A washer/dryer in the apartment — or at least in the building — is a must. I’m not dragging a basket full of clothes down the street when it’s 10 degrees outside. Intercourse that. Intercourse a lot of that.

I wish Craigslist allowed somewhat more detailed searching. I want to find places that have washer/dryers, and are in Cambridge rather than just containing the string “Cambridge”; so many Craigslist postings say “near Cambridge!” when they are in fact in Reykjavik, yet they come up in a search for Cambridge. Lameness.

Craigslist seems to be the only game in town these days, as far as hunting for apartments goes. I could drop one of my constraints and look at places that charge broker fees, but those are normally equal to a month’s rent or more. I’d like to avoid that.

If anyone has brilliant apartment-hunting ideas, I’d love to hear them.

It is time for me to enter the ‘90’s and get a PDA. I’m considering an Apple Newton. Is that the right choice for my e-tailing, cyber-driven, information-superhighway lifestyle? (More like gridlock on the information superhighway, what with SPAM, am I right?)

Actually I’m looking at a Treo. But here’s the thing: I am a geek. What this means is that, among other things,

1. Being able to ssh from the device is important to me
2. I don’t want to have to talk to a Verizon drone and explain for 20 minutes what ssh is
3. It puts me off a little bit that the Treo advertises “email, including AOL, Gmail and Yahoo!” I realize that’s just ad copy, and that they can’t very well say, “Our device supports IMAP over TLS.”

All of which is to say that I’d like a more geek-friendly intro to buying these kinds of devices.

What I’m looking for is an organizer more than anything; though while I’m at it, it seems worthwhile to get one with a decent digital camera and so forth.

So I’ll open it up to the floor. Any advice from people with 1337 hax0r ski11z?

The paradox of the stone has long struck me as really weak. For one thing, it’s not the sort of question that is going to change any religious person’s mind.

But reading just a little Augustine, it seems to me that it’s just a misguided question. Augustine relates, in the Confessions, how he used to think of god as a material thing — larger than any other material thing, say, but still material. Or maybe he imagined the soul as something akin to electric charge. Only when he moved beyond the material conception of god did he feel like he’d achieved any kind of understanding. In particular, my understanding is that he invented the notion (called the nunc stans by J.G.A. Pocock, at least) that god stands outside of time — that he is independent of the flux of our everyday lives, and can see all of time from a vantage point that is, you might say, orthogonal to human time.

So at some level I wonder whether talking about god’s intervention in the human world, down to the level of his lifting actual human objects, is just thinking about god in a way that respectable Christians have long since jettisoned. It may be that it’s trying to force a material conception onto a fundamentally immaterial god.

But then there are interesting questions in this direction also — those which everyone brings up when discussing the impact of the Newtonian “clockwork universe” on Christianity. Is god constrained in the sense that he chose certain rules by which the universe would operate, then left it alone to do its thing? If so, this isn’t quite the same thing as inventing a task that he couldn’t perform; it’s more the free act of god’s will. He chose not to intervene in a certain way, for reasons that may remain beyond our comprehension — but he could have chosen to intervene had he wanted to. This whole Newtonian line of thought brings up questions about the possibility of miracles in the material world, and very interesting sociological questions about why there seem to be fewer miracles afoot than we read about from the Middle Ages.

Just one more direction to pursue. I don’t think it’s evading the question to say that god is immaterial. It certainly makes a whole set of approaches off-limits, and I myself remain a pretty dyed-in-the-wool materialist. But giving what seems to be a purely materialist answer to a theological question seems misguided, from my amateur (and beginner) theologian’s perspective.

My returning to Boston means that I’ll be experiencing the joys of the T (first Google hit for the letter ‘T’!), including some really insane mismanagement (via Jason Smith; included below the fold).

Boston has a very charming — sometimes — dysfunction. It really can’t do anything 100% right. I lived in an apartment once where the landlord only ever repaired things to 80% of their earlier quality. (The next time he repaired it, it went down to 64%, then down to 51.2%, etc.) Boston’s kind of like that. The city is in a really glorious state of disrepair. The first year I lived there (2001), this really upset me. In the second year I started laughing at it. Eventually I just came to accept it. In its own way, I love it.

It’s not all decay, though. The Boston Public Library puts D.C.’s to shame, for one thing. D.C.’s Metro is a lot cleaner and more reliable than the T, but it’s also sterile like the rest of D.C. You win some, you lose some. I’m glad to be moving back.

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That’s how much it will cost this year. 300 million people or so in this country, $170 billion  . . .  $566 or so for every American. All this for a war that the majority of the country opposes. $566 that I would gladly have spent instead on helping the poor in this country. $566, for that matter, that I would gladly have given to someone other than the Department of Defense to fix the humanitarian disaster that the DoD has created. I’m going to be sick.

Today I got a sweet offer from a company in Cambridge, Mass. where I’d like to work, and I gave my two weeks’ (or would it just be “two weeks”?) notice at the Center for American Progress, where I’ve been gainfully employed for a year and change. I’m still waiting to hear from another employer in Cambridge, but in any case: I know I’m moving to Boston, and I can’t wait.

P.S. (6 p.m., same day): And as of a few minutes ago, I’ve accepted the offer with ITA Software.

P.P.S. (30 December 2006): I hope ITA’s like Google. It seems like it might be.

I’ll write more about it soon, but I’d like to commend John Ruskin’s lecture “Of Kings’ Treasuries” to your favorable attention. In particular, I’d recommend the very excellent edition of that lecture, and of many others, included in the Penguin Classics edition of Unto This Last and other Writings; I don’t think the experience of reading Ruskin would be nearly so illuminating without Clive Wilmer’s exceptional endnotes, prefatory commentary to each essay, and introduction to the whole volume.

The “Kings’ Treasuries” named in the book are not filled with gold and silver; they are filled with books. A true king, says Ruskin, is among other things a wise man; an ignorant man, no matter his social station, is not a king. In “Kings’ Treasuries,” Ruskin argues for public libraries at a time when few people accepted the idea; he argues that we can all become kings without leaving our libraries.

But there’s no royal road to becoming a king either, even if you have all the books in the world. The act of reading, says Ruskin, is much harder than anyone is taught “nowadays” (i.e., in the mid-1800’s). As illustration, he performs a close reading of a passage from Milton’s “Lycidas”, and by the end I was singularly convinced that not only had I never understood a word of Milton properly, but that I also was probably a very bad reader overall. And that I should learn Greek posthaste. And certainly that those with a classical British education had every right to sneer at me.

Every now and again you find a book or an essay that venerates the act of reading and reminds you why the life of the mind is so important. For me the last such book was Kaufmann’s From Shakespeare to Existentialism. “Of Kings’ Treasuries” is the latest, and one of the best.

This is just fascinating. It’s included below the fold.

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From the very beginning of the Iraq War, I’ve wondered why Bush is so committed to it. Why invest such political capital in this thing, not to mention military capital, for a war of choice? And now that so few Americans support the war, why is the President devoting even more troops to it?

Quoth the New York Times:

Being rich is about to get a lot more expensive, at least according to one definition. The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed a rule to restrict hedge-fund investment to those with a net worth of at least $2.5 million (up from $1 milion), a move that not only redefines who is wealthy, but deals a potentially devastating blow to hedge funds getting their start in the world

Those poor, embryonic hedge funds. You know, Uncle Sam is always going after the little guy.

Like a lot of people who are on the losing side of modernity, John Ruskin has an admirable side and one that sounds more pathetic. He saw the degradations that capitalism had wrought on his fellow-men, and his deep Christianity recoiled. What came out of this was a timeless attack on capitalism’s apologists, like Mill; “the question for the nation,” says Ruskin, “is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.” He reveals the contradictions and inhumanity latent in naïve capitalism. And in his attack he produces some of the most poetic English I’ve ever seen in a prose writer:

And if, on due and honest thought over these things, it seems that the kind of existence to which men are now summoned by every plea of pity and claim of right, may, for some time at least, not be a luxurious one; — consider whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. Luxury is indeed possible in the future — innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold.

Elsewhere Ruskin produces a humble, joyous, challenging motto to live by:

I desire, in closing the series of introductory papers, to leave this one great fact clearly stated. There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

All of this, it seems to me, is true and, if practiced, truly revolutionary. It remains as true today as it did in the mid-1800’s. Note also that Ruskin had to argue against many of the same bogus claims that we run into today; see, in particular, his attack on Mill’s and Ricardo’s beliefs that the market is uncontrollable, and that the safest thing governments can do is keep their hands off. The market does not have the force of physics; it is a human institution, which exists because our private-property laws let it exist. It’s both funny and sad that the idea of the market’s invincibility is still current, when Ruskin’s moral and economic attack on it should have done it in long ago. Ah, well: the people with the money have every incentive to convince us that their own corporations should be free of government intervention, so we’ll have this idea as long as we have corporations.

Ruskin goes astray, and respects his fellow-man too little, when he denounces cities as incorrigibly foul, poisonous pits of despair. London in the 1800’s may well have been this way, and I hold no grudge against Ruskin for thinking that the best thing to do with cities is to abandon them and move to the country amongst the flowers. The trouble with this view is that it doesn’t acknowledge that humanity will poke through the cracks wherever it can. Cities have become quite beautiful since Ruskin’s time, even with a century of industry intervening, because they are filled with humans. People need to live amongst beauty, and they will make where they live beautiful if they have any control over it. True, little about the late-20th-century American exurb is beautiful, but Jane Jacobs saw, back in the 1960’s, that what urban planners make for us is not what we actually want. The neighborhoods that are safest and thrive are those where lots of people are out on the street, where kids are joyously playing, where there’s activity at all hours of the day, and where commerce and housing exist side by side. The failure of orthodox urban planning is manifest in the decay of badly planned cities.

When Ruskin argues that 19th-century London is uninhabitable, he’s probably right. But when he tries to extend this into a universal principle, he seriously undercuts the humans whom he reveres.

But his heart is in the right place; ignoring some of the details of his argument is probably for the best. Ruskin believes that humanity is worth fighting for, and he tirelessly carried on that fight for most of his adult life. He’s worth listening to, and worth emulating.

I’ve not yet seen the Borat movie, but the New Yorker has made me feel really bad for having wanted to. (Included below the fold.)

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If anyone can find the ISBN for a boxed set of Singleton’s translation of the Divine Comedy, that would be cool. I’m nearly certain I’ve seen such a thing, and it would be easier (and probably cheaper) than buying all six (I think) volumes separately. Various google searches yielded nada, but maybe others would have better luck.