Fabulously Absolute

I’ve always been a fan of the eclectic Joe Jackson, and had an opportunity to see him in concert recently for his Fool album/four-decade tour. The first single off the album, Fabulously Absolute, is a tad cynical lyrically with one of the best words ever used in a song: troglodyte (which is a person considered to be reclusive, reactionary, out of fashion, or brutish... hmm, I can relate on some days).

Moreover, the playful song title conjures up an interesting reflection. After all, does today’s culture see anything as fabulously absolute, or more like depressingly relative?

First and foremost, if you assume it's all relative, then you've made that into an absolute. No escape. 

So can we at least consider some of the universals that are relatively Absolute? There seems to be many features of culture, language, and behavior that are found in common to all people known: we all seem to believe murder and stealing is wrong; we all hold something as sacrosanct; we all have bias towards kinship, privilege in-group loyalty, and believe in fairness and duty; we all practice reciprocal exchanges of labor, goods, or services; and we all look for patterns and relations in things. Just to name a few.

There are also some fundamental constants to the physical universe: Planck's constant, the speed of light, and Newton's gravitational constant. There are biological universals and constants, such as gender disposition and physiology. 

In the modern civilized world, we see universals around the dignity of the human being, respect for personal property, limits of the state, and the rule of law. As individuals, we also tend to find our deepest and most enduring happiness through the universals of family, vocation, friendship/community, and faith. 

We also find the draw we all have towards a transcendent Absolute through our groping for goodness, truth, beauty, and love in a multitude of ways. Maybe we know implicitly that only through eternal forms, can changeable and impermanent things have significance. And therefore maybe things are not so depressingly relative after all. 

Why don’t we want to believe in absolutes? Because they impose demands on us; demands to say with conviction that some truths are better than others, and demands for us to live by them. It feels safer to search or play with truth, then claim any Truth. 

But who said God was safe? He's just fabulously Absolute.

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Most consider Joe Jackson's best work to be his most popular albums, Look Sharp and Night and Day. I tend to prefer his more obscure work, and consider Night and Day II (a beautiful piece of work), Big World (wonderfully poignant and intense), and Blaze of Glory (epic) to be my favorites. 

What True Self is Self'ing?

We sometimes appear stuck between an existential catch phrase of “be yourself” and a Buddhist-like notion that “there is no-self.” There is a lot of confusion with both concepts.

The relative aspect of self is just a self-organizing narrative that allows us to function in the world. Also, often known as the egoic-self, where there can be healthier and less-healthier forms of this. 

The existentialists would take this one step further by claiming to break the grip of the past by aligning with the choices we make going forward. But this version of self is just replacing one story about oneself with maybe a better story. But our locus of identity is still mostly organized around concepts of our self-conscious doer, albeit with a sense of more autonomy than disposition.

Going a step further, the not-self teaching (anattā/anātman) in Buddhism would claim all concepts about the self are false and that this can be Realized by the practices of emptiness. But there are some misunderstandings here also, as the original teachings did not claim there was no self but where the self was-not. 

The Buddha never denied a self, but that there was no self to be found in the five aggregates: namely translated as corporeality, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and individual consciousness. Yet, ātman remains. The ātman was not impermanent, unlike the aggregates (skandhas) which comprised of a false self.

Still, ātman is seen as universal, which leaves little to room for the particularities around individuality. It would seem to me even Self-Realized persons still act as persons, with particular dispositions, inclinations, and personalities. These are the constraints and gifts that make us human, even as a liberated one. So Buddhism does not definitively speak of finding the true self, but only losing the false one.

By contrast, Christianity revolves around the notion of the Person which is derived from the doctrine of the Trinity. As a Person, we are substance-in-relation. 

The First relation is vertical in sharing in the Infinite. We are receptive of “one’s  own existence from a Source that remains ever transcendent.” 

“Being in a state of grace is the Christian version of what the Buddhist calls the primordial state or essence of mind. It is not passive in the sense of being merely inert, but actively receptive to whatever comes from the Infinite.”

We are not just Consciousness, but we possess consciousness. Therefore, we possess an “inner unity that transcends the flux into which Buddhism would dissolve us—a flux of physical and psychical elements, of individual moments in time generated one after another by karma.”

The Second relation is horizontal in sharing with others in the world. This makes this inner unity paradoxical. Our true center is not just in ourselves, but also outside ourselves. We exist in relationship to others. Therefore, we can’t find our true self just by introspection. Again, we are substance-in-relation!

If we look to the image of the cross, we can symbolically find a paradoxical and Trinitarian true self at its center. This center contains the interaction of these inner and outer modes of being where God, soul, and world are always finely mingled, and in ways which are unique to the individual. This center is universal and particular, dynamic and essential, and is the only true self that can go forward Self’ing as God's mediator in the world.

“You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.” (Ephesians 4:22–4)

(Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from the excellent book The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity by Stratford Caldecott.)

The Making of the Silent Partner

Last year when I was taking a mini-course on St. Aquinas, I mentioned to the instructor that I had also been influenced by some process theologians, when he immediately noted I need to read God and Intelligence by Bishop Fulton Sheen. He said the Bishop takes them on tactfully, and comes to the defense of Aquinas’ cogent thoroughness on the matter. (I tackled similar ‘evolutionary spiritual’ themes before, here and here.)

I put the book on the back burner, until such a time I knew I would be able to dive in. In the meantime, I got to watch some videos of Bishop Sheen’s performances on his prime-time show in the 1950’s. Imagine, a Bishop pontificating on prime time television about Christianity, yet he certainly had the polish for the fledgling platform!

In regards to this excellent book, I came to see why the instructor pointed me here. Bishop Sheen brings out a fresh perspective of Aquinas from the point of view of the modern thinker. While the modern thinker is all about progress, “Progress is necessarily conservative. To perfect we must conserve the gains of the past.”

The question is what is conserved in progress? It would seem that for real progress to occur, growth would have to be organic. Yet, “growth of modern philosophy is not organic. It grows not from within like a living organism, but from without like a crystal. It grows on contradictions. Swinging always between the two extremes, it passes precipitately from one extreme to the other.” This sort of juxtaposition of ideas does little to offer coherency since there are no universals prior to singulars.

Sheen notes, “The Scholastic principle of progress and continuity is metaphysical, not biological. It applies to all the kingdoms of the universe, and with greater applicability and logic than any of the modern applications. The continuity and fluidity of the universe may be viewed either statically or dynamically. Statically, the continuity is revealed in the unfolding of the principle: a higher nature in its lowest perfection touches a lower nature in its highest perfection. Dynamically, the same conclusion is revealed in the application of the principle, the more perfect the nature, the less the movement.”

The fact that we can know with confidence at all, means that knowing is grounded in a Higher intelligibility. “Knowledge is not a push from below, but a gift from above.” So when we Reason, we are progressing from a conserved principle to a revealed conclusion. 

But somewhere along the line, we stopped submitting ourselves to the First Principle. God became equivalent to progress, and man started to identify what is perfect with what is imperfect.

Sheen says,

“Until the fifteenth century, human nature was considered perfectible by a gratuitous gift of God. Grace was not the destruction of nature; it was its perfection. From that time began a war against all extrinsic authority, either in the form of the church as with Luther, or of the speculative intelligence as with Kant, or of government as with Rousseau. The biological hypothesis of evolution was taken over, and was held by many to imply that for the perfectibility of human nature by a gift of God was substituted perfectibility through the natural laws of progress and becoming. In other words, until the fifteenth century, nature and grace were regarded as superposed, one being the perfection of the other. Then came the new notion, one of juxtaposition of nature and grace.”

Where there was once a beautiful continuity and progress of all orders, e.g. between metaphysics, reason, revelation, theology, cosmology, etc, all now got reduced down to biological continuity. And if there was a God, He now got reduced from an object of knowledge to an object of experience (where there were no principles to render those experiences intelligible).

While biological evolution explains the how or the process (and it doesn’t even do that well; see here); it will never explain the origin of nature. Modern philosophy reconciles this by making the nature of God consist in evolution. But a God that is too bound up in the cosmos with becoming, can be of no service to it. He is brought to move as an imperfection to possess more perfection with man. But the “imperfect is intelligible only in virtue of the perfect. To reverse this process is to bring chaos into philosophy.”

“The whole was no more than a deification of man, “who will have no other gods but me;” and a humanization of the Divine. The Absolutist denied morality to God to save His absoluteness; the Pragmatist denied absoluteness to save His morality; and the biological philosopher makes the supreme renunciation: He gives up God to save man.”

Man had succeeded in making God a silent partner — and in his man-made image and likeness.

Discoveries without Conclusions

These days have been bearing witness to the annihilation of my expectations of this life. It has many moments where the reflection is that of a suffering fool. But the fool can have the last laugh if he stays obedient to Heaven.

I rarely find dreams worth a mention due to their whimsical nature. But I did have a recent dream where I had a sweet encounter with my estranged father. After he swung a few unsuccessful shots at me, I asked gently “what are you doing?” At that moment he embraced me (and metaphorically my brokenness). It had a vividness to it that gave me lasting comfort. I have not acted on it, but it has been passively activating me.

I feel suffering as a vehicle with meaning, where my being available to it conveys how much joy can be available for me. If I pay attention to what is actually at hand (rather than what I imagine to be at hand) and then bless it, It blesses me. My forgiveness to myself is what undivides me.

I'm done striving for mountain tops. I prefer the rock bottom, but not in a masochistic sort of way.

I recently heard one of St. Augustine's definitions for sin translates into “caved in around myself.” Interiorly, this is like the mind curled around itself, its self-image, the pre-occupations of the narcissistic discursive self. Exteriorly, this no better expressed than our smartphone addiction. Just consider how our postures exudes the image of the body curled around and isolated by the device. We are walking, thinking sinners!

But if we choose to place our attention away from all this distraction and gently go into our pain, we can sense a core wound waiting to be healed. We don't need to understand or process it, just be with it.

Once truly seen, our brokenness is embraced into the whole while ever new Life breathes through us.

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My latest non-dual teacher crush is Jon Bernie; for no other reason than I like his presence and skillfulness. When it comes to Truth and Method, sometimes they don't always align in the way we would prefer. So I'm not necessarily on the non-dual bandwagon, as I am on the path to being divinely human. Jon Bernie seems to embody that in a way that resonates with me.

Why I Am Not a Libertarian?

Although there are several schools of libertarianism, at their core they all uphold liberty as the ultimate principle. And while liberty is necessary in a democratic capitalistic society, it is not sufficient. As the Aphorist notes, “Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.”

Ironically, Judeo-Christian values helped shape the ethos of democratic capitalism, but since that ethos forbids any religion to rule, those values are now being undermined by the secular world. Hence, we have lost of our “moral center.”

As David Brooks comments in a recent column, “A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor. Society came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest. Selfishness was normalized. As Steven Pearlstein puts it in his outstanding book, “Can American Capitalism Survive?” ‘Old-fashioned norms around loyalty, cooperation, honesty, equality, fairness and compassion no longer seem to apply in the economic sphere.’ ”

On a deeper plane of Reality, we always embedded in a story and not an “atomized collection of individual economic units.” As such, we need a framework as to how this story is guided.

Michael Novak got me to see this best in his seminal book. He remarks, “Democratic capitalism is more likely to perish through its loss of its indispensable ideas and morals than through weaknesses in its political system or its economic system. In its moral-cultural system lies its weakest link.”

And so, “the system qua system will be moral if two conditions are met. First, the design must include pluralistic institutions which permit both liberty and virtue to prosper. Second, the system of moral and religious culture must instruct individuals in the ways of liberty and virtue. Such a design rests upon an exact diagnosis of human frailty on the one hand, and of the effects, intended and unintended, of institutional arrangements on the other.”

So like most libertarians, I am not arguing for some state-sponsored coercion to bring back moral norms. This would never work in any case. But unlike the libertarian, I do believe we need a culture that is supportive of a moral telos. And that may require some guidance from the state and the social fabric of institutions that can reinvigorate such an ethos.

(Ideally, the state should primarily supplement, and not substitute, for the areas where the social fabric has gone beyond repair. See here, for a good read on this.)

So while I agree with the libertarian that much needs to start from the bottom-up with the individual! — I also do believe, in our tribal and morally conflicted society, that the state (as top-down low-entropy guardian) and non-governmental institutions/associations/affiliations (as bottom-up moral subcultures) need to play roles that are mutually supportive.

While there are no easy answers, the libertarian option is overly permissive to a culture that needs to yield to moral constraints, cultivate a covenant of social trust, and bend towards an inspired telos with a common purpose.

Genuine Heterodoxy

“Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else ... A 'synthesis' of religion implies a lower quality of attention.” — Simone Weil

I do believe Weil's quote is on point more so these days than I may have in the past. Being drawn to certain syncretic approaches to Truth, I once believed you could come up with one system than hangs all Truths together (see Ken Wilber). But now I don't believe this is probably the best approach.  

That's not to say I have gone orthodox in the strict sense of the word. As Fr. Andrew Stephen notes, “Orthodox dogma never claims to expound the whole truth about anything, but only delineates the borders of the mystery.” It is where we delineate the borders that things can get interesting or very slippery. I suppose for some of us, based on personal interests and inclinations and archetype, need to expand the boundaries where our path is no longer strictly orthodox. By working from the edges of the inside, we have moved the edges out a tad.

This is tricky, and probably not a good move for most. I do find these often leads to individuals pursuing almost anything spiritual or philosophical that appears to have authenticity. When this impulse begins to happen, then it is easy for one to fall into a spiritual relativism: there is no one, universal, absolute truth, but rather, there is only what is true “for me” or “for you.”

But I suppose there is room for genuine heterodoxy, where you know that you're the sort of individual who needs to turn over other rocks to find Truth. You are still immersed in a traditional path, but willing to find other religious precepts that may affirm or create dissonance in what your path expounds. Maybe reconciliation is never the point, and as Weil notes each path has its own fragrance of ontological Truth.

This path still should be traditional, since tradition has gone through its share of trials and errors. These paths are in line with the notion of anti-fragility (in Nassim Taleb speak) that no New Thought/Age path can accommodate. And even for those who believe in the emergence of something novel, MotT makes the intriguing point that the “mission of the Buddha-Avatar to come will therefore not be the foundation of a new religion, but rather that of bringing human beings to first hand experience of the source itself of all revelation ever received from above by mankind, as also of all essential truth ever conceived of by mankind. It will not be novelty to which he will aspire, but rather the conscious certainty of eternal truth.”

Understanding one's Raccoon archetype, being committed to Truth, and humbly submitting to the spiritual authority of tradition, allows for a genuine heterodoxy.

Fritjof Schuon, as usual, expresses this best:

“A pneumatic is in a way the “incarnation” of a spiritual archetype, which means that he is born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure; the pneumatic does not “go forward” towards something “other than himself”; he stays where he is in order to become fully what he himself is — namely his archetype — by ridding himself, one after the other, of veils or outer surfaces, shackles imposed by the ambience or perhaps by heredity. He becomes rid of them by means of ritual supports — “sacraments,” one might say — not forgetting meditation and prayer; but his situation is nonetheless quite other than that of ordinary men, even prodigiously gifted ones. From another point of view it must be recognized that a born gnostic is by nature more or less independent, not only as regards the “letter” but also as regards the “law”; and this does not make his relation with the ambience any simpler, either psychologically or socially (…). In any case, the pneumatic is situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis — where there is no “before” or “after” — so that the archetype which he personifies or “incarnates”, and which is his true “himself’ or “his very self’ can, at any moment, pierce through the contingent, individual envelope; it is therefore really “himself’ who is speaking. The real gnostic does not attribute any “state” to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather — through an “instinct for holding back” — to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of “cosmic play” (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, “horizontal” beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, “humanists” that they are, below the vocation of man.”

Open Minds and Original Thinkers

There is a misnomer out there about being open-minded and an original thinker. If someone told you were none of these, you would feel a tad insulted. But truthfully, most people don't possess these traits in the way they think they do.

Let's take open-mindedness, or openness to experience. It is considered one of the big five personality traits according the five-factor model. Let's see what Mr. Wiki has to say:

Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience. Openness reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety a person has. It is also described as the extent to which a person is imaginative or independent and depicts a personal preference for a variety of activities over a strict routine. High openness can be perceived as unpredictability or lack of focus, and more likely to engage in risky behaviour or drug taking. Also, individuals that have high openness tend to lean, in occupation and hobby, towards the arts, being, typically, creative and appreciative of the significance of intellectual and artistic pursuits. Moreover, individuals with high openness are said to pursue self-actualization specifically by seeking out intense, euphoric experiences. Conversely, those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven—sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret and contextualize the openness factor.

I don't necessarily agree with this entire definition, but I do like the aspect in it of being curious. I think curiosity incorporates a humility of experience and understanding. But that's not how most self-defined “open-minded” people believe themselves to be. First, they are coming from metaphysical assumptions as we all are. Generally, they see tradition as a bad-thing or just plain old and tired ideas that need to be deconstructed. 

As the counter-culture grew, it saw the “closed-minded” as the old guard and obstacles to progress who needed to step aside or die-off. As Bruce Charlton notes, “Closed minded became synonymous with irrational and wrong; then was interpreted as evidence of ignorance at best, but more often of cruel wickedness. To be closed minded (implying sealed-off from evidence, from experience, 'dogmatic') was the characteristic attributed to the bogeymen of fanatical 'fundamentalist' right-wing/ fascistic/ authoritarian - Christians; in essence, those who tyrannically restricted sexual behaviour.”

But what this notion did was to get the “open-minded” ones to trade off some vertical traditional precepts for some horizontal self-determined “freedoms”. So while some may have opened the aperture to new experiences in counter-culture, they closed themselves off to classic antiquity. As this “open-minded” postmodernism crept in further, minds became more closed off to coherent ideas around religion, morality, and logic. 

Today, as David Bentley Hart remarks, “we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations.” By refusing to accept objective standards (more closed-mindedness), we fall into an incoherent “openness” of something that is undemanding and therapeutically comforting. As Gödel believed, we would always trade off coherency for completeness.

On the matter of original thinking, we are also left with short-sightedness on this concept. Original is not necessarily new, because most ideas are not that new; nor are we strictly autonomous when it comes to the source of our ideas.  

Moreover, originality is not necessarily thinking differently from everyone else, but it consists of thinking for oneself. Or as Franklin Merrell-Wolff put it, “by ‘original’ I do not mean an idea that has never been thought before, but one which, for the individual, has been produced with a creative effort from himself.” In other words, you've made that the idea your own through reflection verses being indoctrinated into it.

(I do find it amusing Apple ran one of the biggest campaigns on the mantra “think different” when today most of Silicon Valley has been indoctrinated into a leftist “think alike” view.)

Genuine pursuits of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual curiosity can create real openings and originality. The answer is not to limit ourselves to a dogmatic rigidity, as we are only fully human when these deeper Truths are revealed and made our own. But this does require us to sort ourselves out beyond the shallow and undisciplined “openness” we have fallen under. 

All in all, this explains why open-minded and original thinkers are the most prone to closed-mindedness and unoriginality. They are unaware of their metaphysical assumptions or where and how their ideas have been assimilated. If we are ignorant of our own assumptions and where they come from, we can't delve deeper into our curiosity in a truly open manner. Instead, we are contained by our own arrogance and pride while indignantly believing we are so much better than we are.

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.” — G.K. Chesterton

Random Signals #3

I want to end the year with some thoughts that are thoughtlessly incoherent. It’s been a good year, but challenges always ensue. I am arriving at an age where time is more of an essence (existentially) while being held by the timelessness of it all. Gratitude has been a key contemplation.

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I came across a recent article with Camille Paglia that affirms the same conclusion as Jonah Goldberg did in his stellar book: we need to feel our way back to go forward! 

Paglia says, “From my perspective as an atheist as well as a career college teacher, secular humanism has been a disastrous failure. Too many young people raised in affluent liberal homes are arriving at elite colleges and universities with skittish, unformed personalities and shockingly narrow views of human existence, confined to inflammatory and divisive identity politics. … I contend that every educated person should be conversant with the sacred texts, rituals, and symbol systems of the great world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam — and that true global understanding is impossible without such knowledge. Not least, the juxtaposition of historically evolving spiritual codes tutors the young in ethical reasoning and the creation of meaning. Right now, the campus religion remains nihilist, meaning-destroying post-structuralism, whose pilfering god, the one-note Foucault, had near-zero scholarly knowledge of anything before or beyond the European Enlightenment. (His sparse writing on classical antiquity is risible.) Out with the false idols and in with the true!” (emphasis mine)

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I would add that comparative religious study would not go far enough. It does nothing in regards to Godlessness and decadence. We need to go deep, along with the breadth. And that means honing in on a path with intellectual rigor and open hearted imagination. As well as augmenting it with spiritual practices that would align one’s disposition with one’s belief. Good Metaphysics + Deep Mysticism = Reason + Faith = Truth + Beauty => Virtue + Love.

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As the year ends, I also want to note some favorite cultural artifacts. I really like these songs from Middle Kids, Mitski, Beirut, and Wye Oak. They are delightful to my ears.

I have also been augmenting my interest in indie music with an attempt to cultivate more knowledge around classical music. This podcast from Dacia Clay has been quite helpful.

In regards to film, this year has been less stellar than prior ones. First Reformed sticks with me because I got to see it at the Boston IFFB with director Paul Schrader in-house. It's also a compelling meditation on the roads that faith can make us rise and fall.

Roma is a masterpiece! It is a beautiful experience to see in a theater despite the Netflix release. My favorite film in quite some time.

I finally saw the classic It's a Wonderful Life. Shame on me.

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On the matter of gratitude, I have many things that come to heart: some of the thoughtful people on the “intellectual dark web”, the eternal presence of Joe and Bobo, David Thomas, the friends in my life that endure with their passions, the mistakes I make, the God-man that still affects us 2,000+ years later, Gagdad Bob, the online Bishop, my landlord, the lady who laughs and loves, Journey Home, the people who I see on the streets who God loves through me, the comedy of it all and those who nail it, film buffs, Jonesy Jukebox, Fulton Sheen, Ric Drasin, Brother David, meditations with Amy, Jeff, and John, the stars away from the city, the books that continue to inspire me, what remains when I go.

Google Verses Gödel

George Gilder is once again on to something beyond the typical monoculture thinking with super-AI technologists. He knows his Gödel, who claimed “every logical system necessarily depends on propositions that cannot be proved within the system.”

Yes, we can't escape metaphysics no matter how we try to deny ourselves in the process. And that's exactly what the materialist-techie types do. They believe “the human mind consists of electrical and chemical components that are unintelligent in themselves”; however, “By using their own minds and consciousness to deny the significance of consciousness in minds, they refute themselves.”

'But you can’t prove consciousness is immaterial', they may say.

Sure, but Gödel already demonstrated that mathematical statements can be true but unprovable. So why deny yourself some Truth too?

This is always the problem with super-AI proponents: they sell up their machines while selling themselves short; when the measure of AI should be the human mind. (Gilder notes: the human mind is “low-power, distributed globally, low-latency in proximity to its environment, inexorably bounded in time and space, and creative in the image of its creator.”)

Such is also the issue with Google. Gilder says, 

“The Google system of the world focuses on the material environment rather than on human consciousness, on artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence, on machine learning rather than on human learning, on relativistic search rather than on the search for truth, on copying rather than on creating, on launching human hierarchies in a flat universe rather than on empowering human beings in a hierarchical universe. It seeks singularities in machines rather than in human minds. The new system of the world must reverse these positions, exalting the singularities of creation: mind over matter, human consciousness over mechanism, real intelligence over mere algorithmic search, purposeful learning over mindless evolution, and truth over chance. A new system can open a heroic age of human accomplishment.”

In the book, Gilder believes the “new system of the world” will be blockchains. Unlike the Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states that Google uses, blockchains use hashes to preserve history, enhance trust, and extend truth. We would own our information, instead of it being overly centralized with risk to security, privacy, and actual costs.

Blockchains will be the low-entropy carrier to our high-entropy creativity!

Gilder says, “The inevitable conclusion is that machines based on mathematical logic cannot exhaust the human domain; they can only expand it. Every new mechanism frees the human mind for more creative adventures and accomplishments.” The question is whether or not blockchain will be the new mechanism that frees us evermore going forward. 

In the end, I would rather place my bet on a technology that aligns with Gödel than one that tries to play God.

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. — Jaron Lanier

Dr. Feelgood

This holiday season I do feel a bit more inclined to hand out alms. I don't have any delusions of grandeur that my actions do much good, but it does make me feel good.

Chögyam Trungpa coined the phrase “idiot compassion”; meaning, any compassionate act that enables the bad behavior of another. Like giving an addict money for food — when it will unlikely be used for those purposes. While the intention may be “compassionate”, the outcome will do little good for the well-being of the person. 

The general tendency is to give people what they want because we can't bear to see them suffer. Moreover, we do feel good about ourselves when we do it, and it helps deflect some of our own internal suffering. But this isn’t true compassion, or agape. There are mixed motivations involved, along with a lack of logic to see if the intentions are truly good.

These days everyone talks about compassion (along with tolerance) as though it’s the only virtue(s) that matter. But virtues always need to be balanced with other virtues, so they can be enacted in a way that is appropriate to the given circumstances.

Compassion also tends to work better in the microcosm than on the macrocosm. This is why political acts of compassion are so difficult. For example, if we opened our borders to everyone, would this eventually undermine the whole of a nation to benefit a few? The relationship between political ideals and cultural outcomes in a big, diverse society isn’t linear, therefore often leading to unintended consequences.  

(It should also be noted that compassion for the masses is often too abstract to be relatable. Recall Mother Teresa’s comment: “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” That's why human interest stories of the individual always move people more than state-sponsored statistics.)

But our idiot compassion has a bigger consideration beyond the fact we can’t always trust our feelings: we also need to trust in something Higher. 

William Wildblood makes the astute point on his blog: 

“When you no longer have the idea of God as the centrally organising fact of existence you have to replace it with something else. Today that something else is the abstract notion of humanity, and humanity, abstractly considered, is regarded as just one thing with no distinctions within it allowed. It is seen in purely material terms and so everything is equal. There is no better or worse except insofar as better corresponds to this idea and worse is what goes against it. Compassion is defined as treating all humans and their cultural achievements in the same way, and anything that resists this tyranny (which is what it is) becomes branded as hateful.”

A poster then followed up with this comment:

“As a young man I read Flannery O'Connor's comment that in the absence of faith, we rule by compassion, "...and compassion leads to the gas chamber." It puzzled me then and it was some years before I began to appreciate the crucial truth of the statement. By Faith, I think O'Connor meant trust in God and His Providence; by compassion, I think she meant the sentimentality that views suffering as absolutely undesirable and irredeemable. In a materialist view, suffering has no value and should be eliminated at any cost. ...But as suffering can be salutary, and as hierarchy is God's creation and, therefore, the condition of our existence, the leveling and numbness is doomed to failure and, ironically, will cause even more suffering.”

When compassion is conceived only materialistically and with no ordering principle, we are prone to cause enduring spiritual harm. Dr. Feelgood may help with some of the symptoms, but never find a cure.